_ In many different areas of our lives, we all develop notions of best practice. Thanks to our experiences day-to-day, we develop ideas about how our businesses, our communities and our country could run better.
We all catch ourselves, from time to time, saying “Well, If I was the boss...”.
Sometimes we are listened to, sometimes these ideas fall through the gaps.
The Greentape website will be a platform where everyone will be able to express their ideas to a wide and well-suited audience. It will promote the refining of ideas and, if they are sound, it will provide a platform for these ideas to gain maximum support, and for them to be properly heard by those people who can give them the green light. Essentially, it will be all about us having much more local and national democracy. The site will also include a component which will make sure we don’t just use this democracy to satisfy today's needs but also to achieve tomorrow's ideals.
The site will help make these things happen using two elements: 'The 'Home' Page, and the 'Blueprint' page.
We all catch ourselves, from time to time, saying “Well, If I was the boss...”.
Sometimes we are listened to, sometimes these ideas fall through the gaps.
The Greentape website will be a platform where everyone will be able to express their ideas to a wide and well-suited audience. It will promote the refining of ideas and, if they are sound, it will provide a platform for these ideas to gain maximum support, and for them to be properly heard by those people who can give them the green light. Essentially, it will be all about us having much more local and national democracy. The site will also include a component which will make sure we don’t just use this democracy to satisfy today's needs but also to achieve tomorrow's ideals.
The site will help make these things happen using two elements: 'The 'Home' Page, and the 'Blueprint' page.
Element A –The Home Page
(to explain this effectively we will follow an imaginary day-in-the-life of an idea on Greentape)
The Setting: On the Greentape website, everyone will have a personal home page (similar to facebook or other social networking sites) which, for the moment, we will call 'The Home Page'. It could look a little like this:
(to explain this effectively we will follow an imaginary day-in-the-life of an idea on Greentape)
The Setting: On the Greentape website, everyone will have a personal home page (similar to facebook or other social networking sites) which, for the moment, we will call 'The Home Page'. It could look a little like this:
The players: Little Ted, Jemima and Manu
Scene 1: Little Ted (LT) posts an idea and sends it to Jemima. It appears on the 'Personal Posts' section of LT's home page. On Jemima's page it appears at the top of her ‘Personal Posts’ section.
Now Jemima is the government's MP in charge of Trade. And the idea LT has sent her suggests that the government doesn’t go ahead with plans to sign a free-trade deal with The People's Republic of Jupiter (we said it was imaginary).
It is a very well-written post with some very solid arguments. But, initially, Jemima, for one reason or another, is happy to push on with her free-trade plans. She sends a 2-line generic reply to LT's idea which sadly doesn’t really address any of his points. This reply is attached to his post.
Fortunately though, as well as appearing on Jemima's home page, the idea also appears on the pages of a large collection of other users via two tools:
Scene 1: Little Ted (LT) posts an idea and sends it to Jemima. It appears on the 'Personal Posts' section of LT's home page. On Jemima's page it appears at the top of her ‘Personal Posts’ section.
Now Jemima is the government's MP in charge of Trade. And the idea LT has sent her suggests that the government doesn’t go ahead with plans to sign a free-trade deal with The People's Republic of Jupiter (we said it was imaginary).
It is a very well-written post with some very solid arguments. But, initially, Jemima, for one reason or another, is happy to push on with her free-trade plans. She sends a 2-line generic reply to LT's idea which sadly doesn’t really address any of his points. This reply is attached to his post.
Fortunately though, as well as appearing on Jemima's home page, the idea also appears on the pages of a large collection of other users via two tools:
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Now, you would be forgiven for thinking
there would be great potential for members' in-boxes to get inundated
with a truckload of posts very quickly using these two distribution
methods. And you would be right, but there are ways around this,
and we will get to that very soon.
Scene 2: For the moment, lets find ourselves with Manu who has discovered LT's post. Attached to the post are boxes which allow her to comment and/or to agree with LT's idea. As a result of LT's strong case and Jemima's lacklustre attempt to justify hers, Manu decides to agree with LT's suggestion and clicks the 'Agree' box.
Fast forward a couple of hours – Jemima returns to her desk after lunch to find that 8000 people have agreed with LT's idea.
What does she do now? Can she ignore the issue? Probably not a good idea for a number of reasons. The first being that the more 'Agrees' or comments a post gets, the more chance it has of it being pushed to the top of the Gallery section of everyone's page.
Fast forward a couple of hours – Jemima returns to her desk after lunch to find that 8000 people have agreed with LT's idea.
What does she do now? Can she ignore the issue? Probably not a good idea for a number of reasons. The first being that the more 'Agrees' or comments a post gets, the more chance it has of it being pushed to the top of the Gallery section of everyone's page.
