During the course of Project Red Stripe we have come to realise that assessment, reassessment and change are natural parts of the innovation process. As part of this process – and with some regret – we have decided that we had to move on from Lughenjo.

We went public with Lughenjo four weeks ago, primarily to test our idea on a wider audience. Since then we have continued our conversations with social entrepreneurs and NGOs and worked on producing a business plan.

The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly that Lughenjo was a good thing for us to do. There were, however, two problems. Firstly it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do. Secondly, and more importantly, it became clear that there was not an immediate demand for a knowledge network from NGOs and social entrepreneurs.

The upshot was that we would have had to force the creation of the network from a demand point of view as well as marketing it to potential donors. This would have put a barrier in the way of us being able to grow the community quickly and therefore monetising it. And the one thing that pretty much all the people in the NGO community that we spoke to said, was that they expected us to run Lughenjo as a profitable business, because that would be our motivation to stick with it.

Lughenjo had already gone through several iterations before being made public, each time being refined into a simpler proposition. It had its roots in us wanting to make a ‘major difference’ and originally deciding to help achieve one of the UN’s millennium development goals – that of universal primary education by 2015. The idea that we came up with was to create a platform for digital donations with a novel map interface. It then became a skills exchange to help achieve universal primary education, before ultimately seeing the light of day as Lughenjo, aimed at helping anyone working on projects involving international development.

With Lughenjo we had always thought that after philanthropy we would be able to roll out other “verticals” that would be of value to The Economist Group’s high-end audience, but we hadn’t focused on that wider goal. The feedback that we got made us see the need to put the wider goal of a knowledge network at the front of our idea.

Maybe think of it as a for the Economist Group’s audience (let’s call it HiSpace).

For it to be engaging for a time-poor audience, it would need to deliver something that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere. Maybe a starting point would be to allow members to engage with each other to create knowledge repositories like a deeper, more targeted or Naver (the answers site that ranks above Google in South Korea) within closed or self-selecting groups of members.

You can see how the relationship between a HiSpace site and its members would be substantially different to that enjoyed by most readers of mainstream media – not only would members of HiSpace consume information but they would also be the principal generators of such information. Certainly the ability to manage this “3D journalism” will become increasingly important for mainstream media companies.

So, what’s next?

Well, Project Red Stripe ends on 27th July. Going forward, though, I will explore the issues around starting a HiSpace with the intention of coming up with what the next steps should be in November.

So, as Project Red Stripe ends, we hope that our legacy will be felt both in HiSpace, and in The Economist Group continuing to encourage this kind of innovation. We also hope to publish some feedback on what has and hasn’t worked for us during the process, as a practical guide for you to follow or dissect and to tell you how, with “So many good ideas to review! So little time!“, we came up with HiSpace.

Last, but not least we want to thank you for your ideas, feedback and support over the last six months, especially those of you in the NGO and social entrepreneur community who have given us your valuable time.

Farewell and maybe see you in HiSpace soon.

By now if you submitted an idea to us you should have received your six months subscription to Economist.com.

We wish you happy reading and thank-you once again for taking the time to put together so many well thought out ideas.

With hindsight getting your permission to publish all the ideas on the site certainly had merits - it would have been great to get comments, builds, bombs, sun and rain for them - but equally we were pretty time-poor.
Still, there is always the potential son-of-Project Red Stripe!

After four and a half months of sweat and toil we are pleased to announce our idea:

We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

So how does it work?

In a nutshell, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charities and other organisations - as well as entrepreneurs active in developing countries - will be able to post tasks on Lughenjo asking for help in solving problems. Qualified individuals can then provide such help by donating their knowledge and skills. By connecting these two groups Lughenjo will create a marketplace for good and a new channel for skills and knowledge transfer.

So what difference can it make? We can’t help but think that if we allow The Economist Group’s community to give their time and expertise online - quickly and easily - then something great will happen. Initially we’ll start small. Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organisations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.

The key will be what happens later, when tasks become more complex. Imagine a CEO examining a business plan for a developing world social enterprise. Or when one of the 450 000 finance and accounting professionals of CFO and Economist.com can look over the books of an NGO in Nairobi. The possibilities are endless. What’s more, by allowing skilled, smart, professionals to help development organisations, they will help solve development problems with market-based solutions.

