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Stop the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico – Stop The Gusher Site Launches
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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a tragedy. We have just launched a new Collaborize site, called www.StoptheGusher.com, that we believe is the first and only site where people can see and vote on suggestions about how to stem the tide of oil that is polluting the Gulf Coast, as well as ideas about clean up and containment.
As we aggregate all the ideas, we will provide resources to enable any and all of us to take ones voted “most likely to succeed” and direct them to the right people in BP (British Petroleum), the government and mainstream media. We are doing this with high hopes that this site will be obsolete by the time we get it launched, but accepting the fact that it probably will not be.
I don’t think anybody thought the undersea oil gusher a mile below the surface would be a global catastrophe when it first happened. Americans are prone to think “Theyll get it fixed.” But after weeks go by with one failure after another, we have begun to wonder: at what point should ordinary people get involved and try to have an impact on the situation? Kevin Costner has tried, as has James Cameron.
Beginning about a month ago, we at Democrasoft started to notice that there are many, many ideas beginning to surface, and that made an impression on us. While the number of ideas is increasing daily, there is currently no single repository where these ideas are neatly organized and also no way for the best ideas to be vetted. The current repositories are a start, but they are clearly enough.
Back on or about “day 30” of the oil leak, we were semi-joking around the office that this situation was actually tailor-made for a Collaborize site. But we’re a company with a lot to do, and besides, we, too, thought the issue would get resolved “any day now”. But two more weeks went by and the oil was still gushing, so we started to give serious thought to creating our own site, modifying our platform so the collective wisdom of the community can be used to address and maybe even help solve this very disturbing global crisis.
We started asking ourselves whether we didn’t have a moral imperative to do what we can. By chance (or not), of all people or companies out there, we at least have at our disposal a perfect tool that can facilitate massive collaboration and bring the best ideas to the top. Government can’t do this, or doesn’t know where to start. So even though it is already day 60, we thought we would start now, because unfortunately, this issue doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
We realize the “www.StopTheGusher.com” site is not going to make money, and it may not even make a difference. But maybe it will. And on that small possibility of making even a small difference, how can we not do it? If we don’t do something can we just assume that someone else will?
What personally scared me into action was when I heard it mentioned that one possible solution being promoted by so-called “experts” was to stop the oil leak by detonating a small nuclear device at the site of the leak, a mile under the surface of the ocean. If something goes wrong with that solution, an already terrible leak of a million gallons a day could become a nightmarish million gallons a minute! There had to be a way to vote those types of ideas DOWN as well as sensible alternatives UP.
Anything on the scale of this oil gusher disaster attracts all kinds of ideas and that’s really a good thing. So all ideas, the good ones and the desperate ones, need to be vetted and voted on. Together we increase the chances of success. Harvesting the best of what we all have to offer is what our tagline refers to: the Wisdom of We. And we could all use some of that wisdom right now in the Gulf of Mexico.
So our big idea is to bring your big ideas to the forefront. We will be organizing them into helpful categories and seeking your votes on as many as you are willing to review. Go to www.StoptheGusher.com right now; review the current ideas, help find new ones, vote the best ones up, and most important — share this website (and the individual best ideas) with everyone you know.
You never know where the best ideas will come from. Everything in America gets done because somebody takes the initiative to do something and just does it. We can’t just wait for someone else to do it for us. And that’s a good thing.
Normally on a Collaborize site, we would be asking people to “Ask Questions”, but we are trying to modify our platform a bit for this purpose. So when you go to the site, and click on “Ask a Question,” instead of asking a question, name the solution you are about to post to the website. Upload your solution as a video or a PDF, or just describe it. Finally, designate it as a “yes-no” question. That will allow people to vote on it up or down, and lend some consistency to the process.
In the “Resources” section of the site, we will provide tools for sharing the best of the “Wisdom of We” as our contribution, because it is part of our value system to be a good corporate citizen beyond just making money. We want to help find the right solutions and see them properly implemented. When things do finally get taken care of, whether by us or by someone else, we will breathe a sigh of relief and shut the site down, because we aren’t attached to any outcome except trying to help. But in the meantime, let’s get the word out, because this one really matters, and there’s not a minute to lose. Thank you for your support.
