Cosmos Café [6/25/19] - The Next Ten Billion Years

[Douggins (Douglas Duff)]

@achronon

I would hone in on the “long-term” notion and say, “Let’s make it strategic ”. That is, why not take all our future-oriented thinking, apply it to the Café – or, better, the IC platform – and do a bit of strategic brain-storming. If anything comes of it, we have something to offer Marco and Caroline and all of the rest of us who would like to see the platform succeed. What I’m proposing is we conduct a real-live strategic workshop instead of just “talking”; that is, let’s do something concrete, practical, and potentially helpful.

@achronon

We know, for example, that it should be some kind of “business entity” that is, in some sensible meaning of the word, “sustainable” (i.e., it can survive on its own). We know that the “investors” (whoever they are and however they are conceived) “benefit” from their investment, and that the participants should be able to incorporate their own activities on that platform in a meaningful, and potentially “profitable” way: perhaps one earns units of some kind of crypto-currency, or authors can get published here and received something like royalties, or … you get the picture. The details of the vision can be fleshed out later, and it is obvious that the current “powers-that-be” are thinking along these lines. The details are, quite honestly spoken, irrelevant for the moment.

This proposal is exactly what @madrush and @care_save have been working on in the background, minus the stategic input and expertise (for lack of better word) from you Ed. And I would also say that said proposal has been brought forth to the foreground, though it easily becomes lost in the weeds on the forum. The multiple conversations that are occurring and have occurred, most recently and concretely through the Cosmosvision discussions, have directly addressed and fleshed out the various steps to your proposal, though I wouldn’t recommend watching these recordings, as they are mostly brainstorming sessions. As an extra pair of listening ears (participating in the Cosmovision discussions without much useful business savvy), I have noticed a divide between the business side of things and the more “playful” creative side. The “This Week in Cosmos” short recordings that I began three weeks ago intends to bridge our foreground perspective with this background work, though it is difficult to talk about this stuff in just a couple of minutes.

As @johnnydavis54 notes . . . this type of talk can be torture for some of us. But this type of talk has to happen. I think this proposal is just what is needed @achronon . . . your input Ed would be most helpful. Whatever is produced during this Cafe would be very useful and is exactly the type of feedback we need to make shifts happen. Perhaps you (and others) could attend this 7/4 Cosmovision session which would be a good time to share feedback directly to Marco and Caroline:

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/cosmovision-reboot-7-4/3315

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I will be around for the discussion today. If @Geoffreyjen_Edwards and @Michael_Stumpf can attend, great! They both have shared their thoughts around the business side of things. Looking forward to what you have in mind Ed.