But what’s the business model? Lughenjo will be a social business enterprise. A business that does good, and returns a profit. To do this we’ll do what media companies do best and put ads in front of eyeballs.

Time for questions

There are many questions, which we have thought long and hard over. Does the world need another volunteer-matching site? Will time-poor professionals donate their time? Do NGOs and other organisations actually need such a site? Can you make money on the back of charity?

In the next few weeks we’ll be dealing with these issues on our blog (starting with the question of making money from philanthopy, below) and at the same time putting together a great pitch for the Group’s management team.

So there it is. We’d love to get your feedback on the idea - feel free to post a comment.

And if you work at an NGO or are a social entrepreneur who would use Lughenjo for getting help, then please e-mail us on:

When you receive a generous gift, you don’t usually turn around and sell it.

So why, then, would we want to make money from a website on which people are supposed to donate their time to solve development problems? Such an approach, one might argue, is bound to fail because volunteers would feel taken advantage of. This “smacks of cynical exploitation and a values clash”, was an initial reaction of one of my Economist colleagues.

You can be sure that we have had more than one heated debate about this question. Initially, we wanted Lughenjo to be not-for-profit, with revenues to finance the programme coming from The Economist Group as well as long-term sponsors and grants.

Yet this would have been an all too easy way out, not very innovative – and would likely have led us into a dead end. A business model mainly based on the financial support of others has serious drawbacks that would limit Lughenjo’s growth and sustainability. For starters, sponsors and grant givers may jump ship if their priorities and thinking change. At The Economist Group, for instance, many think that shareholder money should not be spent on charitable causes: if shareholders want to do good, they can do it themselves.

What is more, not-for-profits often don’t raise enough funds, and thus cannot fully achieve their mission. Witness the several interesting online volunteering sites such as OnlineVolunteering, run by the UN, and Nabuur, a Dutch site. Although they have pioneered international online volunteering, both have problems getting real traction.

Most importantly, by making its brand and readers available to the site, The Economist Group will be taking a considerable risk, which should be compensated. This will give the Group a strong interest in making Lughenjo a success – which, in turn, will help achieve the site’s mission.

We are not the only ones who have begun to rethink the divide between profit and social goal. There is a growing “social enterprise” movement. One of its leaders is Muhammad Yunus, who – along with the Grameen Bank he founded – won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social benefit from below, notably by pioneering microcredits. He is now promoting another idea that he calls “social business enterprise”. This is an enterprise that has an overarching social goal, but is run like a business – which can include making a profit.

“Once a social entrepreneur operates at 100% or beyond the cost recovery point he has entered the business world with limitless possibilities”, Yunus writes in an article on Grameen Bank’s website. “This is a moment worth celebrating. He has over-come the gravitational force of financial dependence and now is ready for space flight! This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. He has moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business.”

Grameen Bank itself is the best example so far. Although it lends small sums of money mostly to poor women, it is a for-profit company. In 2006, in made a profit of $20m (which was transferred to a local not-for-profit created to cope with disaster situations – to exempt Grameen Bank from paying corporate income tax). Recently, Yunus launched another social enterprise – a yogurt factory. Built by the French food company Danone, it produces fortified yogurt at an affordable price. Profits will be reinvested, with Danone getting back its initial cost of capital. If the setup is a success, the new company intends to build dozens of such factories.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and son of the prominent federal appellate judge Richard Posner, has recently co-published a paper making the case for “for-profit charities”. If there currently are hardly any, he argues, it’s because tax benefits are linked to not-for-profits.

The internet has already given birth to a number of pro bono/for-profit hybrids, notably open-source software communities, such as the one that gave birth to Linux, the computer operating system. It is developed by volunteers across the world, but it is accepted that for-profit companies make money off it by selling services and other add-on products as long as they also contribute to the community and “don’t do evil”, to quote Google’s corporate mantra. (By the way: , the online giant’s philanthropic arm, is a “for-profit charity” because this gives it more flexibility.)

In digital philanthropy (meaning websites that allow people to make donations, be they money or time), too, one can also find a few hybrids. GlobalGiving, for instance, a sort of eBay for international philanthropy, that matches donors to projects in developing countries, cooperates with a for-profit partner, which also pays the CEO’s salary. JustGiving, a UK-based private company that enables charities to raise money online, take a slice of the tax refund. And if discussions on SocialEdge, a website for social entrepreneurs, is any guide, there is much interest among charities and NGOs in going “hybrid”.

