Comments on: Musing about Ebbsfleet….and Obama

By: Mark Samuels

Mark Samuels — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:50:51 +0000

Ebbsfleet? Changing the world for the better? Frankly, I’m not so sure.

Collaboration, community, interaction… Yeah, I can see that side of the Ebbsfleet ‘experiment’. But there’s also a much darker side.

So, participants are mailed with questions concerning the day-today running of the club. Fine.

But the end point of the interaction has always been for fans to ‘help’ manager Liam Daish select the team. The group running the ‘experiment’ suggest it could be logistically difficult. How would you feel if a bunch of strangers told you how to do your job? Positive? Pleased? I doubt it.

Fans were recently asked if they would like to have an input on team selection – the majority said they would, in some form.

Not exactly fair play, is it? I thought football was a sport, not a social software toy…

By: david cushman

david cushman — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:40:42 +0000

Love the Ebbsfleet story, and blogged about it from inception. You’re right to suggest it shows the way of the future – communities of purpose are the business units of the 21st century – as I often bang on about.
I’m told the crowd at the FA Trophy was a record. Someone described it as like being at a wedding because you kept bumping into people you ‘knew’ digitally and this was the grand opportunity for them all to come face to face. Those people came from all over the world. The internet lowered the overhead cost of forming this community of purpose. awesome real successful example!

By: Alice Bachini-Smith

Alice Bachini-Smith — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:56:45 +0000

It doesn’t matter how Ebsfleet does- pioneers often fail, due to being the first ones out there. But someone has to do it.

This is a great idea and a brave venture, and it’s brilliant that Ebsfleet are testing the water. If they fail, some other group will surely try again, for their own reasons, and they will have learned from whatever happens to Ebsfleet and likely do better. But the human race won’t give up this path, because it has such enormously good potential.

We should be grateful when people do this stuff- it’s changing our world for the better.

By: Frymaster

Frymaster — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:12:13 +0000

Alan,

The idea with Obama is that because he has small amounts from many, instead of large amounts from few, his financial constituency is de facto de-specialized. There will be much less pressure to meet specific industry demands, so we’ll expect (hope for) better governance than we’ve had.

We may be in living a fantasy, but if it is, we’re gonna enjoy it while it lasts.

JP,

I’ve always been wary of group-managed ventures, as they can dither and miss opportunities. This set up seems more BoD/CEO, so there is the freedom for executive action. I’m interested to see how this plays out over the years. Can they climb the ladder? How high?

Talking of which, can you believe FulhAmerica stayed up? Heroic last few games. I thought we were for the can!

By: alan p

alan p — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:31:07 +0000

I agree Ebbsfleet is very interesting, and we have noticed a parallel trend in that people trust “social” enterprises rather than commercial ones in areas in their lives such as medical data etc.

Nonetheless, I thnk the “other shoe” has not yet dropped at Ebbsfleet yet, to wit the owner / manager conflict of interest (Agency Theory) has not yet had time to play out yet.

In politics to a large extent it has played out imho – large numbers of people elect politicians, who from then on tend to do (more or less) what they want, influenced more by special interest groups than the masses who elected them initially. Its unclear to me why Obama will be an exception to this.

This to my mind is why the voting turnout is frequently low – the average voter knows they will have minimal individual impact.

To your point, if one could build a system that made him accountable to all those small-cap bakers, and a way of discerning what their will as in a consistent way, we would have a Democratic resurgence – Politics 2.0.

Ditto Ebbsfleet.

I live in hope, but on past evidence I’m not overoptimistic.