English

The problem¶

It’s hard for new-founded independent projects to find collaborators. Although there are many organizations that want to promote an ecosystem between projects, the optimal outcomes (not saying the expected ones) isn’t achieved. Especially if the idea is so novel. Since it takes a lot of time and cognitive wordload to have deep conversations, often the project has to grow big enough to have a staff specialized in networking.

Finding collaborators for new-founded independent projects with groundbreaking ideas is difficult. In the 5 years I’ve been involved in non-profit networks and communities, I feel that although there are many organizations that want to promote an ecosystem between projects, the optimal effectiveness has not achieved yet, despite of my great appreciation for their effort and professionalism. I must frankly say that I am very disappointed after the networking events. Everyone knew each other, but after the events, everything just stopped there, nothing could go any further. I think the most important reason is that the participants are too busy. People can’t go deep enough to get to know each other. Especially if the idea is so novel. Since it takes a lot of time and cognitive wordload to have deep conversations, often the project has to grow big enough to have a staff specialized in networking. If there are community connecting organizations actively categorize and organize meetings for similar new-founded projects, that’s great, but I don’t see that.

For an ecosystem to operate effectively, the amount of energy spent to capture the signals of the environment must be reduced to almost zero. You do not need to ask and still know the needs of the stakeholders, and they don’t have to ask to know what you need. While we always encourage asking questions, an ecosystem does not work by asking questions, but by knowing what the answers are without asking. And current project management tools do not have the ability of providing team information to other teams. Until stakeholders’ needs are stored right in the team’s database without having to look for it then we can begin to talk about an ecosystem where new organizations and projects – who are very short of staff – can still benefit.

In the current market of task management and note-taking software, Obsidian seems to be a promising tool that can meet the need of collaboration in large-scale. The power of them lies in Obsidian’s philosophies:

Local-first and plain text
Link as first-class citizen
Make it super extensible

These philosophies enables a vast of functionalities that a community development project would need. To name a few:

Community members can passively contribute their insights, needs and other data in a shared repository. They don’t need to care (too much) about the shared database but can still enjoy the benefit from it, just by focusing on managing their own projects. Their contributions are just a by-product of their focus on themselves.
Via graphs, everyone can see the big picture of the community: which need is needed most, who have the same needs with whom, etc
Completely free, no paid functions or per capita. Suitable when you need advanced functions or when the team is expanding without much money
With plugins, its functionalities can gradually expand depending on the needs and the current status of expertise of the users, making it a cognitive scaffolding to support part of the cognitive load, making it a medium of thought to augment our cognition
Obsidian can be used in combination with other data processing solutions, avoiding data fragmentation due to storing data in many different tools.

So what will we do is essentially categorized as technology education: helping new-founded organizations to learn Obsidian.

The plan¶

Rough Financial Projection: How will our revenue, expenses, cash flow develop? How and when will we break even?¶

Currently, all of our income comes from donation. We expect it to grow more.

Let’s talk about the evisioned ecosystem in the form of a shared database. One of its vital feature is a graph of needs of individuals and organizations. All participants knows which needs are needed most, who have the same needs with me, etc, and thus can figure out a way to satisfy their needs. Mostly via collaborating with others who have the same needs with them, or via exchanging the needs. If the network grows and operates as expected, after a tipping point, the percentage of satisfied needs of an entity will grow larger and larger. This makes the whole network functions as an economy. Since the needs are satisfied without money involves, so this is a moneyless economy.

Non-monetary economy is not a new concept. The oldest example of such an economy is barter. The gift economy is also another example. The Community Exchange System is a success story that has 1241 exchange groups in 107 countries. It can also be analyzied as a platform economy. Our product would be similar to it.

So back to the question, it is possible to answer how will the our revenue, expenses, cash flow develop. But answering them should be considered as secondary. The better question should be: how the ecosystem serves the needs of its members, or at least the our members?

Market¶

We are in the process of conducting market research so their is no solid evidence yet. All we have for now is our experience and some interviews. Plus that as we aim at joining the moneyless economy, many concepts from traditional economics many not be well applied or required to be modified. So currently we can’t say much about the total available market or how the market may evolve in the future.

Our target beneficiaries is people who want to learn how to manage their life well, organizations who want to find a tool to manage their projects or build community efficiently, and anyone who want to join a moneyless economy where you list your needs and cooperate to anyone who are also interested in having those needs served.

So far, the only direct competitors we can see are cloud solutions for business, like Google Workplace or Microsoft 365. Their strengths:

Backed big companies: lots of money, lots of trust
Users already know how to use the tools well

Our weaknesses:

Coreteam cannot focus full-time on the project
Obsidian and Git require users to spend a decent amout of effort to learn

Appendix¶

It isn’t news that by centralizing data storage on servers, users’ ownership and agency on their own data is taken away. It also isn’t news that storing data in local solve this problem. In fact, this is the most basic method in data storing and everyone knows it. However, if you ask an avarage user to list some data storing solutions, they would very likely only name cloud apps like Google Docs or Notion. There is a reason for that: centralizing data storage on servers is enable real-time collaboration excellently.

So there is a tradeoff that every system designer has to face: do you want your users to gain whole control on their own data, or do you want to enable real-time collaboration? This, by far, is still one of the hard problems in computer science.

However, digging deeper on the problem you will see that Hợp tác thời gian thực không thực sự cần thiết trong đa số trường hợp. Đa số đều là hợp tác phi đồng bộ. And there is an excellent tool for asynchronous collaboration for local-first data: Git.

So what will we do is essentially categorized as technology education: helping new-founded organizations to learn Obsidian and Git.