Community Meritocracy, Dan Mezick, boundary objects

This note describes the proposed system of "vote per ticket" (VPT) in which participants purchase tickets and attend events, and in so doing intentionally support organizers in the ecosystem that are delivering the most value at that point in time. The model can be used in any market where a large number of user groups exist, such as Boston.

The system supports and encourages a diversity of user group organizers who self organize around each other's events. With VPT all the user group organizations are incented to cooperate while continuously delivering real value to the attending community-at-large. Value here is defined as extremely high-quality, extremely low-cost events that people are actually willing to pay for.

Event organizers in a community are encouraged by the VPT system to focus on the attending public and serve them. The attending public funnels rewards via VPT to the consistent producers of the perceived highest value. This self-reinforcing system encourages more and more value creation for the entire community. The system facilitates community wide collaboration, customer value and overall community growth.

Vote-Per-Ticket Explained

Vote-Per-Ticket (VPT) is a system of continuous economic feedback at the community level based on a 'special offer' or 'discount' code that identifies a purchase with a specific group, via a code. Purchasers use the code at purchase-time to self-identify with one specific group. Thus, "Vote Per Ticket".

For example, BROWNPAPERTICKETS.COM provides an online ticketing service. This service allows the operator to define a code that the purchaser can enter at purchase time. For example as an event promoter selling tickets, I can define the codes 'PMI', ("PMI"), 'ABZ' (for Agile Bazaar) , 'SPIN', "(Software Process Improvement Network") and the like. In this example, each code represents a user group in Boston that sends purchasers over to buy a ticket for Agile Boston's XYZ event.

For people in the community that attend events, the proces sis simple: get online, buy an event ticket, and specify a code. That code tags that ticket purchase and associates it with a user group or organization. Presumably this organization is bringing the event to it's membership, but is not the organizer per se.

VPT is a mechanism designed with specific objectives: It is optimized on:

1. Event quantity and variety
2. High attendance
3. Continuous feedback from attendees/group members
4. Responsiveness on the part of organizers
5. Maturity of community's knowledge level (domain understanding of Lean/agile/Scrum)
6. Growth in community numbers

Example

Say it costs $100 to buy a ticket to the XYZ event. The rule is that 25% of the cost goes to the group that sent the ticket buyer indicated at purchase-time. Thus the ticket purchase is a fund-raiser for the organization associated with the purchaser's indicated sign-up code. If we run an event that costs $100, then $25 goes back to the originating user group leaving $75 for the promoter (us) for each ticket sold.

Everyone running events operates the same way. In an ideal world, if any group is running an event, the group with a big list and very loyal supporters always gets a nice payoff from ANY community event that people pay to attend. VPT incents every group to promote every other group's events; rewards the groups that deliver the most value with ongoing material support, and puts the ticket purchaser in charge of the feedback process.

VPT is a "short account" (ie, "continuous") capital allocation mechanism that delivers rewards to those organizations that deliver the most value and encourages efficient operations, higher frequency communication with "customers", community growth, "passive collaboration" via the Vote Per Ticket mechanism. Its is adaptive. The key effect is the focus on the customer and customer's perception of value. Thus each "agent" or individual in the system is involved in shaping the form and content of the community in a continuous manner, via the VPT feedback mechanism.

Advantages of the VPT System

"Vote Per Ticket" is adaptive. As event organizers act, some may underperform and others may out-perform in the eyes of the community-at-large. The VPT mechanism provides a conduit for feedback flow. It is responsive.

The purchasers of tickets are in charge of sending positive and negative feedback in the form of economic "votes" every time they purchase a ticket. That means the VPT increases the responsiveness of the community to changes in perceived value of any and all groups and event organizers in the ecosystem.

Advantages

FIRST: The Customers may be familiar with many user groups in the community but it can only vote for one on a per-ticket or "per event" basis.

For example a single agile enthusiast may enjoy meeting from Agile Boston, Agile Bazaar, the PMI, and SPIN. But when they buy a ticket for an event, they can only enter one code. That code represents a tiny vote on the part of the buyer. The buyer is in authority over who gets 25% of that ticket purchase.

The vote is supporting a specific group. The assumption is that the best group in the eyes and mind of the purchaser gets the vote (the one who delivers the most perceived value). VPT is a system of meritocracy that institutionalizes a continuous flow of immediate feedback. .

SECOND: Community is supported. The user groups are incented to promote the events of others. Groups get paid for selling tickets for events run by other organizations. This builds community.

THIRD: Quality is supported. Groups doing the best job get the most votes at purchase time.

FOURTH:All groups remain independent but very connected, via the ticket. This encourages and supports a diverse ecosystem. The mechanism to accomplish this is the coded ticket, which is a boundary object. A boundary object is an object held in common across social worlds:

"Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.

FIFTH: Optimization. The entire community is now optimized on quality, quantity, value and merit. This leads to all kinds of emergent cultural effects that become reinforcing as the community employs the coded ticket to provide continuous feedback from the attending public to all organizations in the ecosystem.

SIXTH: Simplicity. For ticket buyers, it is simple. At the time of payment, they enter a code. That code is a vote that explicitly says "send 25% of this purchase to the group of my choice"

I want to see this done in Boston. It is simple to implement and can cause a doubling of user group development and growth by providing a continuous voting mechanism that funnels resources to the user groups which ticket purchasers believe are most deserving of support.

I believe that the simple VPT mechanism can double the size and improve the overall health of any user group ecosystem.

Links:

Boundary Objects on Wikipedia

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