Consultant Dialog – Nicole Hallberg – Part 2

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Hi Stan,

It was once again a pleasure to chat with you. Please find below the questions I'd like you to think about for our meeting next week. The last questions I sent you were more open ended and purpose-finding in nature. Now that we have more of a handle on why, we're going to focus on how we achieve that purpose. Towards that end, these questions are designed more with an eye towards teasing out priorities and identifying end goals. Once we know where you're headed and what you're aiming for, we can begin to identify a way forward.

The How

Is Wikidelphia a library? A community locus, organized, curated and designed on principles of helpfulness, usefulness, and advancing a community and its members. Why or why not? In what ways is it similar or different?

Wikidelphia may have some original material, but essentially it is NOT a library. It's being set up to serve as an index (remember the old card files?). The actual content being indexed is what people are doing within their communities and businesses.

What if anything is unique about Philadelphia, its community, and its needs, other than there being a Stan Pokras living in it? Should anything about Wikidelphia be designed differently to better serve Philly's particular needs? Or would a Wikicago or Wikiami look functionally identical if a Dan Pokras were to start one in those cities?

Philadelphia is unique by being organized around its neighborhoods. Philadelphia is also recognized as the poorest of the ten largest cities in the country. So, it may be that the need for improvement in the economics may bring out a certain spirit of self-sufficiency where people of limited means find themselves positioned to build resource ties between their neighborhood and other neighborhoods or communities of interest, such as gardeners, or collaborative home maintaince businesses. This may be a good time for worker owned enterprises to flourish. Worker owned businesses may be at an advantage due to somewhat lower capital requirements than "regular" businesses. Wikidelphia will be of greatest value if highly motivated but resource poor "business" and "social" entrepreneurs can find the human, intellectual, cultural and material resources (including customers) that allow them to build sustainable and mutually sportive enterprises. (The ideas behind "Asset Based Community Development" and Building Communities from the Inside Out are useful to understand what I'm talking about.)

It is useful for me to introduce a new and important factor here. We're not going to have a "Food, Clothing, and Shelter" economy. I believe that we are living through a "reset" in how civilization functions. Right now, we are watching as the people who manage the "purse strings" of society find out how important it is to create sufficient money to keep the people active, ie. people need to continue to eat and creating money is the best way to insure that we all don't starve or revert to cannibalism. Please, bear with me as I pronounce capitalism to be a modern form of cannibalism (or to be polite, I can call it a form of slavery)... but that discussion will have to wait for another time. Suffice it to say that we may be seeing the beginning of a "NEW" economy that includes some form of guaranteed income as has been suggested by at least one recent candidate for the Presidency.

If you were to retire at some point in future and could hand the keys to Wikidelphia over to someone else you trusted for stewardship over the next 25 years, what would you like to see happen with it? Or would you rather close it down, because it existed to serve a very particular community at a particular time, and you hope that it will have accomplished that purpose?

If Wikidelphia blooms it will be because people begin to use it for its ability to help them establish "supply chains" of human, intellectual, cultural and material resources that will be the life blood of the new economy. If this happens, I will no longer be needed and could retire. If it doesn't happen I will have had my fun and can let it go.

JPS: I'm game to keep it going somehow. Stan hasn't stopped at age 65, and neither would I. Gotta have something to do!

Can you please define what a 'commercial cesspool' is? And what specifically makes it antithetical to Wikidelphia?

A commercial cesspool happens when we ruin our environment by trying to build "bigger" and "MORE" when we ought to be building "BETTER." Please watch this video: The Story of Solutions. It's 9 minutes long and quite useful in understanding what Wikidelphia can help with.

JPS: We're not in the business of business. But if it would help Wikidelphia become self-sustaining, I'm open to including that. I would define "commercial cesspool" as a site so loaded with commercial marketing that we lose a lot of visitors because they think that Wikidelphia is just a bunch of ads.

Values behind potential key progress indicators. Please indicate Yes or No:

• • I'd like to see more web traffic. Y/N

Use, YES, But traffic just for the sake of having traffic, NO

JPS: Amen. I want to see more people and orgs use and benefit from this thing. I have no interest in empty numbers.

• • I'd like to hear about more exciting things happening as a direct result of people's use of Wikidelphia. If it's happening, I would like to hear about it. Y/N

YES

JPS: YES. I can't expect to ever see everything, but it would be encouraging if we could see some indicators.

