20100716

Homework assignment

1. Come up with a mission statement for this site/tool
2. Come up with an ideal set of capabilities that our tool should offer—the underlying requirement for the system
3. Come up with a brief business/money generation scheme associate with the tool, that is, how do we make money? What is the Revenue aspect of the plan?

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model

• Mission statement:
• Capabilities of tool:
• Business generation:

trox

to be improved over time

• Mission statement:
  • Develop, implement and run a system (that includes f2f and online, synchronous and asynchronous elements) in order to
    • exchange experience about achieving sustainability at individual labs
    • add an international distribution mechanism to individual labs business models to make (the individual lab’s) own business international
    • leverage the network's capacities, making the skills and knowledge of individual labs (and eventually individual lab users) available globally as sources of knowledge and production
  • This system relates to the following points:
    • Industrial [r]evolution -- reinventing manufacturing, i.e. creating a "parallel universe" (albeit temporal) of digital (and personal or maybe: low-fi, or nearby) manufacturing complementing the global make industry.
    • Giving back relevance to "making".
    • Enable "people" to be makers again -- as an essential local resource in any community (resilience).
    • Linking up those making communities across the globe. -- Question: is this by self-declaration or by accreditation
• Capabilities of tool:
  • directory of capabilities, needs to be "certified" in some way (probably fab central style) -- on the level of labs and individuals
  • internal "ask for help" system which includes
    1. asking questions (including reward system, both in terms of money/micropayments and karma),
    2. commenting / clarifying questions,
    3. providing answers/solutions,
    4. discussion of answers/solutions,
    5. rating of answers and questions (which could be accumulated into a community wide "karma" system to supplement the accreditation mechanism)
    • such a system could be modeled based on http://www.starmind.com (I am in contact with ceo)
  • "sub-contracting" or "bidding" or "out-sourcing" or "tendering" system (public?)
• Business generation:
  • freemium model for directory entry
  • micro payments in "ask for help" system
  • tendering system might want to pay overheads to global network
  • long tail revenue system for local production of "(almost) anything"

--trox [at] fabfolk [.] com 21:38, 10 July 2010 (UTC) --trox [at] fabfolk [.] com 21:05, 18 July 2010 (UTC) --trox [at] fabfolk [.] com 18:37, 26 July 2010 (UTC)