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Permalink Reply by Amoira on June 28, 2012 at 2:24pm

I'm a WoW nerd, Athene got me here way back when. His fame was such an enigma at the time. And I'm pretty sure most girls were like aw damn Dean is a cutie! =D Yeah I believe a good portion of people are here for shallow reasons like that, but I feel real sorry for folks if that's true about what you said of the old crew and how they aren't active anymore. Because it meant so much to people when they could talk to them. It meant a lot to me, even though it wasn't much more than simple acknowledgement, it sure gives you a big smile on your face when you have the ability to talk to someone you admire. Dean telling me to take down my offensive signature on another site instantly made me think I was the shit for a couple days. And being a high school student at the time self confidence like that was hard to come by. But I'm pretty sure a new crew could rock this site just as good as they did if not better in some aspects. Though without the old crew you face the competition of sites like facebook and other popular social media sites. Like you just said you guys use google plus, how is this site going to become an effective tool to express the goals of the new crew? And how do you captivate the interest of people who join who are orginally joining because of the old crew? Disappointment is quite a turn off. Maybe striving for a new selling point? Small communities are cool but new people are fresh and have their own ideas, their own logic and can help challenge ones own self development more than just those you are familiar with. Plus isn't it refreshing to reach a new mind and inspire them? Anyhoo I hope you get a great new crew together, I'm sure it will be fun no matter the old expectations. Oh and you look a teensy bit like David Tennant from that picture as far as I can tell Tom. That's pretty chill imo. I knew of a guy who went to conventions with his girlfriend and they were a David Tennant Dr.Who and Rose pair. 

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on June 28, 2012 at 4:16pm

Nice post.  Bold... but nice.  :-)  

I-Power was established in 2008 as a social networking platform where people from all around the world could get together and collaborate on self-improvement, self-empowerment, and social activism projects.  And although the site has never been used to its full potential, (even when the Belgian Crew was active here,) it is still very helpful & useful, in many ways.

Which is why they keep paying for it. 

And while some people may consider your idea to be somewhat blasphemous, I personally like it.  It actually represents the spirit of what I-Power is all about -- which is feeling personally empowered enough to where when you see a cause that you feel is worth some energy and attention that you will be courageous enough to "pick up the torch" {so to speak} and personally do something about it.  Attempting to rally the attention and help of others to assist you in the cause is a part of that, of course.  That's what activism is all about. 

But anyway... I'm in.  The Belgian Crew has changed and matured since 2008, and although Reese has said several times that I-Power represents the spirit of everything that he & Chiren do, I also think that it is pretty obvious that they have no intention of spending much of their time here anymore.  They have been having some major success with their new Livestreaming site, and I wouldn't drop that if I were them.  heh

Which means... that the future of this site is up to the members like yourself who care about it.

In the end, it is going to be up to us to decide what happens here.  

Which is kinda cool, actually.  Reese has also said that they never wanted to breed Athene followers here anyway -- they wanted to breed leaders.  I know that he fully supported the "Junior Crew" idea that a few of us had last year, which I eventually ended up creating a Group for.  That fizzled out, {along with many other things, lol,}  but I also think that it will serve as example of what I'm saying, and that is that I think he would totally support an idea like this, Tom.  ;-)

http://ipowerproject.com/group/creating-your-own-crew

The biggest problem, as you mentioned, is that the majority of our membership were originally drawn here by watching Athene videos on YouTube; and I suppose that many of them had hopes of getting close to their favorite gaming celebrity here, {or to Dean, or to Tania, etc.,}  or of maybe wanting to troll them. XD  And once they discovered that that wasn't going to happen, most of them disappeared, never to be seen again.  It's only the rare few who ever got a clue as to what I-Power is really all about that ever stuck around and did anything.  

And what that all boils down to is this:  

How do we attract those people back to I-Power, and keep them engaged?  

and

How do we attract new people to the site who will not be here looking for Athene and the rest of the Belgian Crew? 

.

/discuss  ...  I'm all ears.  :-)

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Permalink Reply by Michael Smith on June 28, 2012 at 5:34pm

Watching the theory of everything had a link that routed to here and that's why I joined. To me it was a forum of individuals who wanted to discuss anything and everything, while keeping quantum mechanics and brain sciance at the core of their reasonings. After being here a short time I have noticed this place is much more targeting the self development side than just discussion. I find this to be great since talking is useless if you cannot act after your plan. I know nothing about the original crew. But if you older members will accept me, I'm in. I am in an extremely busy career field that can take hours at any time for any length, how ever, since finding this site I have regularly checked on activity. As I have said I am all about a good discussion as it helps me carry my zen with me to hear another's thoughts.  But i am more than willing to provide any help that I can in other mediums of this sites goals.