• • I'd like to be more recognized as the mind behind Wikidelphia. Y/N

If Wikidelphia helps people build communities, then YES. Otherwise, NO.

JPS: The words I've heard Stan use are "instigator" and "progenitor".

SRP: Instigator is MY term. "Progenitor" can only be found in a comment or title of something that Paul wrote. I don't object to the term, but I'd never define myself by it. I'm the Instigator of Community Magic and the "Publisher" of Wikidelphia.

• • I'd like Wikidelphia to grow into a bigger organization with more people working on it than just me and my assistant. Y/N

YES, but I'd prefer to say "working with it" than "working on it."

JPS: I keep hoping we'll get some volunteer editors, even it's only to work on subjects that interest them particularly. My methods are so standardized, I could totally train people.

• • I'd like more people to know about Wikidelphia as a resource. Y/N

YES

JPS: Definitely. We could really use some tips on how to "get the word out".

• • The more contributors to Wikidelphia, the better. No number of active daily users is too high, conceptually, if we could build the infrastructure needed to support their activity. Y/N

Again, I'm hoping people will be "users" rather than only making "contributions." The right mix of USERS will themselves constitute the infrastructure needed to support the process.

JPS: I find the word "user" rather confusing. I prefer the clearer term, "volunteer editor" or whichever other term more specifically applies. To me, "user" could mean an editor or just a visitor or who-knows-what-else.

• • I'd like it if every single person in Philadelphia and the surrounding area knew about and used Wikidelphia, if we could build the marketing engine needed to inform and attract them. Y/N

YES. It would be nice if more and more people know of Wikidelphia. But it's those people who are building community, networks, collaborations and financially intertwined enterprises that will affect society the most.

JPS: There's something for everybody at Wikidelphia, from the serious-minded nonprofit leader to the casual Web surfer. It can absolutely enrich every Philadelphian's life at least a little.

• • I'd like Wikidelphia to help solve a very particular social problem, or a few problems. Y/N

YES. Our present society and civilization is like a multitude of separate animals when we need to stop seeing the world as "Me and Mine" and form the sensitivity that believes in "Us and Ours."

JPS: No, not really. I see myself as helping other people do that, by helping people and orgs get acquainted and form useful collaborations. Plus, I want people to get a lot of fun and infotainment out of it.

• • I'd like Wikidelphia to make a specific contribution to society. Y/N

YES. It would meet my best expectation if it created greater unity, trust and collaboration among people.

Which of these most closely describes your feelings about Wikidelphia in regards to revenue?

1. ** F. Wikidelphia should be developed with the end goal of supporting itself someday.
2. ** E. I'd like to move towards potential revenue generation some day, but we can take our time getting there.

JPS: Since I'm the (six hours a week) paid staff editor, I surely would like to see Wikidelphia generate its own little trickle of cash, and if it can help Stan's family, too, that would be great. Caveat: People Before Profits!

You indicated that each of the following indicated some measure of success in Wikidelphia's purpose. Can you rank them in order of importance? Can you name the single overarching purpose that unites them in common? Can you do it in six words or less?

Faclitating Helpfulness, Collaboration and Respect globally (yup, 6 words - Good challenge, Nicole. Thanks!)

1. ** Helping to move humanity away from people killing, exploiting, and degrading each other and the planet
2. ** Other Supporting/fostering a global civilization of well-connected yet independent prosperous democratic communities.
3. ** Promoting helpfulness
4. ** Supporting/fostering a community of well-connected people
5. ** Creating opportunity
6. ** Answering someone's very specific question
7. ** Tackling a general social problem
8. ** Solving a Philadelphia-specific problem

JPS: I think a bunch of people would like to see this answer from Stan! When this thing began in 2011, at the launch meeting, when it was framed as "Information Advocacy", it was hard for us to pin down what he was going for. I think we lost a few folks early on, because they couldn't get the concept. Neither could I. After Wikidelphia started, for a long time I was thinking of it as like a Wikipedia for Philadelphia. I still wasn't getting it. So if all that ever comes out of this consultation is that we get a better, more focused idea of what our purposes and objectives are, that's a big "plus", and I would consider your time and effort to be worthy of great gratitude.