I fully concur. We would have to work as a collective to keep out the "leeches" who wish only to benefit as an individual. While individual success is a wonderful thing, I'm looking for more of a group success style system.
Both individual and group succes styles can work and be accommodated as long as the group permits no leeches. The moment talented people begin sensing they are being taken they become withdrawn and their contributions are seriously stifled. Also besides knowledge it helps if there are other things a member can contribute in the blog arena. It's important every member has a sense of ownership which results in pride for the organization. Some sort of "stake". Those and many other topics are all for another forum though.
I very much agree with your thought process in this line. Here is what I have in mind... feedback appreciated. 1) 100% revenue from blog posts If and when we set up the revenue sharing system for Adsense, the blogger will get 100% of the revenue on pages they create. 2) 100% site access Apart from my hosting account, I would give each "trusted" member full access to EVERYTHING. This way everyone knows at all times what is going on in the backend and within the code. 3) Full participation in development If we're going to do this, we should do it right. I think all the original members should be as active as possible in discussing the devlopment of the site. What plugins do we use? What kind of theme will we install and modify? Who will work on which parts of the code? I'll pitch in some cash to get some graphic work done in the contest section here at DP, and each original member can also participate in those contests for input and feedback. The ultimate design and system would be accepted only when the full collective agrees to move forward with it. 4) Full ownership We could have a "who we are" page with profiles of the original founding members. This would eventually do wonders to boost our online presence and would list each of us as owners of the project. I would also entertain the idea of an "agreement document" of some sort stating that if one of the founding members was to bail that the other members can legally inherit the site. I'm not sure exactly how this would be worded, but this can come with much more discussion moving forward. ------------------ Now, bear in mind that not everyone who posts here will be accepted right away. I can see probably four members in this thread that I would be willing to work with in launching the full project. But once it's up and running we can open up an invite system that will allow us to expand within our forums and start getting to the original intent of this thread. Thoughts?
A group of writers put something like this together. We had a collaborative blog and a forum, but the forum was open to the public. It was Jenn's brainstorm and started off strong, but two of our writers disappeared before we even launched - I still have no idea what happened to them. Jenn kept it going, and has rolled the blog into one of her other writing blogs. My point? If you are going to include a collaborative blog, consider your structure. Will you be the main contributer? What happens if certain people start to flake - does it even matter? Will there be a pattern for updates so that everyone's post gets a certain amount of time in the spotlight? I like the forum idea for sure, but the collaborative blog gets a bit dicey. You might consider building a forum first and then, in privacy, () hammer out all the details of the blog. There are sure to be very different opinions on what is best - some of which won't be shared until after things have gotten rolling. Rebecca