Come Play With “We”
Posted by: | CommentsWhen we came up with this application we call Collaborize, we knew some of the things it could do. But as we started working with it, and with our customers, we started to realize that Collaborize is more than just an online collaboration application; it is actually more of a platform – one that can be used many different and creative ways.
We already knew that Collaborize is ideal for organizing thoughts and comments for better decision-making, for outreach to customers, and for capturing and organizing nominations. But since launching our product in March, we found there are many other uses that we had not originally envisioned.
Education is one of these uses. Initially, we never considered education as a core market for Collaborize, but in one of our local high schools, a classroom teacher tried Collaborize. She used the categories on the left to differentiate her individual classes. Then she used the sub-categories to call out individual subjects. She followed up by posting questions about what the kids were studying. The questions were designed to be challenges and to elicit further thought about the subjects being discussed. Instead of just handing out xerox’d assignments, homework became spending some time on the online Collaborize classroom website.
Somewhat surprisingly for both us and the teacher, the online questions elicited engaged responses from students who were ordinarily silent in class. This unlocked a whole new level of class participation from students who probably didn’t feel comfortable speaking publicly, but had a lot to say. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, the students started commenting on each others’ answers, and soon robust conversations had broken out on various class subject matter.
As a result, not only does that school want to roll the Collaborize classroom application out to other classrooms, but now we’re introducing it into other schools as well, and realizing that Collaborize can be a powerful teaching tool for classrooms of all types. That is a market we hadn’t originally thought of on our own – a customer “designed” it for us.
In another example of how Collaborize is really a “platform” and not just an application, when columnist and tech writer Bob Cringely wanted a way to nominate companies for his Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour (www.cringely.com), he was able (with a little help from his friends at Democrasoft) to modify the basic Collaborize platform in way that replaced the “Ask a Question” tab with a “Nominate” button, creating a template by which hundreds of companies could not only be nominated, but more importantly, organized, collated, commented on and ranked. The effort was so successful that we are now creating a new “Nominate Mode” as an option in setting up a new Collaborize portal. Submitting a nomination in this “mode” invokes a template that will capture common elements and display them in an organized way so that people can compare different nominees (whether they be ideas, people, songs, stories, etc. etc.). Many thanks to Bob Cringely, for giving us an opportunity to discover this valuable new way of using our own product!
Democrasoft Town Hall Online (™) is another example of a unique application built on the existing Collaborize platform. With a different “skin” and carefully chosen categories, combined with videos pertaining to pertinent topics (as well as “face time” for elected officials or candidates), citizens now have a mechanism to engage with politicians in a meaningful way, not just once or twice in an auditorium, but 24 x 7, online, using essentially the same feature set already built-in to Collaborize, but crafted to address a completely different need. Same platform, different application.
There are other examples of how the basic Collaborize platform can be used, without modification, to accomplish very different ends. For instance, a company that wants to devote its Collaborize portal to questions about its products or services and how they work can customize Collaborize to act like an “FAQ on steroids.” The categories in the left-hand navigation can be devoted to how the product works, or how to set it up. Then instead of a simple FAQ, a community manager can provide a set of questions, with accompanying answers in embedded videos, and a place where customers can also contribute their own additions to the FAQ, drawing on their own actual experiences with the products or services. In this example, Collaborize is used in a “wiki” style that continuously improves product support by incorporating both the official answers in a FAQ and additional information from actual users.
As a platform, Collaborize contains a lot of functionality. We sometimes like to think of it as the best of many collaboration applications, wrapped in a single, easy-to-use platform that contains potential for individual creativity for emerge in determining the ways that the platform can be used. That’s why we are taking this opportunity to ask our customers, our readers, and our prospective customers, to help us find even more possible uses for this versatile platform. Can you tell us how you think Collaborize should or could be used? Can you help us develop something new, something we haven’t yet thought of? We’re betting that you can, and we’d love to hear from you.
