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I invite others in the community more skilled at extracting key thoughts or issues, to chop this content down to size, move sections to new pages, or otherwise edit in a way they feel would get better understanding from the broader community.

I think “consensus polling” is currently one AboutUs “diamond in the rough”. I offer some input relative to how the community might polish this diamond.

First I think there should be more community effort to find the best way to explain its “big picture” and upside potential. One attempt follows:

To make big, important, world changing, personally life impacting “things” happen, it helps if you’re wealthy and powerful – so what about the rest of us? We only stand a chance if lots of people can agree on the same course of action – to gain “consensus”. The problem is today this too often takes many years of effort and lots of time and money - to get even a small group of people focused on a common goal and action plan.

“Consensus polling” automates the process in effort to radically compress the consensus time frame, and increase the number of people that come to agreement.

The most important things in life rarely come easy. Consensus polling is a new and important tool for your personal empowerment - but it requires some learning on your part. (hopefully others can contribute the details of the “how to” – some of this already existing on various Wiki pages).

Some suggestions on new ways for AboutUs to use consensus polling:

edit Replaces market research

Market research boils down to spending lots of time and money figuring out what lots of people want – that large number needed by investors to justify this or that effort. Instead consensus polling can be a faster and cheaper way for large groups to in effect say, “we want this”.

edit Identifies and isolates new and “the best” profit centers

AboutUs has to generate profit or it ceases to exist. Investors that support AboutUs ask, “how do you plan to make money?”

In such regard the typical approach is for company insiders to do strategic planning about ways to gain revenue – which is “businesses as usual” and not at all in the Wiki spirit of community involvement. In contrast why not ask the community in effect, “what service would you value so highly, that you are willing to part with some of your own money to get it?”

As community members provide such input, there will be many differences in what individuals deem worthy of payment. Consensus polling can be used as a tool to extract or filter the common value proposition.

For many Internet start-ups the pitch to VC’s often boils down to, “we are not sure all the ways in which we will generate revenue at this early stage of evolution, but we know that if we collect lots of users, and show a repetitive pattern of growth (doubling users every “x” months) there will be plenty of profit center opportunities in the future”.

In contrast perhaps VC’s would take more notice if an Internet Start-up’s pitch went something like this: “we continually work to improve our consensus polling. One way we have exploited this is to have our community help us figure out how to generate self sustaining revenue. For example via our consensus polling 10 million people have agreed they would spend $10 per month if About us provides them with ‘y’ service”.

As a community member what are some services I feel are so valuable I am willing to pay for them? (again this question could be highly publicized and thrown out to the community).

1. The topsoil project would help me. It takes me too long to find other groups or pockets of interest having some common goals. Different groups I bump into never have exactly the same objectives. I need automation that would help me flush out groups that appear to have similar objectives. Once automation has helped me to identify those groups, then I need further automation to help me flush out, within these collected group of groups, what are our “few” common goals or objectives, so that we can gain an action plan backed by the larger group clout. Today this process is extremely inefficient.

2. I am willing to pay for a service that makes it fast and easy and credible for me to share in early stage financial risk with other people that have come to censuses on an action plan.

3. I am willing to pay for a service that alleviates me of the burden, of having to start up my own Internet infrastructure that enables “use friendly” collaboration with lots of people. The fact is we are still a long way from the type of “user friendly” collaboration environment I am willing to pay for (that will take a lot more computer coding dollars). For example to share a concept with the AboutUs community can I draw a quick sketch on a sheet of paper and send it to an AboutUs Wiki page? Do I still have to look at coding syntax to get a movie or picture onto my Wiki page, or is it a simple click of a button? (that is the gist of what I mean by gaining more “user friendliness”).

edit Sets priorities

When a company is growing fast there is typically not enough money to do everything that is needed, thus priorities must be set. Today the typical process mode is that company insiders set these priorities, and that often directly related to gaining more money from investors. Again if consensus polling can be leveraged to get the community to in effect say what it has a burning desire to have now, and values this service so much each community member is willing to pay for it – that could highlight the development priority.

If AboutUs uses consensus polling for key internal strategic planning issues, and allows community members to participate, it would also provide AboutUs staff with critical process feedback. For example perhaps one consensus polling experience has the AboutUs staff saying, “next time we have to take faster action, we cannot wait for this polling process to come to conclusion”. Such comments reveal there is still need for process improvement – if not good enough for you to use internally, then why would you expect others to embrace it for their needs or projects?

All of this said I must commend AboutUs management on its process transparency to date. I don’t recall a time during the early stage growth of Amazon, or eBay, or Google that I was allowed to call in via conference line and listen to their strategic planning issues, involving discussion of potential competitors, and issues of concern to VC’s – nice breath of fresh air! MartinPfahler