Initiative Brainstorming

This page is a draft proposal. Please send any comments to [1] or to the Project VRM mailing list.

Initiative Brainstorming

Anyone may add or expand on current ideas for VRM. Simply add to this page and start filling in elements to fully describe the idea. Feel free to start small. Time and other people's contributions can turn even a short headline into something we can work with.

If you have an idea? Copy the template and start filling it in. Brainstorming rules apply:

• Everything is ok, as long as it is a viable VRM idea, inline with VRM Principles.
• If you don't like an idea, improve it or suggest an alternative.

As ideas develop, flesh out the details. Eventually you will probably want to address the "standard" questions, such as

• What's the problem?
• Where does the problem occur?
• Who participates?
• How might we fix it?

Then leave room for discussion. In the discussion area, please sign your comments. And remember, anyone can update the entry itself, but if you aren't sure your idea fits or if you have concerns about a particular element, add it to the discussion.

Once an idea is concrete enough to receive the blessing of the community and has gathered one or more champions, it begins the VRM Process and is removed from this list. During the Process, the champions see that each step in the process is completed thoroughly enough to advance to the next step and that the Initiative advances at an acceptable pace. Some initiatives will take longer than others. Many will spawn multiple protocols. It is the champions job to facilitate the advancement of an Initiative from a good idea to a working Protocol.

Multiple ideas may be merged into one or one split into multiple. Discussion is probably most effective on the mailing list, with suggestions and thoughts eventually finding their way here after getting fleshed out in email.

Here's a strawman example:

Digital Receipts

Introduction

Today, we can automatically get our credit card transactions imported into Quicken or QuickBooks or Excel or whatever application we want to use for managing our finances. Why not the line items from the receipts?

Problem

I can't get the line items from my purchase receipt on my credit card report. Sure, I can get the credit card data into Quicken, but I'd like to have the line item information so I can more accurately track my spending.

Where/Context

In retail and online when I download my transaction history.

Who

Retailers, credit card companies, consumers, and business consumers. In fact, this may be even more valuable for small businesses that need to put the line items into different accounts in QuickBooks!

How

The line-item data is there, on my receipt! Can't this go online or be sent to my credit card company? I'd like for it to automagically be incorporated when possible when I put the credit card history into Quicken. I have no idea how this might actually be implemented. Perhaps just with my loyalty card and I can download it online, but there would need to be a way to link the line-item report with the credit card history. Otherwise, I might get duplicates.

Brainstorm

SYO — Share Your OPML Project

Introduction

Dave Winer has three posts that outline the Share Your OPML (SYO) project, and progress in developing it:

• Opportunity Knocks
• Opportunity Knocks Try #2
• Opportunity Knocks Try #3
• I've deployed a first pass at what Dave proposes in #3. This is for testing and feedback purposes only. Any uploaded data to this development site will possibly and most likely be swept clean during future development phases. Here at http://dev.glistn.com

Upside-down buyer's guide

Introduction

Don Marti writes,

Doc has been contemplating business, identity and vendor lock-in, and makes me think about an interesting experiment -- use links, tags, and a microformat to help people buy a "commodity" IT product, the 1U or 2U rack-mount Linux server.

How

First step would be to come up with a microformat for a "server RFQ". At the beginning of the experiment, these could be relatively loose -- just a bunch of "ol"s with "id"s such as "required-parts" "preferred-parts", "disliked-parts", "forbidden-parts", "required-features" and so on.

There would also be a section for "status", which would be time until buying decision, "deferred" "cancelled" or "ordered". If and when the idea got more popular, the RFQ could be more detailed, and sites and apps could offer server RFQ construction wizards. The nice thing about using a microformat is that (1) it's human-readable in a browser and (2) you can add free-form commentary on what you like or don't like in a server.

So you want to buy a server? Write your server RFQ, put it up with a rel="tag" link to a Technorati tags page for "server RFQs". and another tag link to a new, unique tags page just for that one, such as "joe@example.com-2005-07-09".

Along come the vendors who want to sell you a box, and are naturally watching the "server RFQs" tag like hawks, I mean like some animal that doesn't want to eat you. Like Easter Bunnies? Vendor sales person checks your RFQ, makes a page for you with links to matching products and a rel=tag link to "joe@example.com-2005-07-09". This is highly automatable, but careful, vendors -- don't spam. A future web-based product configurator should be able to crawl a server RFQ page and come up with a good quotation in response.

