ArchimedesCoalition:Community Portal
From ArchimedesCoalition
Members of the coalition can enter here and record their names and activities.
My name is Ben Shook. I started the Archimedes Coalition; I have a background in industrial design, writing, building, community organization, and intend to broadcast the coalition as a means of organizing craftspeople, designers, inventors, and makers all over, with the intention of creating simpler, more suitable ways of using energy and relying on one's own community. You can find out more about me at www.benshook.com, and can reach me at ben@benshook.com
it's 5:30 a.m., july 12. here is a copy to date (potentially without appendices) of my business plan for the AC... still much work to do
ARCHIMEDES COALITION LLC
BUSINESS PLAN
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
DEFINITIONS
VISION
CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT
BUSINESS MODEL
STRATEGY & MARKETING
THE BOARD
REVOLVE©
OPERATING AGREEMENT
FINANCIAL
PRIVATE PLACEMENT MEMORANDUM
THE ARCHIMEDES COALITION: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This conception of a new community, a coalition, has been in the works in my studio for almost ten years in one way or another. I will discuss my background more at length in "The Board," and say here that the coalition started with the idea of designing objects better in terms of sustainability. In beginning a couple of other business plans with the intention of founding a better building company, I realized that the buildings themselves, and the things themselves, were not the locus of my attention. I realized that if you look at an object with a long view (over time), especially a building or car, the object is not so much the materials that comprise it (though important) as it is the embodied energy in that object. Buildings are energy. Things are energy. How do we make them? Where do they come from? How much energy do they require to function? A car, if it lasts, say 15 years, and consumes one tank of fuel per week (say 20 gallons), will use 14,400 gallons in its short lifetime, which is a volume of just over 1,925 cubic feet of fuel, roughly seven times the volume of the entire car. At the end of its career, that automobile is more energy (fuel) than it is steel, plastic and upholstery, and has produced many fold more carbon by weight than its own mass. We are entering an age where questions of energy consumption, value, and total cost must be undertaken in a new way, and by everyone, everywhere.
My intention in setting up The Archimedes Coalition is to create a forum where these challenging questions can be asked, where solutions and implementations can be discovered quickly, in a broad array of geographical locations, and by means of a new orientation to how the internet can function to solve material problems quickly.
The Archimedes Coalition (AC) will function in several ways as an umbrella entity for "legacy companies." The first companies I wish to place under this umbrella are Revovle©--Static and Revolve©--Dynamic. I will outline them later in the business plan. The mission for the AC as a container for an as-yet-unknown volume of other efforts and ideas is as follows:
The Archimedes Coalition is an online server technology that specializes in a distinct formulation of energy consumption: one that shifts infrastructural energy needs from grid style nationalized energy demand, to locally sourced, independent energy technologies. In providing networks (including peer-to-peer), semantically oriented software, geographically specific resources, and tutorials, the Archimedes Coalition will provide the groundwork for a broad shift in ecological and economic policy, energy consumption in every sector, new infrastructure design, local business development, financial schemata, industrial design, and humanitarian relief. A secondary role the Coalition plays is patent formulation: in any case ideas present in the online forum can be made into patents, or where new patents could be formed with combinatorics, the AC will act to secure patents, get products to market and distribute a specified royalty to those members of the coalition who proffered the ideas.
DEFINITIONS
Archimedes |ˌärkəˈmēdēz| ( c. 287–212 bc), Greek mathematician and inventor from Syracuse. He is noted for his discovery of Archimedes' principle (legend has it that he made this discovery while taking a bath and ran through the streets shouting “Eureka!”). Among his mathematical discoveries are the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference and formulas for the surface area and volume of a sphere and of a cylinder.
coalition |ˌkōəˈli sh ən| noun an alliance for combined action, especially a temporary alliance of political parties forming a government or of states : a coalition of conservatives and disaffected Democrats | he governed in coalition with the socialist Labor Party | [as adj. ] a coalition government.
