[PLUG] The Callaborative Cooperative

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 09:10 PM, Paul wrote:
> William H. Magill wrote:
> > From my perspective, the whole outsourcing thing is actually 
> > overblown. The problem really is that the Companies are gone, not the 
> > jobs.
>
> Hmm.  Just a thought.  Maybe there is a solution within the crowd of 
> the under/unemployed.  Just as Open Source is a collaboration of 
> interested individuals and companies which produces impressive 
> results, maybe the under/unemployed could join together, not to find 
> jobs, but to /create/ jobs for each other.  Could this be done by 
> working together to create business opportunities through product 
> development, skills enhancement, support networks, etc.?  Could it 
> hurt to think in terms of small business and collaborative employment?

Bingo! ... good idea.

Ok, how do we start?

I suspect that this idea is not really new, but what can be done with 
it locally.

I seem to recall a body shop in North Jersey that specialized in 
contract employees -- Techies maybe?
Yes... www.techies.com (philadelphia.techies.com)
Although looking at the web site, it now looks like any other 
employment agency.

In the past, a company would contract with Techies for some "service." 
Techies then supplied the body, and skimmed, er, received a percentage 
of the monies paid. The worker got paid by techies who handled their 
witholding, taxes, benefits and the like.

I suspect that the key to this endeavor, is the sales and marketing 
side ... soliciting the contracts or selling the services.

What product (short of selling bodies) could or needs to be developed 
around which a company could be built?

Anybody got any - "What the world needs is a good five-cent cigar" 
ideas?

The Economist Technology Quarterly this week has a piece on "smart 
lamposts" -- low-speed, low-power, cheap, wireless units to monitor the 
status of the lights. (That article doesn't seem to be on-line, but 
there are a bunch of others:
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/

Then there is bluetooth and "sentient offices."

How about we begin figuring out how to build REAL virtual reality 
environments on the web. I believe that we are just about at the 
beginning of having the computing power and communications capabilities 
necessary to build "home caves."

http://cave.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
http://www.fakespacesystems.com/workdesk.shtml

Yesterday I was just reading something about new 3d shutter glasses for 
gaming or the pc, now I have to find the article. Maybe it was one of 
these...

http://www.3d-glasses.us/
http://www.3dexperience.co.uk/3dglasses.html
http://www.vrex.com/products/sg_hd3.shtml


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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