Within Democrasoft, we feel we are still just scratching the surface in terms of the many potentially valuable ways that Collaborize can be implemented. We’d like your help in order to reach our full potential. If we like your ideas, we will incorporate them into our product and possibly even work with you to develop these new implementations of our product more completely. The only ground rule is that you can’t call for a whole new product. Your idea has to work (more or less) within the existing parameters of Collaborize, and show us a new capability or use for it that we weren’t aware of.
In the future, we may even hold a contest to find the best new ways to use Collaborize and provide prizes or even funding for the best new ideas. In the meantime, let us know if you have some great ideas for improving what we have started. There are a lot of possibilities out there that you may know about. So turn us on to some really good ones, and we’ll help make it worthwhile for everyone. We hope you’ll see the potential in having a flexible collaboration platform like ours and be one of the first to come play with “We”.
The Rise of the Moderators
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Now that we are beyond the name change of the company from Burst to Democrasoft and the launch of our Collaborize product, we’ve been paying attention to the actual experience users are having. For the first few weeks, we were iterating the product has fast as we could, tweaking it and fixing bugs, and striving to achieve “traction” as quickly as possible with our small team.
While these activities continue, we’ve come to the important realization that, rather than concentrate exclusively on having people sign up as quickly as possible (which we assume will continue over time), we need to make sure that we have a high percentage of new customers that are actually successful with the product. In our case, because we offer a 30-day free trial, we want to see this begin to happen in the first 30 days. Simple as this sounds, it turns out that this is the area that almost all similar social networking apps are discovering is the key to long-term success – user engagement longevity.
Even more interestingly, the initial success potential of an online community is gated by a simple fact: for a new community to be successful, it is the “Moderator(s)” that needs to be immediately successful, more than anyone else. We discovered that our launch at the DEMO Technology Conference in March brought a number of people to the site who signed on and started their free trials. Because we had technical delays in starting the e-Commerce engine, we had not been able to accept credit card payments until just a few days ago, so we have limited data on conversion rates at this point. But we know this: despite best intentions and the best product, an online community will only be successful if there is a motivated person (the Moderator) who is committed to making it successful, on a day-to-day basis.
In other words, we need to provide not only a great tool, but also a great process for making sure that the Moderators who accept responsibility for building their online communities succeed in their mission, and get off to a great start. We are quickly learning from our customers what it takes to make that happen, and applying that knowledge, coupled with our own experiences using other software products, to make Collaborize even simpler, and our new Moderators even more effective.
As a result, all the people on our team who were focused exclusively on sales will now also be focused on hand holding our new customers through the first 30 days of setting up their online communities. Everyone on the Democrasoft team is becoming, in essence, a co-moderator with each of our newbies, helping them (and ourselves) learn everything there is to know about the moderator experience. What we learn and share with our customers are important skills and principles that we intend on sharing more broadly with online communities that may or may not be Collaborize customers.
We will be incorporating our knowledge into future versions of our product, so that eventually we can scale this hand-holding by having a daily, on-demand webinar that all moderators can attend. We are launching a meta-online community of our own moderators, devoted to best practices, tips, tools and more. We will not only provide valuable info that we have learned, but also invite our own moderators (and moderators from other non-Collaborize sites) to share the best of what they have learned, and to do so on the Collaborize platform, which we believe offers the most elegant way to organize conversations, capture great ideas, collect votes and streamline the decision-making process. We invite all moderators to join us, beginning immediately, at our new Collaborize moderators’ platform: WeModerate.democrasoft.com.
We want to make sure we connect with our own new users while the initial enthusiasm for Collaborize is high and make sure we set them up for success. We are not interested in just throwing the product out there and collecting their money, hoping it all works out; we want to fine tune the product and the process of using it, to make it as useful and compelling as possible.
Personally, I’ve found in working with customers over the past few weeks that the potential for what we’ve built is probably bigger than we initially thought. The need for consensus, for community, and for a productive strategy that leads to solutions has never been greater. The good news is that by and large, people find Collaborize easy to use — it’s the strategy for growing a community that’s the hard part, in part because in involves developing new habits and a few new skills.