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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on June 28, 2012 at 5:46pm

Well Tom... You know I'm definitely in on this one. I'm with Shiznit in thinking this is a very bold move, but I think it is a needed one. This site is full of untapped potential to change lives and help change the world in a positive way. We all need a rallying point and hopefully together we can all find one and help this community reach its potential.

So count me in. :)

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Permalink Reply by Reese Leysen on June 28, 2012 at 6:50pm

If people want to organize something like this, Shiz and I will definitely be down to help set it up. (I'm thinking moderator rights, page-creation rights to highlight who the members of the new crew are etc, access to the old Twitter acct, I could do a vlog to announce it,...)

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Permalink Reply by SparTom007 - Tom on June 29, 2012 at 7:09pm

We all had a great idea for the site but none of us were quite sure whether the NING framework was capable of it. Basically it would be like an achievement system (a la microsoft Live achievements for xbox and windows) in which you would be awarded achievements for achieving certain goals in self development. Each achievement would reward you with some "points" and a badge or something on your home page giving details about the achievement. Your total points would always appear with your username wherever you post. To make sure that achievements aren't just given by scripts when undeserved, to have an achievement activated, doing a certain action and it being worthy of an achievement should be given by a moderator. For example, an achievement could be "Upload a video to i power" and then anyone could get this achievement just by uploading anything completely irrelevant, or linking someone else's video to the site. So instead, when a person uploads/links the video, a moderator is notified, and if the video is relevant and actually by the person who submits it, then the achievement is awarded.

This system should help with making a "crew" of sorts too and allow those who do not have time often to act like a "crew" of sorts, to still show up as SDAs on the forums, because they have lots of points, when they give advice, people will be more willing to take it on board.

Another part of making this system fairer would be achievements that reward those who show that they help others with their own self-development, not people entirely focused on themselves.

Hopefully I've made it clear what we were aiming for with this idea. Let us know if that's possible if you can :)

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on June 29, 2012 at 10:01pm

I think it might be important to clarify that this was only one of several ideas that have been proposed and discussed this last week;  and it was yours.  lol  

It is something that's worth talking more about, though.  Like it or not, it is a fact of human nature that people enjoy being recognized and praised for things; and the thought that they might receive such recognition & praise is very often a solely sufficient motivator for them in and of itself.  March and I joked about this a week or so ago in relation to a job that she had then, (which she has since quit,)  and we were talking about how often companies will use job titles as a method of "promoting" somebody, or to just make them feel better about a job,  but without paying them very much or significantly increasing their wages.  In other words, that a lot of people won't care so much that they are only being paid a minimal wage as long as they can tell their family and friends that what they do is important, and their job title lends credence to the claim or belief.  :-) 

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/w-burger-engineer-interview-998617/

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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on June 30, 2012 at 1:16pm

Is this really important? Surely it's better to attract people who have their motivation the right way round. Rather than focusing your efforts on capturing a wider audience.. making the whole thing more complex in the process.

Surely exposure (e.g. advertising, youtube presence) is your #1 bottleneck to getting ideal members. Which, as mentioned above, is chiefly about the particular message in the videos.

Pragmatism: stick at what you are going to do, rather than jumping into more tasks as they come ('feature creep'). have realistic goals.

Secondly, why do people want your forum ranks/achievements? What makes them meaningful or more special than XBL achievements? The idea of designing such a reward system (see: 'gamification') is that you understand it fully, and it can then be applied to manipulate the users to some advantage. Making people contribute purely *through* a reward,.. that's not what you want even if you can do it.

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Permalink Reply by SparTom007 - Tom on June 30, 2012 at 4:50pm

I understand what you're trying to say. Basically, having this ranking kind of system may lead to people feeling superior and inferior to those with a higher score, but one of the main things to remember will be that, none of it means anything. It will just be an arbitrary number in the grand scheme of things and the real things that matter will be realising that there are more important things to be worrying about in the world.

