Bringing the “social” to social networking

We as a user normally sit in the centre of our social networking universe.

Thtat leads us to a few problems:

• there is a huge amount of information, that come down onto us
• we have a various of social platforms, that takes plenty of time
• if we want to collaborate with others, we do not know, what he know

To be the head of our own universe and communicate with more or less digital friends and followers, always trying to bring some order to chaos doesn’t sounds a lot “social”.

What if we start some projects together? Fix some bikes, grill some vegetables or make a new app, in the “real” or “digital” social life?

As you can see, some of the main problems of todays social networking can be solved:

• The members can act as a filter, to filter all the waste of informations, that are not needed for the specific project
• new qualities, like “skills”, “time”, personal “knowledge” enter the stage
• and mainly a project it is about sharing, caring, communicating and interacting, which are essentials of our social being

Phoenix and cooperation

Probaply we again have to start right from the beginning.

But i feel our approach is still good.

Our goal is :

To create a tool, that use the huge potential of the internet, to connect people and share knowledge and datas, to enable people, plan, organize and accomplish projects (like collaboration-software)->BUT with an attractive, well conceived and first of all simple design, for the facebook-generation, with an subtile backround of actionism (social, ecological, political projects).

I think, beside the two “spheres” work world and private life more and more there will be a third: the social actionism (actual examples are urban farming, self-organizied bars, community supported agriculture etc.:

it’s an intersection, where you can share your professional skills and social atributes in an context of cooperation. This group would be my “target group”, because both in the private world and the business: egoism rules. And very often in groups, cooperations, organizations of “strangers with a good will”: true togetherness appears.

Let us create a cooperation tool.

on one’s own account:

my english is not the best. is there someone, who would like to revise my posts?

cooperation?

 

After 1 1/2 year of trying to develop this idea without money, now i come to a point, where i have to admire, that it is to extremlely difficult.

You either have to be a programer itself or have a bunch of dollars to rent one. All the unpaid helper and non-profit developers quit or got ill. Now I am alone again.

But:

A few weeks ago i got an offer of a businessman who is interested in my idea. Is it the right desision to shake hands?

You still remember my three priorities:

1. We want to realize our project. The best way!
2. If there is profit we would like to pay out our developers.
3. If there is a lot of profit we want to invest in social projects

Am i forced now, to give my idea away to people, who just have financial interest?

I don’t see another way to realize my project. In the last year, my trials failed, to develop open source and without investment capital.

If i would make a condition to keep the main creative input to form the program the best way, will he stick to it? Will the former helpers and developers get paid out fair? Would the businessman invest the profit into social projects?

We will see…

The doer, the thinker… and the mediator

In processes of social and political developement, you can say there are two main kinds of people:

the doer and the thinker

doers are mainly outside working. they don’t need a plan: they create something and afterwards they look at the result. they have a lot of ideas and are always on the move. they don’t like to sit in dark offices and hack into computers. they are affraid of statistics, calculations and long term plans.

thinkers need a structured and safe working condition. They don’t like to get dirty in a physical way. They like to be responsible for several things. They eye new ideas critical. They like to analyze processes. Before they do something, they are thinking, planing and doubting a long time.

Our vision is, to create a tool, which helps that two kinds, to get together. We beleave that they could be complementary. The doer needs a fast and intuitive way of sharing his current status of process. The thinker wants to have tools of planning, calculating and a plan structure.

The structure of mind map give both groups the possibility of a simple and intuitive structuring of processes. Different apps can make several calculating tools possible. Doers can share there stage of developement in an easy way. Thinkers can analyse the process and calculate the next step.

What apps can be used in our social media platform?

There are an unlimited variety of apps, that can be added in our platform.

The basic plugins of social networking as there are by facebook, twitter, rss-feed and some blog sites can be sure to be in the first version of our platform. this enhance the connectivity to other social media platforms.

Second are the tools of business and community collaboration like statistics, to-do-list, note, callendar, voice-chat etc.

Also the possibility of full-sharing datas, medias (like videos, photos etc.) and documents can be mentioned as a capital step to our connectivity-network. it could be realized in implementing other platforms like flickr,dropbox,skype,youtube and openoffice for documents. Maybe it will be possible, to edit documents live and online.

Another main function will be the creation of knowledge-databases to share with friends like wikipedia. The structure of mindmap can focus an easy and intuitive way to get into knowledge. Cooperations with platforms like wikipedia can be possible.

There are a millions of other possibilities. Feel invited to think of some 🙂

Small preview of the final tool!

You can see here a small preview of some of the functions of the final version:
create a bubble, insert an app and connect other bubbles to a network.
You can use the programm in your browser or as an app at your mobile device.

The preview was built by our Designer in order to show first ideas of design and functions to an interested audience.

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How it began

The idea began end of 2011. At this time i was thinking about a network of people who creat there own space but in real. That means they would have a little pice of land and can decide, what is built there. I planned with a community of a few hundred people. (see for that the project-page:http://socialvillage.lima-city.de (in German).  For that venture we needed a plattform, which integrate tools of organizational management, process developement and social networking. That kind of platform did not exist.

Our first idea about it was, that if we create a platform, it will be project-based not people-based like all the other plattforms.
That is because the focus in our network is an activity not the jabber of many people.

Second is, that in our village-project we need a lot of categories, like a business-category, a science-category, a main-category, a landscape-category etc. And this categories will hace some under-categories.
But at first, not we, but the people’s needs and acticitiys creates the categories, there are not fixed (they come and disapear with their need):

That reminds us to the structure of mindmap, which helps uncategorized notions to be organized in a system, that is very close to our way of thinking.
So we started to combine the social-network-idea with mindmap.

But the third step was, that we would need some advanced tools, like to-do-lists, chats, picture-sharing, vote-tools etc. to develop a usable working surface for a community who plan to develop a real village.-> The apps came into it. With that little tools, we have the opportunity to create simple programs in all kind of ways to solve mostly all problems of developing, organizing and deciding in a social community.

In the end we realized, that this is not just a tool for this projects, it could be the tool for a lot of social, private and economical projects, that need a good structure of communication and exchange of information in one plattform in a very intuitive and brain-friendly design.

Help us to create the great design!

I am very happy, that I can involve you into the developement of our project!

We made some suggestions for the raw design and if you want, you can vote and discuss our product.

It is also possible, if you have your own ideas, to share it with us, so finally we together find the best design!

Please vote for the best design and leave some comments with your ideas and wishes!
How important would it be for you to customize the design by yourself?

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