Most of the users of Slashdot.org, the (in)famous news site for geeks, are undoubtedly quite nice. But as Marx made clear, people’s interests tend to determine their views (“Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein.”). Slashdot’s incentives are structured to solicit comments that are either funny or sharply critical – and in the best cases, both (rather like The Economist, in fact). These qualities are valued – and rated – by the site’s audience: contributions can get “karma points” from “moderators” – themselves users who have accumulated a lot of these points, giving them a “good” or “excellent” karma.

We were not surprised, then, when many Slashdot users either derided or hammered our idea collection effort after a news item about it was posted on the site’s homepage on Sunday morning. Some suggested we’d be better off drinking lots of Jamaican beer. Another commenter wrote: “This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard out of [The Economist]. They actually will compensate you, with a rocking 6-mo web-subscription to economist.com (street value: roughly $50)… Perhaps the Economist should actually talk to their economists, and ask them what ‘Incentive Compatibility’ means. If I were the Economist, I’d be terribly embarrassed about this.”

As often with such debates on Slashdot, however, they raise an important point, which is then only superficially discussed before moving on to other more fundamental things (the debate quickly digressed to talking about democracy, Hitler, the Soviet Union and, of course, Ayn Rand). Yet the underlying issue is indeed a crucial one – and one we probably need to resolve somehow if we want to make this project a success: How can we cleverly combine – to mutual benefit – ultimately for-profit efforts such as Project Red Stripe and “commons-based peer production”, in the words of Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School.

I’ll come back to this question in another post. The essence of the criticism on Slashdot – and, similarly, by some noted bloggers such as Dan Gillmor, author of the book We the Media and director of the Center of Citizen Media – is that we let others do all the work and then will take all the money we make by exploiting it. “The terms upon which the idea is submitted basically means they can use the idea in any way they like and they will hold a patent on it. So it’s not just getting a poor level of compensation for an idea, but giving that idea up for use by anyone except the Economist Group”, argues one Slashdot regular.

The interesting thing about Slashdot debates is that the more “informative” posts, to cite one of the site’s labels, are not always the most highly rated ones. But if you have enough time, you can always find less biased comments. “Let’s not ascribe more evil than necessary”, suggests one Slashdotter, highlighting that our terms and conditions ask for a “non-exclusive” licence. Writes another: “Well, as I read it, they protect themselves from you, in case you would like to patent your idea once it gets accepted. They want to be sure they can use your idea. The keyword here is ‘non-exclusive’. They will be able to use it, and you will be able to ‘licence’ it to anyone else.”

“I actually think the idea itself is good”, states another of the rare positive posts, “what they’re trying to do is prevent the stale thinking caused by a bunch of like-minded toffs in a room all exposed to the same ideas. So they invite us to send in our ideas, and they’ll take a look. I don’t see that as being a bad strategy at all. They figure that they need to be exposed to people unlike them.”

Yet some of the reasons for our terms and conditions didn’t come up at all. So Stewart took the liberty to inject them into the debate (though without revealing that he’s a member of our team – shame on you Stewart!). “The six months subscription is obviously, for me, a legal thing that they had to throw in to stay legal”, he wrote, “you can’t have a contract between parties without payment. I guess this is why my house lease cost a peppercorn.”

That said, we certainly could have done better. We probably should have made clearer upfront, for instance, why we ended up with these terms and conditions (one should think twice before asking one’s company lawyer to draw them up…). We also should have emphasised more strongly that we didn’t expect people to send in complete business plans (as some Slashdotters seem to think), but thoughts that we would then build into actionable ideas. Finally, we could have explained better that the six-month subscription to Economist.com was only a token of appreciation rather than a compensation - and what we wanted to do is “allow people that might be passionate about what The Economist does or could do to suggest things to us”, as Mike put it in a recent comment on this blog.

At any rate, all this hasn’t kept people from sending in ideas. As I write this, we have gathered almost 200 ideas, most of them of much higher quality than in many of the other idea gathering sites we’ve come across (the latest one is here, though it’s only for those who master the language of Goethe). And if our terms and conditions really keep you from submitting your great idea, you can always do what Jeff Jarvis, the creator of the popular blog BuzzMachine, has suggested – and some have already done: post them on you own blog. But don’t forget to send us a link.

We are going to the park this afternoon to be creative and sit in the sun. See you tomorrow.

Team Red Stripe

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.