Now, you, the buyer, just watch the RSS feed for joe@example.com-2005-07-09 -- hey presto, it turns into your own personalized Server Buyers' Guide! When you buy the server, you change the "status" field on the RFP to "ordered", and add a link to the vendor you bought from. This is to (1) give the good vendors Google Juice and (2) let vendors know you're serious in the future so they'll pay attention to your RFQs.

Setting terms of service

Introduction

In Credit card fees can suck you in — Consumers pay high price for increasingly complex policies, in USA Today, Kathy Chu reports,

Remember when most of us paid only an annual fee on credit cards? Today, late fees and over-the-limit fees are replacing that annual fee. Add in a dizzying array of extra charges: for phone payments, "expedited" online payments, credit card use overseas and balance transfers from other cards.

At a time when Americans wield more plastic than ever — 692 million credit cards, with $711 billion of debt — fees and policies have grown so complex that even regulators struggle to grasp them.

In the holiday shopping frenzy, consumers are especially vulnerable to card fees, because more of them are likely to pay late or exceed their credit limit, according to industry consultants Nilson Report and Moebs Services.

Lots of card issuers offer low initial interest rates these days. But once they've pulled you in, they often replace "fixed" rates with floating rates — which can rise — and impose penalty rates of up to 30% even on those with good credit.

"It's like economic Darwinism," says Chi Chi Wu of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. "The business model has changed from one rate and annual fee to all these different tiers and fees designed to make money."

This is a perfect example of what CRM does without the benefit of VRM.

How

We need something on the customers' side that directly tells vendors — and the whole credit card marketplace — "Either give me the terms I want (e.g. 30 day grace period, X% or lower fixed interest rate, $X cap on annual fees) or I'll take my business elsewhere."

Educators vs. Cold Callers

Introduction

Russ, a network manager at a UK high school, writes,

We have the technology already, it’s called blogs. I am currently setting up a blog so suppliers at work can subscribe to an RSS feed and it provides them with information on what I want.

But not everyone uses RSS so the fact that most blogs have the function to view posts as web pages, plus the ability to email out new posts to people means you have that angle covered. The more I read on this concept the more it addresses some of the major problems we as customers have and suppliers have with customers.

Personal Health Records

Introduction

Today, medical information is locked in cabinets and largely isolated behind doctor's and institutional barriers. Much of this arrangement is about protecting our rights to privacy. Kudos for that. However, the primary need in the realm of medical information, is quality health and health services... the secrecy is a solution to a constraint, not a requirement of the underlying need.

Problem

This unfortunate silo nature of the existing medical data system results in a loss of transparency and choice when individuals want to work with different providers. This lack of access and control leaves patients with restricted vendor management options.

Who

At the Internet Identity Workshop (iiw2006b), Doc brought this to light in the context of Johnson & Johnson's interest in providing enhanced drug packaging services, such as custom daily packets for people with complicated drug regimens. Unfortunately, J&J can't offer this service because of a systemic inability to access customer information effectively--even when the customer wants them too.

In a December 2007 speach, Google's Vice President Adam Bosworth echoed this need:

Google can find all the most relevant answers to any query you submit across the entire web in less than a one-third of a second and yet, in general, your physician cannot get the lab results from your last specialist without paper and fax. (...)

Your physician cannot always reliably and optimally treat you without a comprehensive knowledge of what has been wrong with you in the past, how you were treated, and how you responded to the treatment. The lack of easily accessible, comprehensive medical records results in people being in more pain for longer than they should be. (...)

We should not accept this. We should not accept that the institutional barriers of the system cause tens of thousands to die unnecessarily and hundreds of thousands at the very least to suffer without cause while we pay an enormous bill.

So what can be done? We should start at the beginning. Let’s put the patients in charge of their health and medical information. Let’s build a system which puts the people who are sick in control. For every single medical and health-related event, let’s make sure that patients can effortlessly retrieve and share their information in its totality and then use it to ensure that they get the best quality of care possible. It is their health.

Thanks to Philipp Lenssen of Blogoscoped for the quote.

Discussion

There is an active development effort around "Personal Health Records," with "Dossia" as one significant umbrella project. Google provides a significant amount of information on Dossia and PHRs.

Initiative Template

Initiative Name

Discussion

This is a draft proposal. I'm particularly interested in both real Initiative Ideas and improvements to the template.