Nodding in agreement my fellow spoon hanger. (Remind me to share a picture!)

I’ve recently been immersed in thinking about technologies for communities of practice and the thing our little team has been focusing in is the tension between the individual and collective. It is not a tenstion that can (or should) be resolved, but it has design and deployment implications. In the instance of social change—like the examples you offer, Alexandra, is that it is easier to work on the individual when we are a distributed community, and harder to move towards the collective. So I’m really interested in what intersections of tools and processes can help us weave back in the collective.

(I’m also wondering now about policy change. My long time ago work was changing maternal and child policies here in Washington state and it is interesting to think about the individual and collective aspects of this work. Grin)

Thanks to all of you for digging in to how 43 Things can serve humanity. Its really inspiring.

Here’s a brief question – why “daycare” and not “preschool”? I know it’s just semantics – but it might be an important distinction. Do you think these terms are synonymous or that one would be better than the other?

Behind the scenes is a technical issue we are wrestling with on the system side – how close/loose do goals have to be to merge (right now we are thinking punctuation and capitalization won’t make goals different) and how close to be synonymous. To me daycare and preschool are different – so as a test I set up a rival goal. If the daycare word isn’t important, editing your goal to say preschool should merge us. If it is, we can watch which goal grows, and two similar agendas would have to decide how to share info.

Anyway – thanks again, and if you want to wade into how you think the experience ought to work for organizers/activists – let us know your thoughts and we’ll get back to you with what we can do. Thanks

It’s interesting to see that our issue convergence so far is not only on the idea of social change, but on the daycare example in particular. To answer Josh’s question re: daycare vs. preschool, I guess I tend to think that not all daycare is preschool, or vice versa. I’m no expert but I think of preschool as primarily educational, and daycare as primarily being a way to ensure kids aren’t left at home in a crib with a tv on. (Though the OECD recently busted Canada for treating daycare as kid parking rather than as education.)

What’s interesting about 43 things as a tool for addressing an issue like daycare is that it provides an opportunity for working on both the individual and collective sides of a problem—but that opportunity really depends on finding a good way to track relationships among goals.

For example, personal goals could include:
- “find a great nanny for my baby”
- “figure out a childcare solution for when I return to work”
- “find a way to work from home while my kids are little”
- “find the best daycare in Boston”
- “teach my daughter to read”

Wouldn’t it be great if people who had goals like these could find each other—for example, what if the person who wanted to work from home could provide daycare for someone looking for a childcare solution?

Even more powerful, what if people with personal goals like these were alerted to “collective” goals like “help create a national childcare program”? After all, people who are doing focused work on their own childcare issues could become activists, supporters or leaders of a childcare policy initiative.

There are already personal and political goals on 43 things that could be tied together. Why don’t all those would-be conscious consumers join with my goal to ban SUVs?

It strikes me that this could be >a kind of power-wiki for helping >people work on social change >goals.

Yes, it does remind me of a wiki kind of thing – the links to other things remind me of Everything – http://www.everything2.com/

The difference is the focus on defining goals, which reminds me of another concept that popped up a few years ago called mind mapping where you produced a diagram made up of overlapping blobs that outlined your thinking on something.

Create a feedback mechanism, so that when you give me advice toward my goal, I can rank your advice as good/bad. That way, over time, if you tend to give good advice on a particular goal, the site can identify you as an “expert on it. This alone would add a lot of value to the site. But, the site could make some $ off of it too, by allowing experts to sell their advice/services through the site, with a % of each sale going to 43things.com to support the site.

For example, say my goal is “improve my business plan. If you are an experienced business person who enjoys tweaking business plans, you can give me advice. Then, if I like your advice, the site should let me rank your advice as good. Immediately, every other user who has the goal “improve my business plan? should have your username pop up next to their goal as someone who has been identified as able to give good advice on that goal, so those users can ask you for advice, too.

Over time, as many people give advice, and many are ranked, whole lists of “experts? will be connected to particular goals. And, since experts will choose to give advice related to goals that they know the most about, while ignoring other goals, they will tend to specialize. For example, some users will emerge as being good at business plans with tags like “marketing? and others with tags like “supply chain management? and so on. Eventually each expert will collect a unique slew of good rankings that correlates with demonstrated expertise on particular goals (with particular tags). So, the site could tap this pool of identified expertise by allowing experts to SELL their advice/services through the site, with a % of sales going to support 43things.com.

As eBay has shown, this kind of reputation system dissuades gaming/exploitation, since each “expert depends entirely on other users. The difference being that eBay’s reputation system only answers the question, “how trust-worthy is this user regarding selling/buying? Whereas, the 43things “expertise system? would answer “how much of an expert is this user on goal X? where “X can be any goal imaginable.

What holes do you see in this idea?
What would be the best way to let users sell their advice/services? Through bidding?
Would you use this kind of service, if it were available?
Do you think it would add value to 43things.com?
Do you think it could bring in some revenue to the site?
Do you think it could be gamed or otherwise exploited?

Great spoon u have their Consultini!

I’m really new to this tool, so may not have a good enough understanding of its totality, but I do feel it is giving us a nice easy way in 2 aspects at least:

1st to specifically communicate targets we wish to acheive 2nd, a way to call others to join us in achieving them.

There seems 2 different interpretations though. Calling for joint actions a collective target vs calling for a personal target, where others will help us solve our need. eg find a new house

Personall waht interest me is the collective target, ie things that may change the world. www.changethis.com is in that vein, and I can see a good complementarity with what that site is doing. That site doesnt have the social nature of this one. Though it is a good wa of seeing good proposals bubble up for others to support.

On Nancy’s comment about tension between individual and collective. I feel its actually really important to have the individual identity from which the collective draws.

For example this comment now lives its life divorced from the rest of my thought trails, blogs on the other hand keep our thoughts connected to us. and allow us to air our difference slants on everything without which any collective voice would seem so bland.

So for me it would be nice to be able to link this concept here more into the existing blogosphere better. Hence, mabe 43things could scour existing blogs and pick up anyones call for action, or we could have pointers (like a trackback) to ourselves from “a want” we see here then see the posts by others under that “want” get auto fed into comments under our post where the trackback like link points to.

Sorry for this mixed braindump. In conclusion, I would like to see tool as being a mechanism that helps generate collective group spaces form easier, (which it seems to be well suited to)from all/any cries out there in the general blogosphere for “a want”.

in a way I see 3 steps, calls for collective action in the blogosphere, takeup and socialization around them in 43things type tools, and then integration of collective thinking through wiki style collab, possibly not needed if 43things replace/integrate that