7 Billion Friends

Towards Radical Asking And Radical Crediting

Two healthy forces are colliding that are leading to a big change in LOVELAND operations. 1: LOVELAND, while still very early stage, has more demand and has grown larger than what I working mainly as an individual am able to sustain, and 2: more of the friends who have informally worked with me on the project are starting to bang their shoes on the table and say GIVE ME MORE CREDIT AND LET ME DO MORE!

In the words of the immortal Zohan (who is not to be messed with): So let’s go!

See, since the project started I knew I wanted to be transparent and put ideas and problems up right away before they were complete or solved (which we did), and to make a system that invited creative networks of people to make things like crazy (not up yet). But when the project started it was necessarily, I felt, a personal job to lay a foundation. Along the way many, many friends and people reached out to give feedback and offer to make things, and there’s a smaller circle of friends who have been very involved, including Rita King and her 1000 Inches In LOVELAND project, Larry Sheradon on the map, Alan Languirand with Project Lemon Battery, Mary Carter on keyboard, drums, bass, and x-acto knife, and Pierce P who’s done some great art work. And that’s not even including the 600 inchvestors who are invited to participate and to create on their land.

Eek!

Obviously, individuals do not scale past a certain point, and enough foundation has been laid to start turning things inside out. The question is how to do it most effectively, and with nearly zero budget to start with. Ah, yet another uncertain stage in life’s journey. :)

A model that very much interests me is radical asking and radical crediting. Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, has a brand new company called Love Machine (of all things) that’s caught my attention here. Love Machine is currently run by Philip and partner Ryan Downe. They haven’t hired any employees, rather they’ve been posting giant lists of things that need to be done, with modest cash rewards on some, and inviting people to do them for credit.

I think this is a really awesome approach and something we’ll start doing in LOVELAND season 2. For as open and collaborative as I aspire to be, and for LOVELAND to be, I probably have had a bit of a hangover from the last startup I co-founded where we were ridden very strongly by our investors to keep everything secret, and there was no way in heck that someone who wasn’t on the payroll and who hadn’t signed an iron-clad contract could ever have created anything for us. Too many ownership and conflict-of-something issues involved. It creates a desire to reach out, but also a fear of doing so with conviction.

Well, if there’s one thing LOVELAND already has in spades, it’s ownership issues, so that horse has already left the barn. :D I believe one of the categories for the new website needs to be Credits where we clearly showcase everyone who’s made a contribution, and to let their work stand as their distinctly as their work. It can be a fine line on how much credit to give to individuals versus entities (“Steven did this” versus “LOVELAND did this”), but we’re not really, nor do we aspire to be a traditional organization, and as it stands now at this stage, “LOVELAND did this” is too synonymous with “Jerry did this”. Do not want!

So we’re on the edge of a much more credit-driven system where people are invited to “own” various parts of the project and to be truly featured (and directly accountable!) for their contributions. Already for Season 2 we’re working on our first grant program where we’ll share some of the money we make with projects already happening in Detroit. In many ways that grew out of the problem of “OMG how are we going to pay people to make cool things in the city for LOVELAND?” to which the answer became, “Duh! There’s already tons of people doing there own cool things in the city who we can support.” In that vein, here it’s like, “OMG how are we going to get everything done on our side of the ball?” to which the answer is becoming, “Open it up and feature people, dummy!” :D

I’d be very very very interested to hear more thoughts on this.