Project: Urban Poverty and a Community-Based Solution

Problem:

Inner city Baltimore is characterized as an area of extreme poverty, crime, and a distinct lack of opportunity. More houses are condemned than inhabited, people live far below the poverty line, and many drop out of education and resort to crime due to a lack of other opportunities. Incarceration for minor offenses exacerbates this problem, as even after serving time they are unable to find useful work that pays a living wage. This cycle of poverty, under-education, crime, and violence undermines the thousands of underprivileged children, teenagers, and adults who are unable to extricate themselves from their situation.

Small businesses moving into the community often employ people from outside the community, and only serve to remove what little money there is from the local economy. Crime and other factors increase the cost of doing business locally, and solutions based on individuals outside the community quickly shutter in the face of these difficult challenges.

 

Here’s my proposal.

Concept:

Community crowd-funded co-op Brewery

Results from the Great Experiment

Well, what can I say...

The final results of our first experiment with Free, Good Will, and Marketing for a small business have finally come in. Overall, very few of the free tickets we offered were taken by the two organizations we worked with, and a third declined entirely for political reasons. Nevertheless, they expressed immense gratitude for our desire to give back to the community by bringing some happiness to those in need.

To simplify the numbers, our total sales topped $2,600.
Now, that doesn't sound like a large number overall, but consider:

1. Our total budget for the show was minimal ($2,000 budgeted, <$1,700 used)
2. Nearly a third of that was licensing fees.
3. We only ran for four shows.  Everyone wanted us to put on additional performances, but any more would have caused both scheduling and licensing issues. 
4. We came in at a quarter of our advertising budget with little to no manpower. Direct marketing WORKS.

This has been one of our top grossing shows. Overall, that's over a 50% profit for a short term project. Not too shabby. If we had the flexibility of managing our own space, we most likely would have been able to pull off more shows and attracted even larger crowds. As it is, we were sold out one of the nights and our overall audience matched our "better" advertised shows (read: paid adverts in local papers). For a nonprofit theatre group that's entirely volunteer owned and operated, that's not bad. Margins like this ensure we'll have ample cushion to operate shows with more elaborate needs. Our next two plays, a company produced children's play and a Shakespearean piece over the summer, won't have licensing fees at all.

Most importantly, we maintained ample contact with various organizations throughout the community. We are beginning to form connections to other groups which will, hopefully, bear even more fruit in the future. Working together with other social groups helps create that good will that's so critical in creating a successful bond with the public.

Lessons learned:

• Personal contact is Key - everyone you talk to is an individual. Unique. Treat them that way, and they will happily respond to you 
• Don't be Annoying, Don't be Ignored - make your message present and immediate, but not forceful - put yourself in their field of vision to grab their attention, but DON'T steal it, or they will feel cheated and resentful
• Word of Mouth is King - yes, a few people heard about us from the radio spot we did, some came from  the writeups we got in a local paper, but most came from a primary or secondary contact - think the "Kevin Bacon" type connections.
• You don't need a Big Budget to be a Big Success - what you need, to reiterate, is LOTS of energy put toward generating goodwill and personal connections within your community/audience
• Don't be Afraid to Ask - people are more friendly than you give them credit for once you get to know them; that surly secretary might react nicer to someone else in your organization. Know your assets and use them.

If I think of anything I'm missing, I'll update this post later. Any thoughts?

An Innovation and an Apology - Feasibly Fixing the Patent System

Sorry I've been out the past couple weeks - real life has been a bit... hectic. I'm working on rebalancing my obligations, so while I might not post quite so frequently anymore (hey, I'm only one person), I should maintain more regular activity here and with my twitter account.

 

This was a comment I wrote on Techdirt on the unidirectional patent system. The idea has been fermenting and fomenting for quite some time, and it may be a feasible method of appealing to the base economic instincts of the organization in order to modernize and fix a number of issues with the patent process.

 

A way to help balance the USPTO while *ahem* preserving it's business model: create an adversarial patent system:
At present, individuals pay to file and refile and, once granted, hold the patent until it is challenged in court. Since, as has been pointed out several times before, their operating budget is predominantly (if not entirely) derived from their filing fees, the economic incentive is to encourage people to FILE AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE - they make it difficult by rejecting patents, but only artificially so, as you can simply refile a modified patent with a new fee for reconsideration. After a rejection or two, they are likely to approve, since they don't want to DISCOURAGE you from filing at all - that would take away a revenue stream!

What if they instituted the ability to file a counter "anti-patent" displaying prior art and obviousness? Such an system would essentially "crowd source" the entire patent approval process and shift the balance of their incentives. By allowing individuals to submit prior art and obviousness research for a small fee, they can streamline and speedup the entire patent review process (for both new and old patents), lower fees for filing while increasing their revenue, decrease their operating costs (thereby maximizing profits), AND present themselves as "open source, modern government" with maximum transparency!
With this new system, to maximize profit, they must ensure as ROBUST AND PUBLIC DEBATE AS POSSIBLE.
If people can present counter evidence to a patent, then the patent will be reject/'on-hold' by the "reviewer" until the patent seeker files their counter argument against said claim. If they can't, they've lost their bogus patent and no one is worse off (though they may be free to refile, and the process begins again, but with precident from the counter-patent filers...)
"But wait!" (I hear you cry) "If they essentially crowdsource patent applications for us to do THEIR work, why do we need USPTO in the first place?!?"

Patience, Grasshoper. For now, they still are needed to be arbiters of the evidence provided. But one day... One day...

On the 'Moral Right' to Profit

This was written in response to Kevin Drum for an article in which he posited that " creators have a moral right to profit from their works."
And "I'd hate to live in a world in which authors found it nearly impossible to make money from their works."
Yes. Really a quote.
No. I will NOT justify his idiocy by linking his dogmatic rant.
Thanks to Mike Masnick and Techdirt.com for the to to the article, though.

Giving Away Scarcity: Free Tickets Aren't Cheap

I am presently engaged in a little experiment with a theatre company I help manage.
The nature of this group is such that our screwy demographic has a hard time finding us: to whit, many of the major social organizations that people participate in have actively rebuffed our attempts at advertising based on secondary considerations.

We exist entirely on a shoestring budget from year to year based on what little we gain from our performances and what we can scrape together as donations among the board members. With our ties to certain major organizations in the community, we are forbidden to directly fund raise to the public, though we may accept donations (and as we have just learned, money for advertising). As a result, we have little in the way of actual advertising within our community. As Marketing Director, I am doing my damnedest to change that, but with finances as a major issue, it's an uphill battle.

Laissez-Faire: Economics vs. Politics

Whew! Time to dust off my blog... Sorry. Life's been... life.

Tried to slide this one post in before the SOPA Blackout on the 18th...but I guess I failed. Whoops.
This is an important issue that's been percolating in my mind for some time now, and this will (in all likelihood) be an incomplete treatment of the subject.