It is easy to dismiss these efforts as vain attempts to mix oil with water. And admittedly, with Lughenjo, we’re pushing the idea further, by not reinvesting the profit. But we strongly believe that all these examples are just the beginning of a larger trend that will spawn many hybrid organisations that will both do good AND make money. Just as the internet has enabled new business models in the for-profit space, it can do so for charitable organisations. And we hope that Lughenjo will become one of the foremost examples.

I’m sure you’re all thinking ‘Hey Project Red Stripe, why the silence?’. To tell you the truth we wrestled a bit (not literally) before we stopped writing our blog. At the time we certainly believed that - as Ludwig said in his blog post -‘going public now would almost certainly kill our idea’. Going under the radar has allowed us to investigate a sector which is totally out of the Economist Group’s remit. We thought our business model was so different we’d instantly receive thunderbolts from on high.

Why? Because we wanted to start a not-for-profit. Then, imagine if our pitch hadn’t worked and we had to kill the site. It would have been embarassing for The Economist, we thought. This is slightly a case of bigcompany-itis - not wanting to try something new because we might look stupid. Going silent gave us time to work on the idea, making it rock solid before presenting it. We needed this time to concoct a business case for having a not-for-profit because The Economist Group - and The Economist itself - is sceptical of corporate social responsibility, reasoning, not unfairly, that shareholders can decide themselves how to spend their own money charitably.

Working under cover has given us advantages. It has meant we could engage potential stakeholders and partners without having to manage a community. It has meant we could change our direction a lot, without having to explain our about turns. We have been free to switch from a not-for-profit model to being a social enterprise, without worrying about loss of face.

Conversely, it would have been interesting to have tried to do this in the open. Instead of having to research our ideas from scratch, we could have asked for pointers from our community. Instead of having to find key partners, they could have been suggested to us. As opposed to having to torturously work out whether you can make money from doing good, we would have heard from a social entrepreneur.

Once we decided that our business could do good, without being a not-for-profit, then the only reason we would keep quiet was if someone pinched our idea. That’s a risk we are willing to take because our key asset in this is something that is unique to The Economist Group and that is our community and our content.

All I will say about the idea is that I am very, very, very excited about it indeed.

Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.

The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.

What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.

The eighth (and last) in the series on the ideas we received

“C’mon, this is obvious. Social networking site for subscribers to The Economist”, writes Vinay Gupta, in response to our invitation for idea submissions. Yet even though social networks are all the rage online, we did not receive many submissions suggesting we take this route. One has to wonder why.

Perhaps it is because The Economist Group’s various businesses are primarily regarded as old-style “mainstream media”. Nonetheless it is clear that a sense of community, of shared interest and passion for this “newspaper” does already exist amongst Economist readers. How often is it that a faint smile of recognition or camaraderie sneaks across your face when you, as an Economist reader, see a fellow commuter reading The Economist on the morning train on the way to work? Surely this sense of shared values could be readily built upon within the online environment.

What, then, would an Economist social network look like? It makes sense to start by defining social networking and giving a few examples of existing sites. Offline the term refers to “a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as financial exchange, friendship, hate…”, to quote Wikipedia. Online, it is pretty much the same thing, with the interaction is mostly driven by commenting on and sharing photos, music, videos and blogs.

The “purest” examples of the social networking site are the likes of MySpace and . They attract huge numbers of users: MySpace is the third, Facebook the sixth-most popular site in the US, with 106m and 18m members respectively (for more information see this recent study by Jupiter Research). These sites are open to anyone to join. They allow users to set up a personal profile and then allow the user to tap into an existing network within the service, further expanding personal connections by interacting with others profiled on the site.

Then there are business-oriented social networks, most notably . Billed as “a place to find and leverage professional opportunities”, it is essentially a contact network and mainly used to find or to list jobs. Users in search of a new position, for instance, usually update their resumee and check whether any of their existing contacts could introduce them to a company’s hiring manager. In contrast to MySpace and Facebook, however, there are rules of engagement. Contacting another user requires either a pre-existing relationship or the intervention of a third user who is already linked to the previous two. Such an arrangement is intended to build trust among the service’s users.

