What's in it for the other collaborators?

Before jumping straight in to start looking for an e-business opportunity, let's take a closer look at this concept of a virtual cafe. It certainly isn't as simple as it appears. Most people, when they take part for the first time, assume that it takes the form of a cooperative discussion group: people, working together to arrive at some kind of mutually agreeable solution.

It comes as quite a surprise that the idea is for everyone to think about their own problems and solutions. They are in the cafe mainly for their own benefit and and are there to gain something positive from the experience. The proposition is that the host provides an interesting situation by which the participants can benefit through learning something worthwhile and meeting potentially valuable contacts. In return, the participants must provide value. This they do simply by providing intelligent and informed comment and opinion.

The participants are in absolute control of their own situation because if the cafe isn't providing them with sufficient benefit or stimulation they can leave at any time. They don't have to announce they are leaving, they simply cease giving comments and opinions. As the cafe is reconfigured at regular intervals (every one or two weeks) the non contributors are automatically excluded. This ensures that the cafe continues only with people who are benefiting from the experience. The onus then falls on the host to try to ensure that the people in the cafe are benefiting otherwise the cafe will empty out.

To see this in perspective, let's imagine a wealthy entrepreneur deciding to create an e-business. She has much experience of business in the conventional world of bricks and mortar but the environment of electronic communications is too complicated for her to fully understand. To compensate for her lack of knowledge she asks fifty people who are experienced in the ways of the Internet to advise and comment on her progress as she tries to find a business opportunity. For their helpful comments and opinions she gives them two hundred dollars a week for every week they comment on her ideas and progress.

She would reason that if she did this for a year, it would cost her half a million dollars for this advice, but, the value of having fifty experienced people commenting on her progress in finding and establishing a viable e-business would probably result in her being able to create a business that would be worth considerably more than half a million dollars. This expenditure could thus be justified.

Being a rational person, she would like to see some value for the money she is paying out each week. If she finds any of her consultants not bothering to make comments or contributing towards her progress, she would discontinue their services and find somebody else to take their place who might give better value for the two hundred dollars a week. In this way, she could ensure that not only did she get full value for her weekly expenditure of ten thousand dollars a week, but, the value she was getting would improve as she continuously replaced the non performing consultants. Or, if she didn't replace them, she'd be getting the same value for a reducing cost.

Realising that it would take all of her time to correspond with fifty correspondents every week and then having the bother of trying to sort out whose opinions were valid and whose were not, it would make a lot of sense for her just to explain her current thinking to them each week and then let them discuss it amongst themselves. She could then listen in to the discussions for confirmation or otherwise of her thinking and for inspiration and future directional pointers.

Besides saving the time of the correspondences, she would also have the added advantage that the comments and opinions when combined in discussion environments could be challenged and corrected where appropriate. This would greatly reduce the harmful effects of bias or lack of knowledge. Discussion would thus provide a greater accuracy plus an added synergy as different ideas and viewpoints are combined.

It would also make sense to divide the fifty consultants into a few small discussion groups, rather than have them all in a single discussion forum. This would allow several different directions to emerge rather than have the group become dominated by a few strong opinions. Remixing the groups from time to time would prevent group view points becoming locked into particular narrow mind sets.