What Sensorica needs

YES!

One hundred percent agreed, Daniel..

The main gap I see at sensorica is closing the loop for affiliates to earn for the work they are doing so we can generate the funds we need to support the network. This is critical for thrivability. Because of our values, crowdfunding is a great approach to seek funding, and there are plenty of sexy projects to bring people together on.

One of the last days I was at sensorica I made a call to a colleague who owns a fair trade business here in Vancouver, Discovery Organics. I told him about the moisture sensor. He was excited to hear about it, saw immediate applications for it, and has contacts with growers all up and down the coast of north and south america. He gave me a contact with a business owner in one of the driest towns in California, and they are big enough to have a research facility, and have many growers they manage. I would like to follow up on that. I think there is strong potential to get a significant funding injection from the research facility, and move into the final design and production of the product. As drought is a critical issue all over the world, I think we have a strong potential to bring in partners, interest to our model, and launch a crowdfunding campaign as well.

I have not yet followed up on this contact. Before I can, I need to hear from others if this is something that would be supported and followed up with in the lab. Bruce, you have taken the lead on this project; is this something you would like to have followed up on?

Tam

I don't see Sensorica as business oriented as I feel we have to build a new way of co-creating and being sustainable. However, getting finance to ensure the viability of Sensorica essential. Thus I would say

People and initiatives that
1. ensure the financial viability of Sensorica.
2. are self-financed and whose collaboration bring value to Sensorica.
3. actively contribute to the global sustainability of Sensorica.

@tammyleameyer , thanks for taking the initiative. Its brilliant.
@brastaviceanudanie I agree with two of your 3 observations. I disagree with the description of the 3rd one, but the overall principle is sound.

First, I believe all Sensoricans are Entrepreneurs. They are risk takers, they believe in a system and ideas that the rest of society thinks is a fringe element.They see the potential and they invest in it, mostly with their time and talents but sometimes with finances.

For the Crowdfunding part, I agree that we do need to take advantage of this resource and circumvent the traditional source of capital. I do think that we still do need business plans and market research because those are vital for designing a product. Also, crowd funding it self is a market place, you are essentially selling your idea or product to the masses. So yes, ideas and products have to be tailored to appeal to the crowd in crowdfunding.

This leads me to the third point about Sensorica being business oriented. @fabioballi pointed out that Sensorica doesn't feel like it is business oriented. I disagree with that statement. It was the case a year and a half ago where projects were undertaken just for fun/geek/nerd satisfaction or for niche markets. The projects were mostly done with little or no market research and did not have financial gains in mind. The projects themselves were awesome and a lot of them were taken to about 90 percent of completion. But they were never properly marketed or they did not have a financially viable future.

Today's Sensorica is different. First reaction to any proposal is its market viability. Research, development and prototyping keeps market segments in mind. All recent project that I have been a part of have at least discussed future market penetration and have designed elements in the projects that appeal to a target audience.

I am not demeaning previous work at Sensorica. All the projects were great, and we are rehashing a lot of them for use in current and future projects. Its just that Sensorica's focal point has shifted a bit.

I am sure that the new focus will result in financial viability of Sensorica. We should become self sustaining soon.

Let me remind you all that there is no concrete right or wrong analysis of the current state of Sensorica. Each individual affiliate has his or her interpretation (and maybe vision of the future) as well as their reasons for joining.
I wish to share my vision of Sensorica and the OVN.

Sensorica to me is an umbrella for open source hardware projects. It is a platform that can assure the success and socialization of a project while properly distributing value and rewarding participants in a fair manner while maintaining the core ethics of peer to peer. Its website should be very project and task orientated.
Something like this: Become a member to initiate a project or pick a task and work on a project. The projects should rank by popularity and attract talent. Each member should have a web based dashboard, kinda like the project pages do now do BUT be usercentric . So you log in and have everything you need in front of you to work on a project...instead of having multiple windows open :P This of course includes data pulled from the NRP-VAS (actually I think it should be part of it) Once a lean prototype is developed the its crowdfunding time. We have already approached kickstarter for interfacing with them but they have no mechanism in place for this. Too bad for them. Sensorica can then help with the production, something very few platforms do. So to sum it up add an element like Quirky's but crowdsource the talent, add a crowdfunding component and then help with production like SeedStudio.
No VC's of course! Only sponsors..Quirky is failing because it poorly rewards the community, it needs to make money for its investors. In the pure decentralized spirit of SENSORICA, I think the recent influx of OSHW projects paints a clear picture of where it is headed.

The OVN and NRP-VAS with its Value Equation I believe is the best tool for the collaborative economy. The model is flexible enough to adapt to any field ( I have an Idea for the world's first restaurant with no boss) After all, it replaces the corporation right? But it can of course be applied inside one's value chain) And of course the fact that there is no centralized governing body makes any instance of it difficult to shut down (Okay so I find decentralization extremely sexy) I am under the impression it would be easier to raise funding for further development of these tools on the Ethereum platform than on the web. I will do some research on this soon...

@jimanastassiou - a couple of responses to your excellent comments:
* Please help design the personal dashboard page you are thinking of. Abran's already written up some ideas for it.
* Re Ethereum: you might be able to raise money for such a project, but just guessing, the project itself would take years, not months. I like Ethereum better than the Bitcoin blockchain, but it doesn't give you much of the NRP stack. If the Ethereum gang wants to work on it themselves (understands OVNs and wants to do it without themselves being paid by the fund-raised project) I would go for it and help them. Otherwise, you got a new crew trying to understand how to work with Ethereum as a platform, at the same time rebuilding all of NRP on top of it. It would be fun (we think we know how to actually do smart contracts, for example), but it would also be a research project, not something anybody would be able to use very soon.

At the tail end of June, I started writing about how blockchains would fit into the OVN infrastructure stack here. Short version: they don't do much for you. I'm still learning about all this stuff, so I could easily be wrong. But that's my current opinion.

@jimanastassiou I recorded your thoughts about the user dashboard and project ranking in the NRP github issues list, where we keep bug reports, requirements, requests, etc. As Bob said, this will need more definition, but I wanted to get it down. (No matter what platform it gets done in... :) )

I did not say Sensorica doesn't feel business oriented, I said I don’t see Sensorica as business oriented (for profit vs financially self sufficient). :-)

I like the discussion, agree with Jim's vision and like Bob's article too !

Who makes a proposition ?

I agree with @fabioballi on this: " I don’t see Sensorica as business oriented (for profit vs financially self sufficient). :-)"

Financially self sufficient is necessary. For profit is not. Who gets the profit? The original idea of a contribution economy when I started with Sensorica was that all the income would go to the contributors who would then decide how much to plow back in and for what. The network would continue and grow depending on how much they plowed back in.

But it's a different idea than profit.

P.S. the percentage of income to go to Sensorica somewhat contradicts that, but I agree with it anyway. It's for necessary expenses and can change as needed. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Reality bites.