Orientation

UPDATE: November 2012, this blog post and previous ones talking about the Dendrite Network refer to an earlier incarnation. The current version is discussed above.

To everyone who's about to help me try out the Dendrite Network for the first time: thank you!

If you're reading this right now you almost certainly know me and you've come here to find out more about how to participate in the trial runs of the Dendrite Network that I have planned for this week.

It should be fairly simple and straightforward but because no one's ever done it before it will take a bit of explaining.  I'll be concise and break it down by the old "who, what, when", etc., format.

If none of this makes sense read the earlier blog post "Demo Dendrite Network" which explains a great deal, and/or just email me.

Who

For the first few runs you'll all be people I know. You may not each all know each other but I doubt there's anyone reading this (at least in the last week of April 2012 here) that doesn't know me.   So we're all friends here! ^_^

You are more than welcome to invite others to participate, in fact I encourage it, but I'm not eager to grow the network any faster than it's natural organic rate.

What

My plan for the next few days is simple:

1. Invite enough people to play/test to get a good network effect (I'm hoping fifty or so, but anything above twelve participants should start to be instructive.)
2. Once we have a pool of players we'll pick websites to represent us and generate tags for them (you can think of these tags like avatars or game characters but it's just a website that can represent you for the purpose of the test run.)
3. We'll each pick a few contacts and trade tags with them to form the initial network.
4. Once the network is built we'll release a meme into it and watch the network graph grow as we build, forward, and visit Bump URLs.
5. Some of us will click "engage" and I'll track that and pay out rewards for it.  (We'll use points rather than dollars, and if I can I'll get some cool schwag to give out or something. Yay!)

And that's about it.

When

Hopefully we can get together enough people to play by Monday, but I just realized that this is Earth Day weekend, so I'm sure a lot of people will be out and about tomorrow and not online.

With any luck we should have enough people (up to about 50 or so) by Monday to form a network and try out a couple of meme propagations.

Why

Well, in the first place it should be fairly fun and interesting.  If it works like in my dreams it will revolutionize what we call the economy, helping to usher in a new Golden Age of abundance for all. (Dream big much?)

I don't think anyone will be getting rich overnight and anyway that's not the point. I'm not interested in making anyone rich, I'm interested in making everyone rich.

I think this system is a fundamentally new way to harmonize mercantile and altruistic behaviours, and I think it's something we should expect to be happening at this time..

There's only one way to find out.

How

Concretely speaking, if you're game to play, do something like this:

1. Pick a website to represent yourself. It can be anything but the obvious candidates are things like your homepage or blog, or your public profile on a social network, or your Twitter page.
2. Get a tag for your site's URL at the register page.
3. [Optional] Introduce yourself in the DN Google Group. In order to coordinate and connect up I've created a google group. If you want, join up and introduce yourself (and publish the tag you just created in step 2.)

That gets you into the party. Once we have enough people I'll create a fake site (or just pick something) and a fun way to reward y'all and we can give it a try.

Thanks again so much for helping me out.  Who knows? Maybe you'll be telling your grandchildren about this someday...

Warm regards,
~Simon