Still, even in the case of LinkedIn with its 9m members, the question arises as to how effective and sustainable a community of this size can be (many users, for instance, are just lurkers - see chart above). It is for this reason that I, like some others, believe the future of social networking sites will belong to niche networks. The “space” (web speak for “market”) seems to be moving in this direction: sites that let users build their own network (such as Ning), have a local focus (Tribe, which was recently acquired by Cisco) and are established around more specific areas of interest (snowvision.com) are gaining momentum.

Yet the best example for an exclusive social network is aSmallWorld, an invitation-only community for the global jetset. It was founded by Erik Wachtmeister, a former investment banker and the son of a Swedish ambassador to the US, who saw the need for connecting a very affluent community of international jet setters. It is purported to include and Ivana Trump in its membership.

To the nearly 130,000 members of aSW, as they call it, the site is mostly a social channel. They use it to hook up with fellow members when visiting a new city, ask what social events or venues to look out for, as well as making their luxury holiday homes available to peers. Think of this network as an online version of the high-end crowd you would expect to gather in places such as Saint Tropez or Monaco.

Predictably, aSW’s rules of engagement strongly illustrate one of the key challenges of social networks: ensuring a suitable interaction between members. To keep the mob out, invitations can only be issued by certain key members of the community (in fact, if the person you invited misbehaves, this will refelect badly on you: “We expect members to be accountable for people they invite into aSmallWorld”, it says in the site’s FAQ’s).

There are plenty of rules the violation of which can make you end up in “aBigWorld”, an online penetentary of sorts: inappropriate language in one of the discussion forums, virtual pestering and if too many of your invitations to fellow members to join your network of friends get rejected or ignored (even in this exclusive online world, trying to get too close to Paris Hilton will get you in trouble). Anyone annoyed by another member can click on one of the omnipresent “abuse” buttons.

“What actions can a webmaster implement to sort out a troublemaker?
The webmasters’ powers are impressive and ubiquitous. But so too are their compassion and understanding. Webmasters can send a warning to a member, clip privileges to invite new members or connect with other members, clip the ability to participate in the forum, send to exile in aBigWorld, or terminate a member’s account.”

(from the aSmallWorld FAQs)

An Economist social network could certainly do without such Orwellian rules. Still, the model I envisage would be closer to aSW than MySpace, FaceBook or even LinkedIn. The Economist, because of its issue-focused and critical content is already a platform of common interest for its readers. As “Free Exchange” (a blog on Economist.com) and “Inbox” (where all letters to the editor are published, except for the abusive ones, that is) demonstrate, there is much potential for lively interaction between Economist readers.

Yet interesting debates are only one type of “content” that a community of readers could “generate” (to stick with the trade’s terminology). Like aSW, an Economist social network could allow readers to hook up, be it online or offline (during the next trip to San Francisco, for instance), as well as helping each other find the best hotels and restaurants (think of user-generated Economist Cities Guides). Members could even help Economist journalists do research (like Assignment Zero, an experiment in pro-am journalism), or use the network as platform to mobilize for action on offline projects and issues (after all, the Economist was founded 1843 in opposition to the protectionist Corn Laws).

So a social network for Economist subscribers is indeed quite obvious. Perhaps even so obvious that it would not be very innovative for Project Red Stripe to create one – since The Economist is likely to soon start integrating all kinds of community features in its website anyway.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to social networks.)

Patrick Tullmann drew my attention to zefrank.com. I guess this is what happens when you live in China and your bandwith is not that great - you miss out on something where you thought, “hey, how come I’m just finding out about this now?”. I remember when the ideas starting coming in that I spent quite some time looking at Ze’s web site and thinking that ‘he’s got it’ - in fact, since then, his site is probably sitting in the back of my mind when we discuss, as a group, issues and questions about the future, such as “Will individuals will be able to make money from their blogs?”.

For those of you who are willing to watch, here’s a 20-minute, highly entertaining and very informative speech from Ze. It provides great background information about him and his accomplishments.

Pat was drawing my attention to The Show, Ze’s year-long experiment in video which ended earlier this year. A great description of the project can be found in the but to quote from the story:

{Ze} built his website (zefrank.com) into a playground for interactive Internet projects, while exploring these ideas as a speaker, university instructor and consultant. Curious to see if his ideas about online video held water, he enrolled himself in improv classes, and started The Show as a year-long experiment.

Pat elaborates on this idea further and how it might relate to The Economist.