Now this is the function that was alluded to a couple of paragraphs earlier, when we talked about managing truckloads of posts. Yes, each inbox will potentially get a lot of posts. However, the order they all sit in each person's box will depend on formulas which, in the case of the Gallery box, takes into consideration:
So, in Manu's case, ideas in her Gallery box that have gained many Agrees, or comments, or that relate closely to her particular interests or location are pushed up the list. And inversely ,posts that don't satisfy these parameters as much will be pushed way down the list, meaning she will probably never be bothered by them.
- when the post was made
- how much its contents relate to each member's interests and location
- how many Agrees or comments a post has received
So, in Manu's case, ideas in her Gallery box that have gained many Agrees, or comments, or that relate closely to her particular interests or location are pushed up the list. And inversely ,posts that don't satisfy these parameters as much will be pushed way down the list, meaning she will probably never be bothered by them.
(...back to LT and co.) - So, with 8000 agrees, LT's idea has pushed itself way up to the top of most people's Gallery list and Jemima now realises the potentially career-damaging outcome of every Greentape user in the country being exposed to LT's idea, her feeble response, and the fact that 8000 (and growing) people agree with him and not her.
Therefore, she has two choices:
Therefore, she has two choices:
- either add a second, more elequent, response to the Post in the hope of bringing people around to her way of thinking (and bringing down the amount of agrees)...or...
- admitting that the free-trade plan is ‘not air-tight’ (or some political-speak to that effect) and making that difficult call to Jupiter.
Element B –The Blueprint page
The Greentape website will also include an additional feature designed around a unique and cunning idea.
As individuals, organisations, communities, and countries we are all connected and we all rely on each other, very much like an ecosystem. Therefore, to maintain our own health we must consider the health of everything else around us. And the more we balance the now with considerations of the future, the more sustainable and successful our world becomes.
The Greentape website will also include an additional feature designed around a unique and cunning idea.
As individuals, organisations, communities, and countries we are all connected and we all rely on each other, very much like an ecosystem. Therefore, to maintain our own health we must consider the health of everything else around us. And the more we balance the now with considerations of the future, the more sustainable and successful our world becomes.
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With these in mind, every Greentape user will have a page (lets call it the 'Blueprint' at this stage) on which they will be encouraged to create a diagrammatic outline of how they would ideally envisage the world developing in the long-term.
It is imagined that each person's Blueprint would be laid out in relation to a time-line (stretching however many years/decades/centuries the user could project their vision) and each user would consider how they would like to see society work together as a whole, and how it would progress from the present day into that distant future.
The user could make the plan as simple or as detailed, and as big or compact, as they like. It could be constructed from thoughts they or other people have already posted on Greentape or new ideas. And, as a result of a mind-map/diagram-making application built into this feature, users would be able to grow their plan part-by-part as they feel inclined, displaying how their ideas relate in terms of time and topic, in an easy-to-understand way.
(An artist's impression of a blueprint page)
Now, there are some great benefits that come with this fun little feature. Firstly, to have an outline like this sitting in the wings is a very nice reminder of what is worth your effort (i.e. so you don't get caught up in the small stuff). In the same way, it would be a good tool to help you ascertain whether any posted argument you are making on Greentape is well thought-out (taking your ideal vision into consideration), or whether it has overly self-centred and short-sighted motivations. Similarly, looking at another person's Blueprint would be very helpful in gauging whether one of their posts also has considerate, well thought-out, roots.
Essentially, the Home page posting system and the Blueprint page will both be the perfect compliment to each other. The Blueprint will be a great companion to the posting system in that it will support posts with big picture ideals. And conversely, one could look at the posting system as a great companion to a person's Blueprint as it would provide a way of cleverly distributing ideas constructed in the Blueprint.
Scene 3 - Returning to LT and his idea – at least part of the reason he received 8000+ Agrees is because he included in his argument a link to part of his Blueprint which illustrates effectively, as part of a long-term strategy, how protectionist trade policies would be beneficial to the country, and the globe.
This link has another positive effect. Hundreds of people, including Manu, after being introduced to LT's Blueprint, modify theirs accordingly in places where they decide his is better thought-out and thorough, giving them a stronger plan to work with going forward. And for the record – Jemima, in relation to protectionist trade strategies, modifies hers accordingly too (cue the fairytale music).
This link has another positive effect. Hundreds of people, including Manu, after being introduced to LT's Blueprint, modify theirs accordingly in places where they decide his is better thought-out and thorough, giving them a stronger plan to work with going forward. And for the record – Jemima, in relation to protectionist trade strategies, modifies hers accordingly too (cue the fairytale music).