Howard Rheingold wants to enlist you

Howard Rheingold at TED in 2005.

Objectives

One of our objectives is to get people out of email when working with critical issues. That would be a win.

Science

Presently we are developing a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding proposal for the National Science Foundation in the U.S. The SBIR program requires participants to conduct a feasibility study; to develop an experimental platform for their innovative concept and collect data about its viability. This process is an interesting counterpoint to the more prescribed software start-up process of iterative development based on pursuing perceived markets until the product’s capabilities align with consumer demands or needs.

Pursuing this scientific approach has focused us on the isolating the significant variables that constitute the value in the product. By pursuing a data-driven approach, the presumed value that we have “hypothesized” that resides within E-Nact can be systematically revealed, tested, and measured. Unexpected results and values can be worked iteratively into the product’s design, and we can proceed knowing that the product is validated as providing value when contrasted with a baseline set of control activities.

We believe E-Nact provides transcendent value as a product and methodology with a fundamentally novel approach to facilitating and guide group in an on-line domain. We’re looking to use science to abet our narrative about the advantage we think E-Nact provides.

Dealing

Deal making and resolution is one of the use cases for E-Nact! In some ways it is a root case in terms of the real-world process it was conceived as untangling: deal making in the short line rail industry.

This is intrinsically multi-party, and intrinsically complex give all the real constituencies that must be served.

From experience, we see the number one impediment in that arena — complex multi-party deal-making convening numerous public and private entities — is a consistent complaint:  the “not doing small deals because they take as much time as the big deals” syndrome. The friction and overhead involved in the process scales upward when you add multiple parties. And the patterns for the existing resolution and deliberation model is fixed on multi-year cycles, not 60 day sprints to movement that we’re talking about with E-Nact!

We have built E-Nact to address the overhead component of complex deal making, and consensus building. It is a reliable process that enables all parties to maximize their interests — transparently and in agreed-to running order. Value conveys from this maximization of interest.

Aligning multiple parties and stakeholders

This is the great challenge we face. Too often parties walk away with value that could accrue to them..left on the table, so to speak.

E-Nact addresses and solves the issue of diffused commitment from negotiated agreements among willing parties.  It addresses and solves issues of consensus-building that plague multi-party issues in areas such as alternative dispute resolution, and any kind of commercial real estate deal making (to give a few examples.)

Or E-Nact becomes a solution for use by the UN and the world’s ambassadorial corps to coordinate agreements — in a fraction of the time and with greater transparency than could ever be imagined at present.

We will provide many definitions and the tools with which these core ideas and heuristics can be reliably used.