As for creating exposure, I'm not sure what you mean. Part of the reason I had this idea is because people are still drawn to this site by AtheneWins. In creating a new crew which will draw people to the site we can make the site less misleading. Obviously, people will always come hoping to be able to talk to Reese or Bachir or Dean or Tania etc but eventually, if this idea works, the balance will shift to newcomers wanting to speak to those from the new crew- and then they will actually be able to.

Another thing I should have mentioned with this idea, is I want the crew to be ever changing. I love that the old crew has moved on to bigger things, it's inspiring because it means those who take their place could perhaps do the same one day. Instead of breeding followers, the site, and each crew, will breed leaders; as Shiz put it :)

The new crew shouldn't be a static thing. It should be an idea, just a few people that others can be inspired by and look up to and ask for advice on how to become awesome and inspire others too. I'm quite sure that was the original aim of the crew, to inspire and teach how to inspire. All I want this new crew to be is people who have something to give willingly; it's not about ego, it's about passing on knowledge :)

Again, about the gamification, I think it's important that we make the achievements in such a way that rewards participation in the group and helping the community. Not just rewarding people for what they might interpret as them being better. All of the achievements should be possible for any member regardless of gender, location and whatever else might effect people's ability of doing them.

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Permalink Reply by Nathan Davies on June 30, 2012 at 6:50pm

I understand Tom's idea, and I'm sure it was easier to explain in person on the G+ hangout than it is in writing. Really the system as Tom envisioned it would be rather fair and I think he was looking for something that would simply motivate people as having a visible reflection of their progress, not so people could compare and feel superior to one another.

That being said, I've done some researching into this and it's not going to be possible to do it within NING's framework. Unfortunately NING is still a limited platform compared to facebook and others, but that is likely what gives some of the charm and usefulness of the platform as a whole.

Solarize, I understand what you mean about advertising and simply trying to hang on to the members who are here for the right reasons (at least that's how I took your comment). That's what the people who have dedicated themselves to becoming the new crew are doing already. In fact we're doing it now, by being on the site, actually engaging in discussion. That is something that has been sorely lacking on I Power for a while now, and I think we're all very happy to see people poking their head back in to see what all the talk is about.

Like Anthony Robbins says, "If something doesn't grow, it dies." Every contribution, every new member, every new thread and every chat we have about the topics this site was founded on helps the site (and each other) to grow just a little bit more.

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on July 5, 2012 at 2:59pm

That being said, I've done some researching into this and it's not going to be possible to do it within NING's framework.

I found this by accident while looking for some help on something else last night and thought it might be appropriate to throw in here.  It's some kind of addon script for Ning sites that awards points and titles to members, called eReward.  I didn't check it out in any detail because, honestly, the more I think about this whole idea the less I like it; but it does look to be something that would provide the functionality that you guys are talking about.  

As Sorlaize mentioned above, I don't really think we want to be attracting people here whose motivation is in the wrong place; and if people are only going to be contributing content here because they think that they are going to be given some kind of a title or cookie for doing so, then that seems like a very poor motivation to me.  I remember, for example, when I was in early Grade-School that our teacher used to have "spelling bee" competitions and that she would award the winners with little colored stars next to their names on a tote board in the classroom.  I used to win those spelling competitions a lot, and so I got awarded a lot of stars -- and although that made me feel good, it also made a lot of my fellow classmates hate me & make fun of me - which did not feel good. 

Social Activism should be an altruistic endeavor - not something that you do for personal profit or reward.  {imho} 

Plus, I would get a lot of stars here and you all would hate me.  XD

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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on July 2, 2012 at 11:34am

>As for creating exposure, I'm not sure what you mean. Part of the reason I
>had this idea is because people are still drawn to this site by AtheneWins.
How about, make some videos about what ipower is about. Give some good examples, why particular issues are important. You need to build a brand basically. Athene's, from what I could tell back when I got interested, was that of... trying to be engaged in what life is, finding some sort of existential truth, and generally mastering things.. or something to that effect.

If you aren't attracting people for the right reasons.. I don't think it's good to dwell on that. I think it calls for change. Just trying to give my best advice. :)


I guess the systems on forums and discussion sites, for rep, all have their use. Maybe I'm reading too far into it.. generally I think though, it's best to stay away from system specifics (web software platform / server application framework) and more on doing something valuable in terms of activism and philosophy... you can always outsource specific software work, or get some professional guidance, if it's causing you a lot of trouble or time.

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