VISION
ABSTRACT
The tools people use to organize in the professional world have become not only largely web based, but largely crowdsourced. Examples of this are wikipedia, flickr, photobucket, youtube, vimeo, Google™, etc. Clay Shirkey details this significant market shift in his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, in which he describes a massive collapse of institutional infrastructure based on the power of the free-sourced information that the general community of a particular domain will offer up based solely upon individual interest in that subject. That information, in turn, is often far superior to any privately offered resource or reference. The wiki software has become powerful enough to adapt tremendous volumes of information in a structured way such that it replaces privatized offerings from reference material to movies and entertainment. As such, these services and specific pieces of software are relatively new. The impact of open source software upon the world of design, invention, engineering, farming, building, and individual energy consumption is still wholly undefined. There are several attempts to do so now, but none with the cohesion that we will set forth here.
CONCRETE
Saul Griffith, founder of Squid Labs and a preeminent voice in the conversation about climate change demonstrates (http://blog.wattzon.com/2008/11/14/scarcity-and-abundance/) that unless immediate and radical steps are taken to curtail the way human beings use energy, there will be catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences. He represents an elegant example (http://www.saulgriffith.com/) of the formation of an umbrella company for other innovative online services, products and offerings. Valerie Casey, a world renowned designer and speaker (a lead designer at IDEO and former creative head of Frog), has identified the need for a "Kyoto Protocol" of the design world. In other words, a method of bringing thinkers, innovators, designers, makers, etc. together to transparently discuss and post solutions to curtail global warming, now. Casey's attempt to satisfy this need is a wiki called the Designer's Accord (www.designersaccord). She has reviewed the initial prospectus of The Archimedes Coalition, and agrees that much must still be done to bring her idea (and others like it) to fruition. Much of the information in the domain of climate change, places like carboncounter.org and wattzon.com, offer highly accurate data about the effect of human energy consumption upon the environment, yet do not provide concrete steps an individual can take to curtail the destructive uses of grid style energy. And while websites like instructibles.com and readymade.com offer incredible resources as to how to get certain kinds of projects done, they do not offer several critical elements: site and user specificity, overall global information organization, and multi-dimensional education, i.e. why the steps are taken, what are the affects, and what do the results mean. I will break those three elements apart in the following paragraphs.
1) Site and User Specificity A solution to a problem, for any given individual is entirely dependent upon the context of that problem. A certain kind of solar array may be quite inefficient and dubiously expensive if applied in the wrong geographic location. (See appendix 1) If mitigating climate change is the responsibility of every individual, those individuals must get information that is specific to where they are and what they're doing. This is only possible with extremely efficient dialogue... and the software that facilitates it. The mission of making the software user specific involves semantic design. This, as yet, has not been combined with how-to websites or reference sites like wikipedia.
2) Overall Global Organization: a Revolution Consider this: the value of the information offered by a wikipedia article is basically the same whether you're in Antarctica or Panama. The value of an article on how to make a green roof, however, is quite specific to a location. If there is an overarching mission to the coalition (mitigating energy consumption), the solutions have to unite in all their various contexts. The problem of sustainability, for example, would land far more heavily in the industrial sector in third world African countries... whereas much more weight would be given to residential energy solutions in Europe and the United States. The Archimedes Coalition will open dialogue along these gaps, to bring the resources each and every person needs (where they are) to commit to change. This involves semantic software, deployed in all geographies and demographics, as well as open source and crowd source software to provide superlative information for specific problems.
The shift from traditional media and advertising (the currently perishing foundation of 20th century corporate structure) to an open-sourced web based medium represents a powerful re-birth in the way humans consume products. In her book, RenGen ("Renaissance Generation"), Patricia Martin describes a modern renaissance, greater even in scale than that which Florence underwent--leading Europe--beginning in the mid fifteenth century. With the invention of the printing press, people were suddenly able to express themselves in radical new inventive ways with great celerity. The "re-birth" enabled formations of guilds, new artisan classes, and heightened collective consciousness about fundamental human questions. This process followed the bubonic plague and was itself not without death: the sloughing of a corpulent corrupt church and dictatorial regime of city-state government. We stand at a similar moment, in the presence of something far greater than Gutenberg's machine. Ms. Martin says:
If we can say the twentieth century was catalyzed by fission--the splitting of nuclei--then the RenGen era is characterized by fusion--the process by which multiple nuclei are drawn together to form a heavier nucleus. This is accompanied by the release of energy. Everywhere our research team looked we found evidence of fusion. The coming together of two unlikely pairings can result in unusual, but useful, new things or ideas... (p.86)
And then:
Some businesspeople believe they must covertly evoke certain positive associations with their brands by manipulating the senses; however, thinking this way may be overcomplicating their work. The bigger opportunity in the fused world is to present an offering that solves a problem, does some good, and delivers aesthetically. This relieves the customer of any cognitive dissonance caused by the thought that his purchase is too one-dimensional, accomplishing nothing more than a simple, selfish transaction. (p.87)
Where, in the last renaissance, artists worked in collectives and guilds--yet still often toiling alone--in this re-birth, we will organize together, trans-nationally in the context of a new medium: an open-sourced semantic internet driven software. In the last renaissance there may have been a tremendous purging of fear and anxiety, relief that human existence was destined to continue; in this one, we are facing grave questions about our behavior of consumption... and it all boils down to energy. Energy. We are now able to organize across the globe, to influence other members of our race from the solace of our own homes, and it is no exaggeration to say that the silicone based processor could be either our greatest salvation or the most destructive tool ever invented.