Navigating your way through a website should be a smooth experience. But ensuring that it actually is, can be a rather rough ride…

Today, Project Red Stripe’s first service goes live: the site to gather ideas from the outer world (as opposed to our Big-Brotherish dungeon). But as I am writing this, we’re still busily testing our handful of web pages – and still finding bugs. There are files that have mysteriously disappeared, broken links and (inevitably) typos. And then there is this browser called Internet Explorer, which most netizens use, but which makes life rather difficult for web programmers…

Overall, though, our little application, called Red Stripe robot, held up quite well. I tried breaking it by putting in a very long idea (about 50 pages of text) and tagged it with the term “test” 50 times. The site accepted the submission without protesting, but it showed up 50 times in our database where all the ideas are stored (a bug Stewart, our resident geek, has since fixed; we’ve also limited the length of submissions to 400 words).

It’s the non-technical stuff, though, that has proven the real hassle, particularly since we want the whole world to be able to submit ideas. Are the terms and conditions legally ok? What about the privacy policy? Closer to home, will our colleagues at the mother ship actually send the e-mails out to readers of Economist Group businesses and put our ads up on their websites?

Barring a last-minute catastrophe, recipients of our e-mail and those who see our ads can click through to our new homepage. It directs users to a brief that explains what we’re trying to do and a web form into which they can type their ideas. Once they click that “submit” button, they’ll get an e-mail thanking them for their contribution, which goes directly into our database to be examined later.

Yet there is even more going on behind the scenes. We ask contributors to “tag” (web 2.0-speak for “label”) their ideas with keywords that will then appear as a “tag cloud” next to the form. We also have an administrative online tool to look at each idea, add more tags and write comments.

Once we have 25 serious ideas, we’ll start taking a closer look at the submissions. In the meantime we’ll do some brainstorming to come up with some ideas of our own. So, as we say in our brief, start polishing your crystal ball - and tell us what the future holds for The Economist Group. The deadline is March 25th.

One of the reasons I think Project Red Stripe exists is because, in general, companies are slow at doing anything other than normal business - and they are probably slow at doing that. It’s just that they have competition that is also slow so they get away with it.

We are here to take something to market. We are six people in one room who can actually make decisions and move forward.

We have been trying to work with various Group companies to get various things sorted to help speed the project along. It has been tough. We have been making requests through all the correct channels etc.. Most of our colleagues think the project is a great idea and want to help. Then we slowly trudge up and down the slow command chain of the companies in the Group to find problem after problem. Surely it’s not so hard to do these things.

I hope that whatever Project Red Stripe produces can change the mould for Economist Group companies and produce a company that is more responsive. Basically a company that can do, rather than might do, or perhaps even says they will then doesn’t.

Economist Group companies should start thinking. Perhaps even follow some of the advice the newspaper actually prints. Our competitors might just figure out how to empower their staff to make decisions without constantly seeking management approval.

With all the Web 2.0 goodness out there and what The Economist is telling us you may be forgiven for thinking that it’d be trivial to equip a team of six with the tools needed to become TNBT*

Wrong.

Let’s start with the basic stuff (I’ll leave the best ’til last). We have a BT ADSL line which gives us an office phone too and we connect our Dell Lattitude D620s wirelessly to the web via a NetGear DG834GT.

We also installed an old Axis 2100 webcam (it runs Linux and is it’s own web server). As our BT ADSL line doesn’t give us a fixed IP address we used DynDNS dynamic DNS service to allow access from the web. Although the router works out of the box with DynDNS, port 80 didn’t seem to work so we’re using port 8000. It is supposedly possible to embed the feed into a page but after trying for what was too long I gave up and stuck with the native web page that the Axis provides.

For office apps we’re using, well, Office. After using Writely and EditGrid I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to use something else because of the time to get up to speed.

What about Google Apps, I hear? Well I did plump for (which recently got a nice look and feel overhaul) for e-mail and calendaring. Since I signed up Google has started offering Google Apps with phone support, 10Gb of email storage and a 99.9% uptime guarantee for $50 per user per year but I’d rather they sorted the Apps (specifically Gmail and Calendar) out first.

I suppose that the fact that these products are still in beta should be a warning for potential users. The calendar is far from complete with the inability to restrict the view to the hours in a working day being the first annoyance. It can also be clunky with appointments becoming unmovable without logging in and out again. The inability to scroll across days or to effectively print from the Agenda view are also usability defects. Then there is the Google Apps for Domains “feature” than prevents recreation of a deleted account for five working days (I wanted to change the way a name appeared in the address book).

Doh!

Speaking of address books, the shared address book only exists for users of the domain (i.e. external contacts cannot be added and shared).

We’re also using CentralDesktop as a collaboration tool. It out-wikis SocialText if you ask me and versions all documents automatically just like a wiki. It’s proved great for agreeing changes to documents - changes made by one person appear nearly instantly for anyone else viewing the document. As an added bonus EditGrid embedded spreadsheets appeared as a feature last week.