Ze’s show accepts both content and direction from the users, but every show has a strong and clear direction provided by Ze (it is very clearly his show, even though viewers have provided intros, ideas, songs, video and stills). He posits ideas and directions, asks for input and material, and combines the results into something that is most likely not exactly what he expected, but generally something stronger and larger. But still imprinted with his style. Similarly, the strong and consistent presence of the current editorial board of the Economist and its journalists would provide the same consistent and open slant on the news that the Economist has always had.

There are some interesting things about The Show. This Business Week article points out that Ze had signed a deal with Rewer Video to have his videos hosted on their web site in return for revenue share. I’m not sure if he has changed partners to Blip but regardless, you won’t find The Show on . This means he can share ad revenue with Blip when people look at his archive of videos. What I also like is that he uses video to encourage experiments and generate ideas. He doesn’t create a page that might be a ‘call to action’. You don’t read a manifesto. You watch a video and then you act. And Ze’s sports racers have acted. You can see a list of completed projects on Ze’s wiki. You can also see current projects which are active on the ORG (need to register).

It would be great to use The Economist’s platform in a similar way to launch ‘experiments’. It would be great to have The Economist also think beyond print. As we discuss and debate some of the ideas which have come in and some that we had come to the table with already, we increasingly start to ask about how can we get The Economist’s audience more involved. While The Economist might not be designing our German kid a t-shirt, I could see Economist sports racers writing their own play.

The sixth in a series on the ideas we received

We’ve been well impressed with the ideas that we have received. While many people sent in short ‘thoughts’, others made a great effort to write clear and concise descriptions of their ideas. Again, we felt that there would be many Web 2.0 ideas submitted and we did get a fair number of ideas about comments, mash-ups and tagging.

Augmento (an internet alias) felt that many people discuss Economist articles and in other discussion forums and that by not allowing our readers to comment on articles we are losing our community and potential ad dollars. Yes, we don’t have comments on our articles on Economist.com but I would point Augmento in the direction of Democracy in America and Free Exchange where we are engaging readers in discussion.

Andy Morrall suggests that we could collate comments/letters to the editor into a digest which could then be published as its own article. Andy suggests one topic which would have benefited from a digest of letters to the editor: our article about Bush and Kyoto.

Lee Mauger wrote in to suggest that we partner with to “provide Economist analysis within the Google Earth environment”. Lee suggests that this economic and political analysis would work well with traditional travel guides about countries and cities. Having been seconded from the Economist Intelligence Unit, I’m a big believer in this idea. I must admit that I always bring along the most recent Country Report (or, for Viewswire subscribers, the one-click report) anytime I am visiting a new place. Okay, at US$525/country report, it’s slightly more expensive than your average travel guide but perhaps the EIU could offer a product which would work with Google Earth. The EIU covers 200 countries so you would be hard pressed to find an area of the world that we don’t cover. Presenting information from the EIU and The Economist in a visual mash-up with Google Earth is a very tempting idea.

One reader, who describes himself as a “former political staffer”, wrote in to suggest that we “let interest groups and ordinary citizens mark up legislation before it goes to the floor of Congress”. I can see this idea working wiki-style and being applied to legislation in any country, and perhaps other important documents like trade agreements, , and strongly-worded documents. It also fits in very nicely with two lesser known brands of The Economist Group: European Voice and Roll Call. Victor Kostyuk wrote it to suggest that we “take the informativeness of Wikipedia, social organization of , comment rating systems of Slashdot and , and mix it all with an overarching flexibility to add meta-content of one’s choice to every piece of the world wide web”. I’m using Firefox which enables me to that have been posted about particular web pages on different blogs. If you have the plug-in and are using Firefox, if you click on the link above for manifestos (or even for the Firefox site itself) you’ll find that there are numerous comments related to the content on that page.

And finally, Bob suggests that we link human and machine resources to The Economist. The Economist already brings readers together for conferences and through our own , Corporate Network. But we certainly don’t tap the unused cycles of readers’ computers. Bob reminds us that we “should not underestimate trust that subscribers have in The Economist”. In return for tapping users’ computers, Bob suggests that The Economist would allow early access to its research and stories for those who are part of the network. Not a bad business model but, as Bob reminds us, “your lawyers will have to work out liability”.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to comments, mash-ups and tagging.)

The fifth in a series on the ideas we received

“Wiki” got the largest label on our idea submission form, which has now simply changed to be a “tag cloud” of the idea categories submitted. For those out of the loop a tag cloud typically gives the largest text to the most popular terms in the “cloud”.

