Fast forward almost 20 years and I quit my high-paying job at Dell Computer to found a really neat dot-com (configure your dream bicycle online from a database of 10,000 components and the software insures compatibility using a series of algorithms) with a really stupid business plan (bicycles have thin margins, components cost more than the bike, frame manufactures weren't set up to sell to me, and most of my target market lacked enough sophistication). I now own a Pets.com sock puppet (see photo) to remind me never to do something that dumb again. Shortly afterward I teamed up with a business partner to develop software systems for the staffing industry. A prolonged industry recession and constant adjustments in strategic direction (we kept over-weighting every new piece of information) left me exhausted after 3 years of intense struggle.

This is where the story really begins. After a year of recovering from that business and wondering what I should do next, I find myself at the Annual Conference of the World Future Society. At this conference I learn from Barton Kunstler (author of The Hothouse Effect) how when societies, communities and organizations adopt democratic principles, they generate an incredible and sustained burst of innovation that gives their neighbors/competitors whiplash. Then I get a history lesson from Jeremy Rifkin (the noted Princeton economist and author of the Hydrogen Economy, not the serial killer) about how advances in our ability to harness stored energy (crops, coal, oil/gas, hydrogen) have always coincided with advances in communications technology needed to manage them (written language, printing press, telegraph/telephone, internet). As an aside he mentions that the printing press preceded coal by a couple hundred years and while it was waiting for its energy partner to show up, it allowed the Protestant Reformation to occur and democratized knowledge, producing the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Then I catch a presentation by Joel Barker on a software program he devised called the Implications Wheel. Organizations/communities can take a subject and outline all the first/second/third order implications graphically in order to better understand it. And all the while I kept hearing this buzz about a new book called The Wisdom of Crowds. It was turning conventional wisdom on its head by using 100 years of research to demonstrate how groups, given the right conditions, can make consistently better assessments than any individual, even if that person is an expert on the subject.

At that point I think to myself: the internet has preceded hydrogen like the printing press preceded coal. In much the same way as the printing press, the internet has democratized information and, particularly with Web 2.0, dramatically sped up and spread out the free exchange of ideas. But that exchange, at least with regard to addressing social issues, has been somewhat haphazard and along partisan lines. What if you could take the principals outlined in the Wisdom of Crowds, apply them to the internet (a highly compatible platform), and expand on the Implications Wheel to provide a methodology for organizations/communities/societies to collectively map/assess the issues of the day for making more informed decisions? I call this approach collective decision modeling and I believe that the wisdom harnessed by it could spark the next golden age.

That conference was four years ago. You must be thinking, "What took this guy so long?" From 2000 to 2004 I had let my web development skills go to seed and lacked the confidence to properly manifest the idea at that point. It also took this long for the methodology to crystallize in my mind. Al Gore helped with that process in 2005 when I caught his amazing speech about how American democracy is in trouble. Plus I decided that I needed to augment my business skills, so I went back to school and got a masters degree in entrepreneurship.

In the meantime (and as a stepping stone) I set out to transform the way organizations and communities conduct strategic planning by applying Wisdom of Crowds methods to a web application in order to make the process faster/cheaper/better. Remember my frustrations with setting a strategic direction at my last business? It's called iC and you can check it out at 3rd i Designs.

I've got some ideas for monetizing SocialCompass, such as licensing to organizations so they can do their own modeling. If you're interested in that, please let me know. Also if you're inclined to support my efforts, buying a license/user-pack for my strategic planning application, hiring me as a strategic planning consultant, contracting with me to do web development, or investing in my business would be welcome. My email is 3rdidesigns@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!