Continuing to brainstorm about how all this talk of shared value communities fits together into new creative possibilities. This is just me running off at the speculative mouth about the potential shapes these things could take… Other people, I am sure, will be able to develop and apply these ideas far more successfully than I. In fact, that is what I am banking on, and why I am sharing these things publicly.

One way of thinking of a shared value community is almost like an interest group in politics (see also: advocacy). It is people organized around a particular issue who want to encourage or discourage change around that particular issue. You could also potentially compare this to an affinity group within activist circles. As far as my own understanding of the concept goes (and it is still developing), a shared value community could potentially encompass both interest and affinity groups, without necessarily needing to be politicized. Although, at a certain point, any group which becomes large enough tends towards protecting its own interests. This seems to be a natural progression. (PS. The organizational notes on the affinity group page are worth checking out if you’ve never come across this stuff before).

Towards that end, I’m also interested in exploring how shared value communities could form other types of unions, including especially legal and financial. SVC’s could form social lending circles and engage one another in value exchanges using alternative or complementary currencies of their own design. An online-based SVC could also pool its data resources and create a bloc of content (including data profiles, data mining, etc) which could be leveraged collectively into multiple ad and other revenue streams which accrue into some collective account. Money could then be drawn by voting or some other decision-making process for specific projects. For instance, an SVC could award creative grants or scholarships to its membership. It could even theoretically fund a full-on interest group for the purposes of advocating a certain stance politically, which could then be supported by direct-action affinity groups.

Another way to think of it: an SVC is almost like a sub-culture (or maybe a sub-sub-culture) which - given the right tools, circumstances, members and agreed-upon intentions - could form itself into a legal corporation or a series of inter-linked corporations. I don’t know enough (or much at all, really) about corporate law though to really have a solid grasp as to how this could work. But it seems to me to be worth exploring more fully. As mentioned above, the corporation’s products could be its collective datawakes, which it could license or re-sell to bigger companies who want to do market research on it. Or the corporate side of the SVC could act almost as a focus group to interface directly to other corporate entities who want to sell products to members of an SVC. They would act as almost an advisory council or a translator between other corporations and members of the SVC.

With the trend towards stratifying the internet which is already underway, I can see the strong need for SVC’s to form unto themselves and cluster together in order to protect and collectively maintain certain types of content: that is, the “value” upon which the shared value community is based. I’m envisioning something like collaborative “web realms” made up of like-minded individuals and communities forming their own internet strata.

The reason all of this stuff seems so important to me is that there are many types of content out there on the internet, and many type of “value” out there in the world. And not all of them are commercially viable for traditional businesses, which means that they will not be supported, or they will be actively selected against or deprecated by business interests, or even censored in certain circumstances. Unless, of course, we cook up other models wherein the people who know the most about certain things and who value them the most can find ways to eke out a living preserving what they love…