A “wiki” is a website that allows anyone (with permission) to edit any page and to add new pages. Wikipedia

Submissions included wikis for breaking news, education and encyclopaedias of economics and democracy. They suggest turning some of The Economist books such as the Style Guide into a wiki. Steven previously mentioned this in his post “Stylin’”

The site would be part encyclopedia and part “handbook of economics” Will Ambrosin, idea submitter and all round good guy.

He goes on to mention

The site would be a wiki, i.e. open authoring, but some of the more recent ideas about quality control in that environment would be incorporated.

Kevin Chuang wants us to build.

The first and ONLY citable wiki resource for breaking news and current business developments.

In general the consensus, from our idea submitters, is that the conventional wiki needs to be improved with some form of moderation. Some of the people behind Wikipedia have left the Wikipedia foundation to build Citizendium, which coincidentally opened on March 25th. Citizendium describes itself as a “project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, [that] aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.”

In addition, it’s my opinion that Wikipedia is hard to use. The “anyone can edit” phrase that appears on the front page is a bit naff. Why? Because you have to learn a non-trivial markup language to be able to correctly format your entries. They didn’t even use HTML, which has to be the most widespread mark up language available that people have a basic understanding of. Rich text editing is clearly something wikis should embrace. I think the idea of a editable encyclopaedia is a great one and it should be easy to add to.

Moderation could go a myriad of ways. I come from a software development background and could suggest a fairly simple model for moderation. In software projects, and this is simplified, you have a development environment, a test environment and then a live environment. To apply that to wikis you could firstly make changes to the development environment, then have someone moderate them slightly later on the test environment and finally promote them to the live environment when moderators are happy. This doesn’t address fact-checking but it could address the issue of children seeing objectionable content. A simple point-in-time snapshot approach could work with moderators only checking pages that have changed since the snapshot. Books can be written like this and, in fact, are. The O’Reilly “Version Control with Subversion” book is written online in this fashion. This is not exactly a wiki but it shows you can release moderated versions of things on the web. Please tell me how ridiculously flawed this idea is.

Some idea contributors want revenue to be shared with the creators of content. Personally I find that intriguing. Challenges could lie here in deciding what is a payable contribution. Should someone get paid if the facts are wrong, how about if you fix spelling or grammar errors? If an article gets rewritten based on the existing content how do you split the cash? Is it fair to equally compensate all contributors? If so, would you get people using the long tail and being serial grammar and spelling mistake changers to earn payments from multiple pages? If we launch a wiki and it does share revenue, if it makes any, how should it pay moderators?
Even if a moderator has not made changes to a page, they have contributed time by checking the page. Editors get paid at traditional publications, and if wikis start paying where do you draw the line? This is a critical question in truly open and editable wikis. Who and how to pay is a tough cookie. I can’t see it working without a trusted moderator figuring out the percentages. How would people who earn money from their content feel about the content changing and the money disappearing?

“Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis, it’s kind of the Wild West.” Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki

The contributors at wikiHow don’t seem to mind that they don’t get paid. wikiHow serves ads alongside their content and I don’t see contributors asking for payment. Those seeking payment have probably already left, in fact just googling for comments I can find disgruntled people. Then again, take any product on the planet and I think you’ll find someone moaning about it on the web. Perhaps earning revenue will keep new people away from contributing to wikiHow; they’ll take their content and efforts to wikipedia and then probably donate to wikipedia to keep their content alive.

At a first glance this looks like biting your nose off to spite your face as you may part with cash to help wikipedia run but wouldn’t contribute to a commercial wiki. However I can see why people might think like it.

I personally think that education, especially for children, is a good area to look at. You could really test the waters of moderation there as you just can’t risk children seeing objectionable content. Perhaps we could get teachers, and other clever people, to write up articles, follow curriculums and help educate children in new ways.

A wiki is essentially a collaborative space. These things have been around for a long time. Be it as cave drawings or graffiti. So online wikis are, relatively speaking, nothing new. Graffiti artists, or contributors, have even figured out a moderation system of their own. They are often aware of other artist’s credibility and would think twice before overwriting a respected artist’s content. They have a strong incentive to follow the moderation system because of real world repercussions.

Please tell me how you would handle payment and moderation, and whether I’ve missed any points on the problems for future wikis.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to wikis.)