There’s been very little available research on how to develop a lasting online community and, more importantly, how keep it vibrant. Despite admittedly valuable anecdotal information and blog posts, people seem to mostly be making it up as they go along. We hope to engage the engagers, aggregating the best practices, and use our own product to provide a way forward that will benefit not only our own business interests, but the needs of online community builders and managers everywhere. If you’re one of those people, we hope you’ll join us in our WeModerate community (wemoderate.democrasoft.com) and in our quest for sharing success.
Balance, Courage and Leadership
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Last Christmas, when our new Collaborize product was still under development, we had a Christmas party for the Democrasoft team. As part of it, we had a gift exchange, and I ended up with two beautifully-framed small pieces of calligraphy, illustrating the Asian symbols for “balance” and “courage.” Some months later, when we moved into larger quarters, I found a spot for them in my office, where I could be serendipitously reminded of the importance of those qualities in my day.
Courage and balance come up every day in the life of an entrepreneur, usually in the form of questions or reminders: what’s the right balance between work and play (for me as well as for my team)? Is there a healthier mix than the temptation to work 24/7, which everybody knows is counterproductive but everyone is tempted to do? Unless you keep asking the question about where the work/home balance should be, it’s easy to be overcome by what seem like all-important demands. In our new product launch, there was no end of tweaks and changes, bugs and fixes, all necessary to meet a launch deadline.
Most days, just bringing awareness to the topic of balance seems to lead to more of it. I am more likely to catch myself doing emails in bed, when I should be getting 8 hours of sleep. I may notice I’m on my iPhone while supposedly having breakfast with my spouse. All part of striving for balance.
Like many others, I find that there’s a constant pull between the amount of myself I am willing to make “public” and the amount that I want to preserve as “private.” With so many social networks, there’s an almost Siren-like lure to being publicly connected. After all, Facebook lets me connect with all my friends, and on Twitter, I can even be “followed,” as I publicly share my thoughts about something. This blog is a good example of the kind of public “sharing” of myself. But how can I balance that against my desire to have a private personal life? (not to mention the current revelations about how so-called “private” information seems to be leaking permanently into the public realms thanks to the policies of some of today’s social networking and tech giants).
Part of me would just as soon have it be that no one knows who or where I am. A few years ago I had the experience of being stalked by a local shareholder who thought it perfectly fine to post my day-to-day whereabouts for the benefit of other chat-room attendees. We had to get their ISP to make them stop. So how much is fair? When it comes to elected officials or candidates for public office, when is it fair game to go after somebody’s private life and suck it into the public discourse? What public servant looks forward to their private life becoming part and parcel of “serving the community”?
Running a company, it sure seems like there ought to be a balance between profit (creating “shareholder value”) and quality of team and employee experience. I could probably squeeze a bit more profit out of our company by squishing more people into fewer cubicles, but in the end, isn’t there a better chance at profit from employees who are happier and more motivated?
If the “balance” symbol raises all those questions, the “courage” symbol reminds me of the saying that “courage is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to move forward despite fear.”
Fear is usually based in an apprehension about the future, which is unknown. In business, especially as an entrepreneur, one is always moving into the unknown, especially when creating something out of nothing. It’s natural enough to want to know what’s coming. But a fear of the unknown can forestall forward motion, and can immobilize us. For those of us who want to make progress in our lives, and perhaps a difference in the world, courage always comes down to a willingness to step forward and do something despite the odds, the naysayers or the fear.
That’s having the courage of one’s convictions, which is how all of this relates back to balance. Yes, our company makes the tools that tap into the “wisdom of we,” but at the end of the day it requires leadership to be able to assess whether that feels right (and balanced), and if not, to have the courage to move in a different direction, despite what others (including the larger “we”) may think.
One version of our product, Town Hall Online, gives both elected officials and political candidates the ability to take input from the constituency, but sometimes the crowd isn’t always right, or has been manipulated by disinformation, or its wishes are not possible within a budget or other circumstances. It takes courage for an elected official to willingly ask for the will of the people and then still be able to move in a different direction if he or she believes that the crowd is wrong, for any number of reasons. That’s real leadership.