On the hosting front, I set up a Yahoo! Small Business Hosting account. For around £12 a month this gives you a domain (including registration), multiple blogs (WordPress or Movable Type) as well as access to MySQL and PHP. PHP was useful for being able to make the blog appear as the homepage, but utilising MySQL to collect ideas became problematic. Try as Stew might, he couldn’t get INSERT access to the database that he created. So, we decided to move to 1and1; and although the transfer was a bit scary (being right before we’re due to go a bit more public) it all worked very smoothly.

So what’s the message here? If your needs are really basic and you’re willing to put up with unfinished applications, then you can probably get away comfortably with Google Apps for Domains and a hosting service like Yahoo Small Business. However, if you need just one additional little thing, then you’re stuck and will need to resort to something more flexible (or just familiar).

Corporate IT departments have some time left still and if they’re smart they’ll be speaking to the likes of Google about what they’d need to do to make chosing their services a no-brainer.

So what’s been the best bit of kit we’ve used?

Without a doubt it’s been the stands for our laptops.

*The Next Big Thing

In searching for the ‘big online idea’ for us to work on, we have had to decide where to look and who to invite to submit their ideas. So, where do you start? Surely a net cast more widely will ensure a broader, better range of ideas. Or will it just ensure more of the same? A more targeted approach should ensure quality but who do you target? Who are the holders of great ideas? There is no clear answer to these questions. This is just one more challenge confronting us on this adventure.

And so, in the spirit of great adventuring we need to take a chance. We make a calculated guess informed by some known facts and fair hunches. If we apply the 1% rule, only a tiny proportion of those who see our ads or receive our emails will actually have an idea for the internet, and a smaller percentage still will take the time to submit it. We overlay this with the reality of the number of ideas we could manage to effectively sort through, and the type of ideas we think we might receive.

The result is a multi-pronged approach. Through email we are inviting ideas from:

• our global staff
• a random selection of clients globally
• Web 2.0 enthusiasts; the bloggers, journalists and thinkers who actively share their thoughts regularly online.

To further widen the search we will advertise for ideas on all our websites thereby targeting more clients, prospects and the public generally. In the more public domain, the invitation is expected to snowball and become a topic of conversation in the blogosphere, drawing those who have little or no affiliation with any of our businesses to consider submitting their ideas.

Closer to home, our team of six will also undertake our own research to ascertain what the big opportunities are, and where our efforts might prove most effective.

With each of these channels we hope that an increasingly broad net is spread to result in the right idea landing in our catch. Now, like all good fishermen, once the net is cast we need to sit back and wait.

It was Ludwig’s turn to plan an outing last week and he took us to see the Gilbert & George exhibition at the Tate Modern. A great choice and a nice place for us to step back and reflect.

I’ll spare you the art discussion and we spared ourselves, too. What was the first thing the team talked about after we had finished walking through the exhibition? No, not Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit but the Dell PDAs that were being used for the £3.50 guided tours (geeks). Dell has been a bit of a running theme through our first month and maybe I should post this comment on the Dell’s Ideastorm web site, but I’m pretty sure anyone who had been considering buying a PDA before taking the Tate tour is now putting money down for a Palm.

The Dell machine was slow. It was unresponsive. It was hard to tell if it was loading information or if it was in the midst of crashing. For some reason, the stylus wasn’t included with the PDA which made it difficult to touch the screen’s different menu items. I guess a lot of people have stolen the styluses but, still, it’s hard to tap the screen with your fingers. Stew took the stylus from his own PDA and said that the experience was much better. Surely they could have provided disposable styluses with the tour.

On the positive side, however, I thought the content included with the tour was fantastic (you can see some of this on the Tate web site). It contained the usual talkovers from the artists and the art critics and sometimes there were even short videos of G&G. When I saw Shitty from Shitty Naked Human World I immediately thought “What would an evangelical Christian think of that?” and, surprisingly, the tour had a short audio piece from the “Christian art critic” (although I thought it was too polite and diplomatic and, sadly, there were no comments from Muslim art critics). As a resident in Beijing, I was expecting the Roger Moore audio tour of the Forbidden City!

We talked a little about how that experience could have been improved. Surely, instead of having to type in the number of the room you are entering to start the tour for that space, the PDA should just deliver the content according to where you are standing or where you are heading to. It would have been great to have had comments or more information on every piece in the exhibition. It’s also not inconceivable that, in the near future, G&G will be walking alongside you and offering their comments or answering your questions when you have them.

We then finished the visit off by washing George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit down the slide.