Peter Kaminski » Community

Making More Money When Your Customers Have Less

pete — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:27:20 +0000

With his social investor hat on, my friend Kevin Jones posts his astute investment thesis for today’s economic realities, in his Stanford Social Innovation Review blog post When More Mission Equals More Money:

So here are the two pillars of the model, as I see it emerging: You build your business based on sharing scarce resources in a time when your customers have less money, and you dedicate your business to serve a movement where sharing comes easily.

Then you build your revenue model to reduce financial and environmental costs for your customers (individual and collectively) while increasing your margins as a provider. The more you focus on your mission, the truer you are to your community’s mission, and the higher your margins. That’s the model that makes sense to me these days.

This is the Dreamfish model. We add a little more to it; by helping people share while they work, we help them be more effective and more happy as they work, as well.

Visible Immune Response

pete — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 18:46:32 +0000

I learned about — or at least about the existence of — the VisiblePulse community pattern from Eugene Kim. (Currently the VisiblePulse page on CollabWiki is empty, awaiting a description if you’re so inclined. :-)

Tonight in discussion with a friend, I suggested a new one, “VisibleImmuneResponse” — a reaction obvious to others in response to damage or attack.

And then it struck me that these are also ways of telling that something — a community, a wiki, a website, or a bird or a snake — is alive and vital.

	Wiki	Community	Animal
VisiblePulse	Recent Changes	newsletter, email list, gossip	breathing motions, eyes track objects
VisibleImmuneResponse	wikispam gets removed	trolls repulsed, members aid others in trouble	scabs form over wounds, sneezing/coughing during viral infection

What other SignsOfLife are there? How do you judge the quality of SignsOfLife?

Blo(g|ck) Party

pete — Wed, 19 May 2004 00:19:54 +0000

Seeing Rebecca Ryan’s post about the virtues of having a physical front porch reminded me of the cool intertwingled set of Ton, Dina, Brandon and me (via Seb) talking about blogs as front porches. It makes Eileen Foley’s Porch culture diffusion index seem s p o o k y.

I don’t know Ton or Dina personally, but we have a lot of friends in common. It’s like we live on the same blog street.

(Pete waves) Hi, blog neighbors!

P.S.: Hi, Phil! :-)