MissionStatement

At AboutUs we see ourselves as wiki guides, working to help your company gain customers by enhancing your visibility and credibility through your work in this open, collaborative environment.

The Earth Metaphor

I woke up early and found myself pondering the seemingly trite "growth" metaphor for AboutUs. On further reflection I realized came to favor "gardening" over "growth" and then gardening raised to stewardship of the Earth. Here are a few more words that try to explain this vision. -- Ward Cunningham

AboutUs.org hosts continuously changing information about the people of the world and particularly how they choose to organize and relate.

We use an organic metaphor for this information. All information is our "Earth". When we refer to "the Earth" we are being both respectful and somewhat vague, like the farmer, as to which parts of the Earth we are stewards.

Our mission is to give life to our Earth. We've begun by elevating the "about us" pages of the internet into a collaboratively editable commons. It is from this act that we take our name.

We assume an activist perspective with respect to our Earth. We choose to "work" the information we find so as to make it produce value we can share. The "iron" from which we make our tools is the computer. Our stewardship depends on making better tools, learning to apply them to our earth effectively, and then engaging all people in this creative activity.

Our activism derives from deeply held values. We struggle to voice our values but recognize that our voice alone cannot capture their uniquely human character. Our collective voices serves only to remind us that we are free to act on our values and that our actions observed and sometimes copied serves as our only sure way to guide stewardship of our information Earth.

Goals

AboutUs Strategic Goals
Goal What it Means
A Vibrant Community Welcome all logged-in people, provide world class assistance, facilitate peer review of all RecentChanges and increase the number of active members. Recruit and sustain a vibrant volunteer community.
Exceptional Content from Goals...

What it Means

Create standard pages

for every

Create Community pages

to draw communities to the site through

Exponential Growth Energize ViralSpirals that incent AboutUs community members to invite their friends. Establish technology for other sites that will promote viral growth for AboutUs (how does it promote viral growth?)
Sufficient Revenue Establish an advertising-, data- and publishing revenue stream that will:
  • support the operations of the Aboutus platform provider
  • creates income for the active members of the community
  • creates value for the stockholders
  • creates value for the cataloged website owners and their visitors

This arrangement is not meant as a partition of different mutually disjoint classes of people.

Active members can be at the same time

  • staff of the Aboutus platform as well as
  • stockholders or other constructive and friendly wikizens

All involved people are invited to collaborate in the spirit of contributing for the mutual benefit.

A Memorable Brand Establish AboutUs as our brand.
Robust Systems Become an Open Source [1] company with a reliable and scalable configuration and no single point of failure. Establish Continuous Integration Update Model [2] with scheduled update points.
A site we can be proud of Foster the idea that a quality site benefits everyone and that constructive participation is welcomed and honored. Segregate adult content and remove illegal content.




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