Monday, March 14, 2011

Welcome to my World: My world II

Educational Component


Program Vision: Each human unfolds and develops his/her potential to use his passion as a tool for the betterment of the world, backed by a community that offers him a safe space, experience, exposure as well as emotional and financial support, through holistic educational means.


What's in there for you:


Economic crisis and pressures such us unemployment, mortgages, debts, rent, providing food and clothing for family, take people as far as to commit suicide. I believe this is non sense. 


The Open Enterprise Manifesto from BetterMeans reveals that "85% of people in America are disengaged from their work" and, that "70% of Americans have start up an idea but only 4% follow through with their dreams". What if you could use unemployment as an opportunity to unfold your passion, translate it to an idea, follow it through until it becomes a project and it lastly becomes the job you can engage in?? You are not unemployed and  already have a passionate idea but do not know how to overcome the barriers??


It seems to me that people's passions come out of the desire to solve a big issue. This issue hurts, it is emotionally painful. This fact normally makes their passion a social cause. A passionate idea is attempting to help the world in order to vanish the personal pain. Most entrepreneurs, including the so called social ones, seem to agree that the main barrier for them to work on is the monetary one. There is always the question of, it is a good idea but you need money to make it real.


Money may be a barrier but is not the only one, and certainly not the most important. For those who have no business experience whatsoever but have a good idea, just putting the idea down is a hard task. And how about you think you have decided what you want to do and a couple of months later you realize that the idea is moving somewhere else?? 


Others, the most experienced ones, have their project ready, business plan is done and they are ready to launch. Now they have to invest money in old school marketing, send flyers or cold-call people and then pray they'll come to their business. How do you ensure your product or service will be consumed?? You need to create credibility in your product, and to create it, you need to be credible yourself, that is, your customers need to trust you as a human being. How do you build that trust and reputation?? If it comes from your passion and your heart, it will care about your costumers. It is not about making money, it is about caring about those you are there for and money will come.


Mainstream way of doing business is becoming obsolete. New businesses are structurally changing the way we interrelate and trade, unemployment and entrepreneurship are a once in a life opportunity to learn about these emerging models. 


We will create a holistic (and fun!) educational program where you will be taken through all these barriers and will offer you the tools and knowledge to make them work on your favor. You will have access to key leaders on different aspects. 


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Research: 


I believe this project requires the generation of a business model, as well as the online banking platform that I talked about in the previous post. Whether they would be integrated in one model or separate I don't know. But maybe we may be able to ensure that we answer what people want to know by researching two groups of participants: 



  • Group 1) You are looking to unfold your ideas and passions and make them a business for the benefit of society, what would you like to know and why?? What questions do you have that would help you clarify what you need to do to get there??
  • Group 2) You are an experienced entrepreneur in any field, or you have experience in providing good advice, or you consider there is something you can contribute. What questions will you be able to answer?? (i.e. I would answer these questions: Why change is good? why don't we like change? what is money for?, others may be able to answer 'how to build reputation systems?' or, 'why do we need new economic structures?')


After or during this process, users will have access to our online office to see in virtual life how there will be a community ready to support them and to help them bring their idea to life.


How can we collect, categorize and organize the answers to the questions posed above?? 
How do we develop entertaining, creative and inspiring ways to deliver contents??


Funding

Imagine you contribute to the development of this educational program. We'll use the estimates/reputation/compensation system of BetterMeans. Once the course is ready, we launch it as a membership based course. Revenues will go straight in to the stream to pay contributors. The surplus will  stay there to support the rest of the development. The idea is to create a membership based educational program that would exchange knowledge for members credits (official money) to support the project and its contributors. 


The Truthology Foundation has a tell a friend program where you pay a certain amount for your membership and using internet cookies, you invite people to join. All memberships paid by the people who join through you, go to your account except for the second person, whose payment is received by the person who introduced you, that is, by the person above you, so to speak. It is a good idea and the money is redistributed within the community of members. My proposal is: everyone who joins, including contributors, pays the membership, which goes to the organizations account. We use internet cookies to invite people. The difference is that those who join because of you, would not credit your account but the organization's one. The third person to join thanks to you, will credit your account, which means 2 things:


1) Your membership will end up costing you nothing if you can get 3 people to join. 
2) We need to create a very good program so that people do not have to convince friends with an old style marketing strategy, but it would be natural for them to talk about it.


My assumption is that not everyone will be interested in getting their money back if the program completely satisfies them, and also, that it will take a while to get the others to bring 3 people to the program. That would give us time to use the funds to cover costs using the built-in system of BetterMeans.

I envision this program as a tool to share our knowledge and inspire people to act, not against anyone, but for the betterment of the world as a whole. Observations no judgement, perspective not formula. Forgiveness. A program that takes us from fear and hopelessness to love and confidence in ourselves and our potential team members. The program would widen our community of contributors and ideally, give all of us, tools to engage in action and prepare us to launch branches in our own communities. 




This is how retrospective/reputation/compensation system works.




I am excited about the next post!! The first two (My world I and II) have been about my ideas, the next one will be about using business model approach to get to the heart of them.


Until next Monday.

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