Tag: travel tribe

BizDev with Cascading Info Game

On July 18, 2011

Social Flights is a complicated game. Aviation is a complicated business. This makes Social Flights a challenging business model as much as a great opportunity for those who can figure it out how to play for keeps.

The Challenge

The challenge is to bring on as many as 5000 independent Travel Tribe leaders distributed broadly across a wide geographic area. Their task will be to strategically build flight plans for private aircraft in their communities. Community leaders will be compensated financially for driving revenue … much is common to a traditional sales channel.

However, each of these community leaders will have already accumulated a vast set of strategic knowledge and experience that can benefit Social Flights across the system. Likewise, Social Flights needs to bring each of them up the ladder of domain specific knowledge in the aviation business.

For compensation, Social Flights offers a tiered affiliate program that pays out various levels of commissions on flights booked according to the affiliate’s tier. One concern is that this strategy may not create an incentive to share information broadly if one is protecting their own tier standing or their own order of influence.

Cascading Information

Another approach would be to use a cascading information system. This is a gamification theory that suggests: information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.

Initially, information would be released by social flights in our initial training program. Later, other players of the game can release information to each other in specific packets defined by the flight scenario. Such packets of information can be rewarded with other packets of information – or access to more scenarios. The Cascading information theory promotes loyalty, engagement, influence, and time involved in the game of building flight plans.

Gaming the game:

From the onset, Social Flights encourages gaming the game. This means that we expect to learn a great deal about our business by watching other people play it. There are far too many scenarios and permutations of business strategies for us to predict how and where they would apply. All we can do is specify a baseline game scenario form and watch the ways the game is gamed.

In a sense, Social Flights would also be subject to the Cascading Information Theory, thus demonstrating how a corporation would enhance their own engagement, loyalty, influence, and time-quality in the communities where they operate.

(reference: Gamification.org – wiki; Cascading Information Theory)

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The Raw Material of Social Org Games

By Admin

On July 14, 2011

In General Information

Fibonacci Trust Curve

Trust Scarcity?

This article is a loose argument related to trust scarcity in social organization games. Rewarding trust in a social game is a difficult thing to do unless certain agreements and institutions are in place.

The Social Value Game

Social Flights will be introducing some game mechanics to provide incentive for people to interact with each other to form specific flight plans This will also include vendors and operators who would support their travel intentions with goods and services.

We want to dis-aggregate the incentives from a specific flight; in other words, a player does not necessarily have to be on the flight in order to receive a benefit from organizing it.

As the game develops, all players will simply keep an eye out for travel opportunities for trusted others in their social media experience. By helping their social circles to find travel opportunities, they will receive rewards which they can use when their own “perfect flight” begins to form.

Technology is not yet here, but getting close…

I would like to think that the technology has arrived which will allow people to form flights in social media, unfortunately, this is not the case. The problem is that big data has become big business. Social media platforms are funded with Data Dollars – that is, organizations who capture, combine, sell, or otherwise exploit personal data and trends in exchange for money.

Spiral of trust

When a person states their intention to fly to a distant place, this creates immensely valuable data. Such information is highly specific and even quite intimate because people share their hopes, dreams, and aspirations when they meet, travel, learn together. For this reason, Social Flights game data will be scarce, remain private, anonymized, or normalized so that it can remain in play indefinitely. There needs to be a great deal of trust in that network and, in fact, a disincentive to casting a broad public net.

Trust as Raw Material:

Social Flights has an internal social network that allows people to communicate anonymously
Travel Tribe Leaders are trusted members in a community who operates with trust, integrity, and respect
Game mechanics can dis-aggregate intentions from specific flights
Game data will normalize outcomes into “probabilities” that mask mask social data as numerical data for future games
New Social Media applications allow users to form travel circles of trusted persons with whom they are willing to share flight plan intentions

It is fairly easy to see that no single social network device will serve every requirement of a social economy – nor should their be. Instead, the integration of several devices which identify, create, and deploy trust as the raw material, will allow people to go wherever they want to go and build whatever they want to build together.

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The Art and Science of Social Sudoku

By Admin

On June 3, 2011

In General Information

It’s been a few months since Social Flights entered the market with our February 28^th Soft Launch. Since then we have grown at an amazing rate after getting picked up by a series of important news publications. But for this article, I would like to talk about what we learned.

