thoughts from experts

There have been three different experts whom I have talked to in depth about this project. The first person is someone who has set up multiple different companies. He has been able to generate funding and actualized on many different products and projects. I received a lot of great feedback about how to structure a deck, and how to go about getting everything ready to start getting money for this idea. There was a lot of conversation over whether or not I go the non-profit vs. for-profit route, and whether their is a viable business model in here that would generate investor interest

The next person I talked to is an expert on Reputation Systems. This is not as simple as looking a distributions and removing outliers. There are a lot of things to be concerned with what I like to call “Strategic Voting” but the main idea is that the algorithm/process needs to be able to stop collusion while still being timely. This balance is the main engineering challenge of the project, and why it is not as simple as a weekend hack job.

The last person was a professional journalism with ties to different news organizations. Our talk covered mainly how these organizations functioned, and how best to get the “Trust” that was missing in news articles. I found out about the Knight Foundation whose organization is focused on grants for initiatives similar to mine, and she suggested that this project might be an ideal candidate for these grants. It is sounding like the main route might be to pursue connecting with non-affiliated journalists, and journalism schools to get their rankings of articles.

What was consistently stated was that each expert agrees with the following:

1. This solution cannot be accomplished by a big company or media entity (like facebook), because the main problem it addresses is “Trust” and each of those organizations have to start with an inherent bias because they are all publishers
2. The time to act is now, or preferably like six months ago. The issue this project addresses is frequently being dealt with by everyone

Here are the questions I need to answer in order to get moving:

• What is the fastest route to getting the ball rolling?:
  • Make an alpha product that accepts ranking and provides basic stats, and leverage my social network to get those rankings
  • Make a deck to get the money, and connections needed to get the right people to rank
  • Apply to the Knight Foundation to get a grant/connections
• How should the organization be setup?
  • (Individual) to get to poc, then take care of legal entity later
  • (Non-profit) Benefit of looking more Altruistic to help with “Trust”, however the Bureaucratic hurdles might be take too long to get going
  • (Com) Might have a slight hit to “Trust”, but if the investment dollars are well taken care of, and board is carefully chosen might not be a problem.
• What is exactly the mission Statement?
  • Is it building “trust” in the news?
  • Is it rewarding good journalism?
  • Is it early identification of bad journalism?
  • Is it about getting positive reinforcement back to publishers for good articles?
• How do i want to get people involved?
  • Do i keep this a secret to those i trust?
  • Do i start getting people excited now?
  • How do i find the right people?