What is "Moving The Needle"?

When Pierre Omidyar first opened ONet, he coined a phrase "Moving The Needle".

My understanding of what he was talking about, was that given the current state of affairs taking place in Philanthropy, such as difficulties in getting heard, under-the-table-deals, favoritism, jumping through unneccessary hoops with no gain, little progress for money invested, etc.

The World needed something different! something newer! We needed to "Move The Needle"

And, What if?,

what if we used the internet to allow the public from all over the world to identify the needs and solutions to the world problems!

and allowed the public to rate and determine what was the most needed and best ways to solve the problems! for it was quite obvious that those living in the poverty and those working in the trenches had a far better view than those in the 30th floor Foundation Office,

so let's "Move the Needle"

lets influence how Philanthropy works!

so what do we need? and how are we going to do it? what do we need in a "Moving The Needle" site?

well I believe, that we can catagorize into a few factors,

• a harboring place that those that are in the trenches can come to and find some of the comfort & normality that they left at home.
• an interesting, entertaining & discovery place where all can find 'new' & unfamilar topics and solutions!
• a place where those that are working on their missions can find assistance & networking to others with similar goals.
• a place that has tools in place that can help in the development of better systems & solutions for benevolent projects
• and most of all a place that attracts those that have financial, human & information resources that can help benevolent projects get underway, expand or survive.

I find the last two as the hardest to implement and something that few if any of the existing social platforms have been able to successfully fulfil.

Imo, from a purely analytical aspect we need to think about what it is that those with the needed resources want?

• first and foremost, we need to make their visit a painless and non time-consuming effort to get to what they are looking for
• we need to make it easy for them to quickly discover related topic that they are not aware of.
• we need to provide tools that will allow them to see how their time or financial investments are being used and prospered from.
• we need to make them impressed and want to come back!

because it is we who needs them!

How do we do it?

we take from the cutting edge best!

• we need discussions (forums) for us,
• we need discussion summaries (blogs)
• we need wiki's (workspaces) for team effort documentation
• we need a reporting system for project accounting, timelines and progress checks & balances.
• we need a navagational system comprising an Index, a table of contents, and a configurable tagging system
• we need rss & atom feed import/export support
• we need personally configurable discussion filtering systems
• we need embeded chat support to keep serious threads clean and on-topic
• we need dynamic tools so a thread/group owner can quickly clip a copy of noteble content and send it to a workspace w/author/date/linking/info
• we can create consensus building threads where we 'fold' out of view the agreed to topics, later to be read as the whole.
• we need a 'one member/one vote' rating system!
• we need graphic tools for creating tables, flow-charting, statistics & data charts
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• we need to build a place that is quickly kept current with the most accurate data available!

more?