Keep them coming
How many ideas will we receive over the weekend? Before we went home on Friday, some of us made a guess. Joanna and Stewart put the number at 10, Mike at 20, including junk submissions (such as: “Get a proper job.” or “You lazy asses.”)
I’m happy to say that we received 140 submissions over the weekend. Even more surprisingly, only about 20 of these are obviously junk; most of the other 120 are well thought out. What is more, we did over 15K page views yesterday (yes, largely due to our appearance on the home page of slashdot.org) and have been the subject of a fair .
Getting slashdotted
But this is only the beginning. Clients of The Economist Group will start to receive invitations to submit their ideas today and - we’re hoping - many of our colleagues will also start making submissions this week. It is safe to say that we’ll reach our goal of 250 ideas before our submission deadline on March 25th.
On Thursday, we’ll start the idea building and selection process by discussing the ideas we feel “passionate” about (including our own proposals and the ones we came up with in our brainstorming sessions).
At this stage, we won’t be using hard criteria, such as commercial viability, to evaluate the ideas. Instead, we’ll try to turn some of the thoughts that have been submitted into true ideas so that we can evaluate each on a level playing field. Having free use of the The Economist Group’s brand and content will mean that we can creatively explore how the idea could be used in relation to the Group (however, this is not a necessary criteria).
At the end of the week, we’re hoping to have a better understanding of which kind of ideas could make it to the next stage (where we will apply harder criteria, such as whether an idea has a sustainable business model and if this idea is already out there). We’ll certainly be looking at the new submissions - and, most likely, run this process again. So keep those ideas coming.
March 12th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
It would be great to give readers a chance to share ideas with one another as well. By commenting on and adding to those, such as on a wiki, we might be able to help filter and improve the bunch.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:28 am
I totally agree with Wendy. I think you’ll get more favour in the community if you make the submissions public. Otherwise it just comes across as a little selfish, and perhaps, dare I say a bit antisocial? Ideas want to be free. If they start off free, they should remain so I think.
March 13th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
People want ideas to be free, but that’s another story….
I posted a reply to some comments over here (https://projectredstripe.com/blog/2007/03/09/going-live/#comment-348) about why we decided not to make the whole process open, but we may come back to that at some point….
March 13th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Read your comment Mike. You could use open source system ‘pligg’ for submission — it has votes etc built in.
I still think that there’s a contradiction between your statements ‘we abhor closed systems’ and ‘please submit your thoughts but we won’t tell anyone what any of them are’. By being afraid of some of the more censorious comments, you’re already on the back foot in terms of web 2.0 thinking. Check out this great interview with Tamara Littleton: http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2007/02/13/interview-with-emoderations-ceo-and-founder-tamara-littleton.aspx
Anyway, your choice!