He who hesitates, iterates

Learning is a critical element in any organization. The iterative process is a series of intentional steps that a group of innovators must invariably endure. The iteration process requires a strategy for introducing new variables to a product or process in such a way that the experimenter can isolate the effects of each change.

Social Flights was very much launched with this in mind. We prioritized the rollout of game features in order to form a player priority profile that will drive this Value Game. Nobody can simply invent such a thing, it must be observed empirically. This means that the right conditions must be in place to reveal the right data without bias. The data can then be used to improve the incentives that drive the game.

Resistance is futile

One of the most daunting challenges has been to identify the skill set for what makes an effective community leader. The Value Game is a value-based economy that is modeled after the mirror image of a dollar-based economy. It’s like driving on the left hand side of the road for the first time. Of course, you need someone who can drive a car – but in a very significant way, you need someone who has never driven a car. In either case, resistance is fatal (figuratively) and futile (literally). The willingness and ability to iterate is essential.

We do expect the results to surprise us. We went through many candidates for our social media distribution and engagement office before we found the right skill set; not in a marketer, or in an MBA, or in social media guru – we found the skill set in a Linguist. This makes perfect sense now – but we did not know that before we started the iterative process.

Easier Said Than Done

A travel community leader needs to solve a simple equation. Find 18 people to share an 9 – passenger jet (9 flying in each direction) within a certain span of time. This is much easier said than done – in fact, it’s like trying to solve a big Sudoku puzzle where all the rows, columns, and regions need to add up to the same number with no duplication. Of course the puzzle gets easier as more people join the community because the probability of finding 9 people that want to go to the same place improves. But still, someone needs to be on the ground to solve the puzzle.

Help us find the gamers

With that, I invite our readers to help us imagine what skill set would be the starting condition for an iterative process of finding hundreds of entrepreneurial community leaders that can solve this puzzle in diverse communities. I am leaning more and more toward the Gaming community on sites like http://gamification.org to find this skill set. Any thoughts? Thank you.

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Control The Information And Control The Game

By Admin

On May 9, 2011

In General Information

Social media is progressing in a direction where the SM application controls your information – not you. This is a game that you cannot win unless they let you win. Social Flights changes the rules by letting you control your own information. As such, we are growing in popularity among entrepreneurs who are looking for a game they can win playing by a new set of rules.

Social Flights is comprised of 2 components; Social Flights Corporate and Social Flights Travel Tribes. The corporate application provides vertical integration while the Travel Tribes provide horizontal integration. Each is hugely dependent on the other, but the travel tribe is where the value is.

Vertical Integration involves information technology; the collection and formation of system data. This is the information that helps groups stay in contact with each other giving the origin community a portal into the destination community (and vice versa) for a given flight. This helps airplane operators schedule flights, and it helps communities become attractive to entrepreneurs and other communities.

The horizontal integration is where information originates and terminates. The Travel Tribe disseminates information on the ground at both the origin and destination. What happens in a Travel Tribe, stays in a Travel tribe.

The most important aspect of data and information control is the ability to restrict it from communities who are not part of the transaction. Nobody else can know where you are going except you and the airplane operator – that’s what makes the game private. Nobody needs to know how much you are paying for a hotel room or travel service except you and the service provider – that’s what makes the game valuable. Nobody needs to know what you are doing on the ground except you and your friends – that’s what makes the game social.

A Value Game depends on the control of information. If someone else controls the information – they control the Value and there can be no game. They also control the use of information and the information technology. Don’t take this point likely; whoever controls the use of the information also controls the technology (vertical integration), not the other way around. Technology is deployed to the game – the game is not deployed to the technology. So, if you control the game, then you control the usage and the deployment of the technology; i.e., you control the value.

(Diagram credit and reference: Seven Faces of Information Literacy in Higher Education by Christine Bruce)

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Lead By Getting Out Of The Way

By Admin

On April 27, 2011

In General Information

By giving people power and observing what they do with it, a leader can learn a great deal about available opportunities. The problem is in getting out of their way, and consequently, getting out of your own way.

