WiserEarth Editors

Sheri, thank you so much for sharing this. Very sorry for the long delay in response as the working groups of our Editors group was taking up much of my time in WiserEarth lately.


*** On Mushin's idea of the monetization of social networks ****

A fascinating thread with lots and lots of insights into the fair distribution of reward on value created (read: a form of monetization) by community members of a social network who are working to make the world a better place. And also fascinating due to the "openness" among the participants of the discussion about their fears, prejudice, assumptions, and "secrets". I'd love to see discussions in WiserEarth to reach this level someday.

Much of what is written in this long thread of discussion is new to me, but I've learned a little about Open Money a while ago (from the same link that you provided) and see how it can potentially redefine money and transform our money system, and thus help change-makers support each other in the good work they do.

I once pass through Zaadz (the platform Gaia is using) in their early days and found the concept of bridging capitalism and spiritual work to be enticing, but haven't really followed since.

How the "not-for-profit", "creative-commons-content", "no-advertisement", "partners-and-community-donation" model that WiserEarth is emplyoing can learn from the "for-profit", "copyright", "select-advertisement", "shareholder-investment" model of Zaadz, is something I'll need to think over a little further.

But if there was something that stood out from that long thread, is this one controversial idea from Mushin at the ending part (as of today, April 4th, 2008) of the discussion, which kind a sum up his original blog post and the discussions around it:
"Another development I expect from this would be that the management would look at the merits of community members and recruit their staff from them. I can also imagine that management decides to give people that add a lot of valuable content according to the community's e-valuation a regular income of sorts to enable them to keep on doing what they do so well."
(from http://mushin.gaia.com/blog/2008/1/the_value_of_zaadz_gaia_and_social_networks_-_a_controversy#comment_209256)

The key phrase in that paragraph, and where I think the model employed by WiserEarth and Zaadz share in similarity is "community e-valuation". At present however, both do not have the adequate mechanism in place, let alone to choose to provide "regular income" for the said community member.

There's also the potential damage to the spirit of service that I sense WiserEarth is trying to nurture. Though I feel that at one point, there must come a day when "a community of good people support each other in their good actions, all together by-passing the profit-maximizing corporate machinery", or to paraphrase it, where "the community that is WiserEarth becomes cooperatively self-reliant in the financial sense of the new money system (e.g. open money) and real economy that is emerging".

Of course, WiserEarth can always stay on the course it is now employing in this regard, which is to rely on donations from users and partners to keep the site running, give the community of users value (a space to share, network and collaborate), and expect users to voluntarily contribute value back to the community/site (contribute content, comments, edits, connection building, etc.) and thus encourage more donations to keep the site running and the NCI staff well-paid for the work they enjoy doing. Much like the Wikipedia financial-model, which is working OK from what I read.

One benchmark I'd like to explore further here is, how well would the current model, and the model suggested by Mushin fare in terms of facilitating, or maybe even accelerating, the move "toward a just and sustainable world created by community" which is what WiserEarth is trying to help with. This is however probably too early to discuss, when WiserEarth is a still seedling not even one year old.


*** On a place to collect discussions regarding the community ***

I love this idea, and perhaps we here in the Editors group have touched upon this indirectly via the "Calling all users" section in our "Assist" page at http://www.wiserearth.org/article/0a8789b17e9d171a662ba070d836daaf
This needs to be explored further and acted upon.

By the way, the link Sheri provided contains a dot (.) at the end, and cause it to point to "page not found", here's the working link:
http://mushin.gaia.com/blog/2008/1/the_value_of_zaadz_gaia_and_social_networks_-_a_controversy


*** note ***

I quoted the paragraph by Mushin not because I expect to get financial reward from my meager contribution here, though I do feel that when a user, any user, spend a considerable amount of his time to provide high-quality and valuable contributions in WiserEarth and it benefits the community as a whole (and beyond, meaning: non-WiserEarth-user), then it is only natural that the community should reward the work that user is doing in ways that help that user make a living. The same analogy of course applies to how any user that feels they receive value from their stay in WiserEarth should financially support the work that NCI is doing with WiserEarth. That's where I hope something like Open Money (and the alternative real economy that will be it's foundation, or perhaps none will be needed) will kick in and help solve the problem.

There's so many loose ends in this analysis of mine, that I hope others will tie up. But I do think this discussion at Gaia@Zaadz is worth reading (if you have the time), even to only explore the model they're employing and the improvements to it being proposed.

Again, thanks Sheri for sharing this.