The new plan for the Wisdom Project

I believe I have formulated a new working plan for the structure and form of the Wisdom Project. It will not be turned into a non-profit educational corporation for one big reason: I want to encourage people to share their all their ideas and their very best writing and preserve the promise of potentially receiving compensation for their work. For now, I see this best achieved by existing as an open source for-profit company (or corporation).

This is how I see it working:
The Wisdom Project shall host rich debates, dialogues, and discussions. It shall foster in depth and substantive dialogue into the most important questions and issues of our day. It will aggressively seek out creative, practical, and feasible solutions to our greatest problems. The contributors will be anyone who chooses to participate, everyone from lawyers and professors to kindergarten teachers and blue collar industrial workers.
The only criteria for evaluating a contribution will be the value of the contribution itself-in essence the wisdom of the contribution. The stature or prestige of the speaker shall be irrelevant. Using a carefully designed system for evaluating and extracting the very best and wisest essays, comments, and answers from the forums-based upon the judgment of all the forum participants-the Wisdom Project will publish its results.

Wisdom Project publications will be reports, press releases, newsletters, and eventually books. These publications will often be sold-and this is where it gets interesting. The profits from the sale of these publications will be distributed to members whose work is compiled in the publications. The exact way this will be done has yet to be finalized, but I have played with some models. It basically, comes down to this: Unlike any other forum on the internet, speaking your mind and sharing your insights in the Wisdom Project will actually lead to potential publication and income in your pocket.

I believe this formula will help motivate many of the people who believe they deserve publication to participate more enthusiastically in the forums. Wisdom Project publication will only be a boon to individual publication of books or articles elsewhere. I may be naïve, but I believe the world is starving for books and publications containing genuine and substantive wisdom…so I believe there is a genuine opportunity for the Wisdom Project to become a very profitable endeavor.

One day soon, I hope to see our project receiving income for its publications and redistributing that income to many of its members. That is the current plan. Now let’s see if we can make the vision a reality.