And there lies the promise of social media in the context of balance and courage – to not simply ‘crowd source’ decisions or democracy and obey the will of the vocal, but to give our leaders in business as well as government the benefit of the “wisdom of we,” while also providing the opportunity to balance all factors in arriving at the best decisions that serve the highest good.
New Community Metrics for Corporate “Value”
Posted by: | CommentsThe current protests against Wall Street executives have made me think about how we look at corporations, and perhaps how that might soon expand. From the protests on television, you would think some people want corporations to disappear from the face of the earth. And at the same time, people are protesting the lack of jobs. To me, this paradox presents a big opportunity to shift our perspective.
Right now, corporations have a bad name because they are viewed as large, impersonal, and even predatory. The Goldman Sachs hearings emphasized the predatory nature, while all the rounds of layoff we’ve been through as a country since 2008 have emphasized their impersonality.
Most corporations, though, are small – probably as many as 95% of them. They are the backbone of our capitalist system. And corporations make important contributions to our lives. Obviously they create jobs, and they can even create communities. Some corporations now have “fans” that are more than just mouse clicks on a Facebook page –they can be rabid supporters (think Apple). Facebook itself is a corporation, as is Twitter.
Could our mixed feelings about corporations be due to the way they are currently valued? The main metric has always been about how profitable they are, and that’s an important metric, because without profitability they wouldn’t stay around very long. But should it be the sole metric we use in determining the worth of an enterprise?
There are probably at least two other metrics we could use to evaluate the true “value” of a corporation, and ones which may be inevitable as corporations venture into the social networking space. After profitability, the next important metric should be whether corporations are making a product or service that contributes meaningfully to the community or society: Are they curing disease or creating it as a by-product? Are they making things better or just cheaper? Are they making life more convenient or simply using up today’s resources at tomorrow’s expense?
Most corporations are anxious to assure us that their products and services contribute to society somehow, although clearly some contribute more than others. Increasing our focus on corporate contribution can start to have a trim-tab effect on how management of companies, large and small, prioritize the elements that go into their decision-making. It can guide wise management regarding what and how a corporation contributes to their communities of customers, consumers and even shareholders.
The third metric for ascertaining true corporate value is about how corporations are behaving. This one is currently talked about the least, if at all. What does a company’s aggregate behavior look like? What are they modeling for other corporations and what message are they sending to their communities at large? When a company that doesn’t even pay its fair share of taxes takes Federal tax-rebate money and moves its headquarters offshore to avoid any possible taxation, what example does that set for others and what does it say about the very nature of capitalism? To me personally, that’s bad behavior, and it doesn’t really deserve a place within a definition of capitalism as an ideal.
Good behavior, on the other hand, might consist of paying your employees a sustainable wage in proportion to the value they create for the company (even it it reduces profits somewhat), and providing more than just adequate working conditions. In an economic environment like the one we are now in, should the principle of supply and demand dictate that you offer an employee the lowest pay possible, just because you can get away with it? Or is there a preferable behavior: hire fewer people, pay each a living wage, tie increased compensation to contribution, and create a community of employees in your company that knows they are appreciated and that will increase their productivity accordingly, on their own.
You probably already know where my bias lies, because our company’s product is designed to create and empower community itself, in both corporations and in any organization that wants to thrive. To me, one of the most exciting aspects of the explosion of online social networking is that it is finally catching on beyond just social life. Corporations are seeing the potential to increase their bottom line by fostering communities both within their customer base and also within their internal organizations. But with that financial opportunity comes the flip side of the coin – thriving corporate-related communities will tend to be much more aware of the other aspects of what it means to be a community, beginning with an awareness of company “contribution” and “behavior,” which is suddenly up for (often very public) discussion. As these other values begin to take the social networking spotlight, our corporations, large and small, will need to step up to the plate and show us what they are made of. That’s a good thing, and not a minute too soon.