3) Multi-dimensional Education The Archimedes Coalition combines wiki-style collaborative software with a semantically driven user-friendly hosting site. The wiki would be a forum within the greater whole. The umbrella site culls not only its own internal submissions, but selections of other parts of the internet. It would search the greater internet spheres and blogs for lectures, how-to guides, protocol, videos, building drawings, sustainability resources, and search and establish loci for specific regions in terms of the predominant needs of any given area. These predominant needs (to date), organized around solutions for energy consumption are: construction (buildings), transportation, finance, entertainment, food, communications (including peer to peer networks), "pure products", and government. An example of what a given portion of the site would look like is detailed in Appendix 2. In any given area, the user would have access to a dialogue or series of articles taking place in the wiki, how-to videos and diagrams that occur in instructibles, vimeo, etc, local links to business owners and establishments proffering the services and goods in alignment with the user's search, "did you know" type articles about this particular domain of energy consumption on wikipedia, and Archimedes' solutions: for example, say a user initiates a search in Portland, OR for "solar" (the given search example for Appendix 2), wiki and blog dialogues will come up within the site, along with reference material about how solar works, local resources for building solar products and others' solar innovations, solar in combination with transportation (solar cars, races, etc.), financiers of solar innovation, solar installation, etc., ways of combining solar with food production (see Appendix 3), solar membranes for buildings (detailed more in Revolve© plan) and ways of immediately utilizing solar power in a home or business. In other words, the site is functioning multi-dimensionally. If a visitor goes to the homepage there is going to be a "features" list, of most popular items, so that if a user clicks into "entertainment" there would be sustainability articles about the topic of entertainment, carbon footprints of film production, alternatives to mainstream entertainment, entertainment about sustainability, local entertainment and theaters and philosophy... basically how the field of entertainment is functioning within the question of its gross energy consumption. If the user navigates into "food," he might find articles on community supported agriculture, on legislation for local food resources, urban beekeeping, window gardening (for dense urban environments, Appendix 3), etc. If he navigates to "finance," he might find resources about local lending institutions, news about finance houses funding sustainable enterprises, specific institutions and their programs for energy efficient business models. The combination of menu items span across a holistic offering of a basic restructuring of an entire lifestyle.
CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Because this is a startup proposal, we will require [at least] three phases of creative development. The three initial phases:
1) Seed 2) Product Development 3) Marketing and Implementation
Consider a couple of these protocols discussed by Paul Graham, designer of the first computer based "app"--Viaweb (acquired by Yahoo in 1998)--an essay about starting a startup.
Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the people we hired. This is a crucial difference between startups and big companies. Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews.
AND:
In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette.
The following teams are all friends of mine, met in one capacity or another over the past decade.