Human capital refers to the set of skills and knowledge that can produce an economic value. Everyone has distinct combinations of social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital, which they deploy uniquely. The entrepreneurial spirit in indomitable.

Likewise, the education, experience, and abilities that people deploy to their communities, employers, social organizations, and for the economy as a whole, are hugely valuable; unless you try to contain them – then they become volatile. So, no matter how proud you are of your own accomplishments, it’s probably not a good idea to get in the way of others’.

As we build out the Travel Tribe Leader functionality, we do not attempt to model the community leader after ourselves or any archetype, instead, we seek to model Social Flights around the human capital of the community that the leader represents.

Then, Lead by Observing

As we develop Social Flights, we listen to a great diversity of ideas from our extraordinary Board of Advisors. The hardest part for some of us on the executive management team is to stay out of the way as these brilliant people tear away at our own creations, preconceptions, biases, and even our hopes and fears for the outcome of our work. This is not easy to watch yourself getting in you own way.

We give our advisory board the power to criticize us. We give them the power to change us. We give them the power to hurt us and we give them the power to make us better. We watch, and we learn and we are grateful to them because we will give that power to travel tribes. This set’s up a very powerful incentive to play The Value Game.

A Game of Derivatives

On of the biggest complaints of the gamefication movement is that people will always figure out how to game the game. by contrast, at social Flights, we intend for the players to game the game. This is the fundamental backdrop of The Value Game. – it’s a game of derivatives not unlike many types of financial derivatives, except in an alternate currency.

This does not mean that we’ll fly blind and vulnerable. It means that the value of Social Flights will be a direct reflection of the value that people create in communities organizing themselves around Social Flights. This is a different type of business method and a stark contrast to the way that market capitalism holds people in boxes, surveys their private information, and places roadblock in their path trying to influence there every turn.

Try that with your battleship.

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Tricking The Debt Monster Antibody

By Admin

On April 16, 2011

In General Information

The last post “How To Kill a Debt Monster” ended with the following line: How do you inject the debt monster in the head with New Value antibody without messing everything else up? Hint: stop whacking it in the foot.

Of course, this is a silly analogy but still quite fun to riff on…

Many of the brilliant ideas in the New Value movement are too rich to ignore. The problem that many face is that these efforts can only be articulated as grassroots start-ups or single entrepreneurs battling in the morass of relative anonymity against the titans of convention. The Debt Monster Process Manual states explicitly that those not pre-ordained must work their way up from the bottom of the food chain where resources are scarce and economic forces are harsh.

Then, when one becomes successful, the debt monster assimilates the innovation into it’s fortress of influence. Get too radical and the debt monster will squash you, bury you, or slander you. So, we can’t beat this thing by whacking it in the foot, we need to go for the head.

Collaborative Consumption At The Top of the Food Chain?

So why am I designing Social Flights? Social Flights is a social media application that helps people fly on corporate jets. A corporate jet burns more fossil fuel in a hour than I’ll burn all year in my car. Private jets are the most visible display of excess for the wealthy, powerful, and exclusive members of society who can afford to isolate themselves from the huddled masses. Private jets are extremely expensive relegating huge amounts of capital to sit in waiting for their master to beckon them to the tarmac. Why would I be doing this? (disclosure: I love airplanes and the majority of my professional career is in Aviation and Space Transportation)

Electric cars were not sexy until Tesla built one that smokes a Ferrari – albeit, 23 minutes at a time.

The answer is simple – applications of the New Value Movement need to be introduced at the top of the food chain not at the bottom. Social Flights is a collaborative consumption game based on the The Value Game. It takes an inefficient industry and makes it less so – at a profit. Travel Tribes essentially convert inefficiently allocated capital into more efficiently allocated capital – and take a profit for doing so. If you look closely, this is a reversal of the direction of most culprit Capitalist flows, yet it remains entirely Capitalist – at a profit.

In fact, The Value Game is so similar to the de-Value Game that it will go unnoticed by the Debt Monster’s immune system and therefore not generate a defensive attack. Millions of dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneurs will quickly identify new ways to create profits without fully realizing that they are, in fact, dismantling the old Capitalist system piece-by-piece (and in the proper reverse order) and replacing it with a corrected version.

