Consultant Dialog – Nicole Hallberg – Part 2

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.

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.

Values behind potential key progress indicators. Please indicate Yes or No:
- I'd like to see more web traffic. Y/N
- 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
- I'd like to be more recognized as the mind behind Wikidelphia. Y/N
- I'd like Wikidelphia to grow into a bigger organization with more people working on it than just me and my assistant. Y/N
- I'd like more people to know about Wikidelphia as a resource. Y/N
- 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
- 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
- I'd like Wikidelphia to help solve a very particular social problem, or a few problems. Y/N
- I'd like Wikidelphia to make a specific contribution to society. Y/N
Which of these most closely describes your feelings about Wikidelphia in regards to revenue?
- A. I feel strongly that Wikidelphia does not and should not ever have revenue as an end goal/should operate without profit to protect its status as a neutral information resource.
- B. I wouldn't mind if Wikidelphia brought in some side revenue, but only if doing so would not detract or distract from its main purpose, whatever that may turn out to be.
- C. I feel agnostic about whether Wikidelphia does or does not bring in revenue.
- D. It would be great if it did, fine if it did not.
- E. I'd like to move towards potential revenue generation some day, but we can take our time getting there.
- F. Wikidelphia should be developed with the end goal of supporting itself someday.
- G. Wikidelphia should support itself as soon as possible, even if we have to change course to get there.
- H. None of these describe how I feel about revenue. Instead, I feel __________.
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?
Creating opportunity
Answering someone's very specific question
Supporting/fostering a community of well-connected people
Tackling a general social problem
Solving a Philadelphia-specific problem
Promoting helpfulness
Helping to move humanity away from people killing, exploiting, and degrading each other and the planet
Other ___________