SEED
In the seed phase, I will chair a panel that would last three days, and be held somewhere centrally convenient. In it will be present programmers from several different places... to determine the best match for the coalition: Eric Hanson, from Aquameta in Portland, Oregon (who has succeeded in partial semantic software design), Britta Riley, educated at ITP (NYU) and an alumna from St. John's College, Mushon Zer-Aviv, a co-founder of Shiftspace (www.shiftspace.org), James Hedberg (Physicist, Programmer, and Innovator) doing a Ph.D. at McGill University, and--if possible--Jonathan Harris (Programmer who wrote Universe, Whale Hunt, We Feel Fine, and several other amazing programs. Even before the seed phase, this proposal will get refined by commentary of these programmers. In essence, this process of using talented communities to build superlative applications, IS the Archimedes Coalition. The purpose of the seed phase is discovery of the best technological partner(s) for the coalition, as determined by myself and investment.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
I propose that this phase takes place with Amy Fisher (Who created Appendix 3), who specializes in user-interface design and project management, Michelle Hege, partner at Desautel-Hege Communications (market analysis expert, http://desautelhege.com/) and Tim Girvin (founder of Girvin, www.girvin.com), an eminent brand designer and specialist in incubator startup techniques, story, identity, and web presence. This phase would begin with seminar curricula, given a specified program language and domain for the coalition, and would begin creating a simple highly usable web interface. This is the design. What it looks like, how it feels, how do we get it out there, how it virally connects, how it culls and embeds other web services such as vimeo, etc. A secondary part of Product Development is research and market testing. The techniques for doing this may be best discovered in another conference with all pertinent parties, i.e. design, communications, hackers, myself, and investment interests.
MARKETING AND IMPLEMENTATION
This was initiated in the last phase, and becomes more integrated in Phase III. Here, we spend the majority of the startup's time breaking into new communities, practicing medium to large advertising efforts, getting exposure in social media, refining the search capabilities of the AC, emending and refining the program language of the AC, developing proper hosting services for a growing user base, and making crucial changes to any and all of the AC's mission, operation, definitions, programs and structure.
BUSINESS MODEL
Jonathan Harris, Tim Girvin, Saul Griffith, etc.
BUSINESS MODEL--SPONSORSHIP/PATENTS
New patent domains, appropriate sponsorship, coalitions... soliciting other design partnerships and entities such as the designer's accord and instructables, etc.
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Amy's design for an Archimedes Coalition page layout. User Interface
Appendix 3
from: http://www.ipo.uc.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=overview.faq
Can I patent a discovery after publishing it?
In the US we have a year from the date of first publication to file a patent application. In virtually all other countries a patent application cannot be filed if there has been any prior publication. The only exception to this rule is provided under an international treaty specifying that if a patent application has been filed in the U.S. prior to publishing, we are allowed a year from the application date to file in other countries. Accordingly, we encourage you to submit your invention disclosure to this office as early as possible before submitting your findings for publication in order to ensure maximum opportunity for us to seek industry interest and to consider worldwide patent protection.
and
What is a Provisional Patent Application?
Effective June 8, 1995, as a consequence of the adherence of the U.S. to GATT, it is possible to file what is called a Provisional Patent Application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Provisional Patent Application is intended to be a relatively low-cost way of postponing the cost and effort of drafting and filing a full patent application. The provisional application need not contain claims, and the filing fee is modest ($150 for large entities, $75 for small entities). The applicant may then wait almost a year before filing a patent application. The twenty-year patent term that runs from the first U.S. filing date does not start with the provisional application, but instead begins only with the date of the subsequent patent application. As a result, one may postpone the start of the 20-year patent term by up to one year by the use of a provisional patent application. The provisional application may serve as a priority document for non-US convention filings.
Under U.S. patent law, the provisional application is subject to the same burdens under 35 U.S.C. § 112 as a patent application. This means that the provisional application must be complete enough to enable one skilled in the art to practice the invention, and means that the application must disclose the best mode known to the applicant for practicing the invention. These requirements are likely to lead to difficulties for those who file sketchy provisional applications. One who files a provisional application (and who fails to satisfy the requirements of § 112) would be making a mistake to sit back and rely on that application as a justification for waiting eleven months before taking the time and trouble to prepare and file a full patent application.
A second potential drawback of the provisional filing is that it postpones, by a year, any hint or clue from a patent examiner as to whether or not the invention is likely to be patentable. No search report or office action will come during the pendency of the provisional application; they will only be received after the filing of the patent application. For the applicant who is considering whether or not to file patent applications in countries outside of the U.S., the use of a provisional application virtually guarantees that no clues to patentability will be received from the U.S. Patent Office that might assist in deciding whether or not to spend the money on foreign filing. The applicant who files a patent application (rather than a provisional application) may, in contrast, receive an Office Action before the year is up for making foreign-filing decisions, and the content of the Office Action may be helpful in deciding what to do about foreign filing.
IT'S NOT A THINK TAKE ... IT'S A MAKE TANK
