Business Models for Paragogy.net

Soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=983DwAOCXRI, Dead Kennedys, "Stars and Stripes of Corruption"

Yesterday I was talking with my sister about an idea that I've had for a while. She's going to interview for an MBA programme at an elite US university soon, so it seemed like a good time to get her professional opinion. Anyway, she asked me "What might you like to do after the Ph. D.?" so I gave her my answers.

The first answer was


 * If the PlanetMath stuff is reasonably successful, I might want to study for my math Ph. D. -- that was always part of the goal of working on this project, to make math easier for me to learn. Especially if I start to get some grant money coming in, there could be a "day job" aspect to this work too.

The second answer was


 * But what I've been really thinking about doing is making something sort of like PlanetMath, but for consumer products. Think about a sort of combination of Amazon and WikiLeaks.  The idea would be to understand the real impact of buying a given product, so, for example, instead of just featuring customer reviews, a product page might include things like an interview with someone who works at the place where the product is made.  There'd be a major 'investigative journalism' aspect of the project, like, how much money goes in and out of Ciudad Juárez, and for what purposes?  Maybe a good code-name for the project is "Milieu" (which is a bit of a pun on the name of the dog-cum-deus ex machina from the Tintin comic book series).  You could get started with a sort of unauthorized plugin for Amazon: think of a crowdsourced version of GoodGuide (cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rlT6kqHFjvU).  And how do I come into it?  I have a certain degree of expertise on where the information that makes up crowdsourced resources comes from.  The tool isn't going to be very interesting if nothing is there.  For example, I had the idea to make a business model for PlanetMath by hosting paid online tutoring on the site, with the novel twist that video, audio, and electronic "whiteboard" transcripts will be shared publicly (presumably with optional anonymization).  Why would students want that?  Partly because it gives them a degree of quality assurance about the tutoring they receive.

I couldn't put it all together then, but I have a thought about how to continue now:


 * In the Milieu project, motivation to participate could be "just for fun" (like writing reviews on Amazon) or "for educational purposes" (which is why I'm writing about this on paragogy.net). It could even be done in co-located "camps" or even extended "group therapy" sessions (cf. http://www.focus-alternative.org/milieu.htm), resembling hack-a-thons or adventure tourism.  (This is just one thought on how a model of educational/economic transactions would prime the pump - long term, the system would be sustained, like Amazon, through product sales.)  It wouldn't be necessary to work with troubled youth per se -- but the model of "life space crisis intervention" (cf. http://www.lsci.org/files/lsci/media/Sample%20chapter.pdf) would be an interesting one to explore as we look at more general sorts of situations where "crisis management" techniques would be usefully applied.  Much as with the PlanetMath case, building up a repository of knowledge about various crises (ranging in scale from personal to global) may itself be a useful and interesting task.

This might be intensely cynical: how can we commodify being a "lost boy"? But I think it's at least worth considering taking people's "anti-social" tendencies and turning it into something that matters, at least to those people involved. Like I was saying, this is a short term question: long-term, milieu/paragogy.net wouldn't be charging the "creators" but, rather, paying them dividends from product sales. For another point of comparison, think of the project as something like the Whole Earth Catalog (whose modern-day heritage includes the Whole Earth 'Lectronic 'Link (WELL), and Wired magazine).

Much like with PlanetMath, there would be a question "how is this different from Wikipedia?", and the answer would again be something like "Wikipedia is stuck being a wiki and an encyclopedia. We can make something that goes beyond that by supporting different kinds of interactions."

Thinking about "anti-social behavior", check out this quote from director Richard Linklater:


 * "Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for."

And as a final note, so far in November, 495 "cups of patronage" have been purchased at 750words.com, which at $4 per cup comes to $1980 USD. That's not millions, but it would pay my rent more than twice over.

See also:


 * http://childrenneedfamilies.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-fritz-redl-and-dr-david-wineman.html
 * http://www.cyc-net.org/journals/rcy-10-2.html#edits
 * http://www.amazon.com/Children-Who-Hate-Sensitive-Anti-Social/dp/0029259606
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Aichhorn
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim