We Will Build It – With Your Help

In response to the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, we took a poll about your willingness to join a tech-focused, monitored, social network with subject matter restricted to tech, culture, and innovation. The number of respondents was overwhelming and the results were decisive. Over 90 percent of you said you would join. So let’s get started.

I am thinking about an invitation-only, multi-sided, extensible platform purpose-built for value creation. Something like a restricted (and highly monitored) LinkedIn meets Upwork at dev.to’s house with Facebook-level media handling (images, video, audio, etc.) and curated sections with fairly large volunteer “content police” committees for each area.

The biggest thing we have going for us is “us.” Our community is awesome, and together we can build a networking platform that drives all of our businesses forward.

Creating Value

This platform will create value by replacing a fair amount of traditional in-person meetings with curated structured information, automated response tools, video conferencing, and messaging tools. And it can evolve into anything we want it to be.

The inspiration for this platform is a vision of the future where it is too hard, too expensive, or too dangerous to travel to all but the most important conferences and meetings. I admit that premise is a bit dystopian. But I am thinking about the future through the lens of current events, in the context of the available technology, and following the early signals of the tech that is just over the horizon.

As we thought about it, we analyzed our travel budgets for the past three years and then added in the costs of various events we staged or attended. The economic benefits of a workable platform like this will be substantial for everyone.

Core Capabilities

Consider this platform’s core capabilities as a digital representation of an old-fashioned purchase funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). There should be areas of the platform that are dedicated to awareness and discovery. Areas that take you deeper and then give you all the tools necessary for you to take action.

As you well know, the technology to do every part of this exists in separate places now. Anyone can publish a blog, do a podcast, host a webinar, create a virtual meetup, join a LinkedIn or Facebook group, watch people code live on Twitch, create a public or semi-private Slack channel, etc. – but what if we could build an environment where all of those disparate events could benefit from the network effect in a curated community?

This is where a multi-sided, extensible platform comes in. To make the data actionable, we will combine the platform with super-easy ways to build integrations into every possible communications tool. You will be able to access all of the information and interact with everyone regardless of your workflow tools: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Trello, Clubhouse, Basecamp, Airtable, SmartSheet, Excel, G-Suite, Office365, Zoom, Hangouts, join.me, FaceTime, WeChat, WhatsApp, Slack, Twitter, SMS, every messaging app, every social network, every cloud storage area – everything.

We’ll build both low-code and no-code integration tools. And we will open source the parts of this project that will benefit from being open source. The goal is to integrate the platform into the ways you work, not the other way around.

As you know, there is a huge difference between clicking a “like” button and actually signing up for something. So at the bottom of this article, there’s an “Invitation to Invent the Future” form. There is a very good chance that if you are reading this you are already part of the community, and we will welcome you with open arms. But this will not be an open social network (there are already too many of those). We are going to curate this experience from day one.

We Need You

What we need are your ideas. If this platform existed, what would it do for you? How would it create value? What are your answers to: “You know what? It would be great if we could _____.”

The Palmer Group has the tools and capabilities to build this, and we are privileged to have the support of a remarkable community of engineers and technologists as well as the open source community. But just because someone can type 120 words per minute does not mean that person can write a novel. We need your input. Your expertise. Your commitment to be the architect of the future you want to live in. Please fill in the form below. Thank you.

If the form is not visible, click here.

Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it.