Social Flights impacts the Airline Industry, The Advertising Industry, The Travel Industry, and Information Monopolies, and sends them back to school – all for profit. The same can be done with any shared assets and their associated corporate captors.

The Value Game creates real and fungible profits that articulate social value, human capital, a shared biosphere, collaborative production, and ultimately a higher order of expression for the things that people create, store, and exchange together.

That’s why we start with Jets.

Note to Debt Monster: we’re coming after you.

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Who Needs Anti-Social Travel?

By Admin

On December 28, 2010

In General Information

I recently returned from a trip from Seattle to Nashville. I am involved in launching a new airline applying The Social Value Game to a legacy industry. The objective of this venture is to match a fleet of 15,000 private jets to social media networks for efficient door-to-door travel. The start-up is largely founded on the premise that a dismal travel experience is a dismal social experience.

Here is how my trip from Seattle to Nashville went using Commercial Airlines:

11:00 I get in my car and leave home for a 1:00 Boarding
11:45 Drive 25 miles through heavy traffic and bad weather, arrive at self-park car lot near Airport. I get into a cold shuttle bus.
12:00 Arrive at Airport Security and strip down to last layers of clothing
12:15 leave airport security after long line after harassment over 3 oz of toothpaste remaining in a 6 oz tube and a telephoto lens that obviously resembled a printer cartridge.
12:30 Arrive at gate. Airline took my baggage away because it did not fit in the “Impossible box” and charged $25.00 baggage fee. (95% of all carry on bags would never fit in the “Impossible Box” so why me?)
1:00 Flight was full. Poked, bumped, cramped, body complies to shape of existing space
1:30 departure was late. Connection in Salt Lake City was tight
3:30 Lands in Salt Lake city, late. No attempt to release tight connections first
3:50 Exit aircraft with 10 minutes to use restroom, grab sandwich, and run 1/2 mile to the next gate
4:20 Board flight to Nashville. Crowded. Window seat. Poked, bumped, cramped, body complies to shape of existing space
4:30 Flight leaves. 30 minutes into flight, I drop my Ipod under seats. Absolutely impossible to recover until airplane lands. No music, sucks.
8:00 Airplane arrives at Nashville (10:00pm Local time). Baggage claim took forever
9:00 (11:00 local): Finally get into rental car
10:40 arrive at hotel near location
11:00 (1:00 local) set alarm for 7 am local (5:00 am Seattle time) head hits pillow
5:00 am wake up sore, tired, and feeling oppressed.

Total Travel Time 12 hours one way and 24 hours RT door to door.

One complete day of productivity wasted. One day of life squandered. Zero time spent with my family or friends. Zero personal time to enjoy or reflect. Zero moments feeling secure, healthy, or self-worthy. 24 hours of confrontation with my surroundings. Zero moments of inspiration. Zero opportunities to be exposed to new ideas. Zero interesting people to learn from. Zero trees, flowers, sunshine, or fresh air. Zero fresh food; no fruit, vegetables, or raw nuts. Zero memories – except bad. No laughter, no friendship, no community. No exercise except running in fear.

The opportunity of the next economic paradigm is the ability to articulate the social value on all of these things – the ability to predict into the future the True Value of all the things that are squandered by an anti-social experience. That is the essence of The Ingenesist Project.

Who Needs Anti-Social Travel?

With a private airplane, I could leave my home at 11:00 for a 11:30 departure at a small local airfield 6 miles from my house. The flight would have been about 4 hours long and I would arrive at my destination for dinner reservations with my colleagues. The flight would cost less than 1400 dollars round trip and I could return a full day earlier (eliminating 2 nights) than the the commercial flight for the same set of meeting objectives.

If a person’s time is worth 50 dollars per hour, the difference between 10 hours of flight time is 500 dollars off of a 1000 dollar ticket. The commercial flight costs ($300), including parking ($100), airport taxes($50), extra airline fees (50 dollars), car rental ($300), 2 extra hotel night ($400) for a total of 1200 dollars (I have the receipts to prove it).

So if 10 hours of your life is less than 200 dollars, then fly commercial. If your time, family, community – your life – is worth more than 20 dollars per hour, then you should consider taking America’s newest airline.

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The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: travel tribe

Tricking The Debt Monster Antibody

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