Will You Help Design Our Blog?
— We’ll pay cold, hard cash for committed work —
Last month I joined a remarkable collaborative writing project dedicated to creating a new book on business model innovation. Through a blog/workspace called the Business Model Innovation Hub, the primary authors of this book-in-progress, Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, enjoy the input of more than 300 contributing co-authors from 28 countries.
Alex is a businessman, writer, and former academic who developed a simple, clear, and highly useful scheme for explicating and visually depicting business models. His methodology has been adopted by thousands of consultants, executives, entrepreneurs, and academics around the world, and is now used by companies such as IBM, Ericsson, and Deloitte Touche.
Here’s how the the Business Model Innovation Hub works: As Alex and Yves complete chapter drafts, they release them in PDF format to the group of registered co-authors. Co-authors review, then discuss and critique the text in an online forum, providing suggestions, anecdotes, and examples from their own work (many co-authors are active practitioners helping corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit enterprises create more effective business models).
The result is a truly international perspective on business model redesign. Alex and Yves are based in Switzerland, Alan Smith is designing the book from Toronto, Patrick Van der Pijl is handling distribution and logistics from the Netherlands, and I’m serving as editor (the book’s working title is Business Model Generation).
Seeing the power of this collaborative effort in action inspired a different approach to a challenge Mark and I have been discussing for several months now: redesigning the Soul Shelter blog.
We feel the quality of the content surpasses our in-house design skills, and that it’s time to raise our game both visually and infodesign-wise.
But instead of simply looking for a good designer who’s probably never heard of Soul Shelter, we figured, Why not ask the readers? After all, they (I mean you) are the experts.
So we are pleased to announce that we are seeking a regular Soul Shelter reader who’s also a professional designer: Someone with at least half a dozen WordPress blogs to her credit, and a good feel for the themes covered in these pages. We’d like someone with strong views, not only on identity and visual topic support, but on how better information design can encourage reading of past essays, among other goals.
We’d prefer to hire someone who already gets what Soul Shelter’s about, and who cares about our mission. Though we seek flexibility and a collaborative spirit, we’ll pay cold, hard cash for your committed work.
Interested? Drop a line to <authors> in care of this domain, tell us about yourself, point to some of your work, and include a daytime telephone number.
And for you non-designer readers (like we non-designer writers), please continue to share thoughts on how we can improve Soul Shelter from your perspective.
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2 Comments to Will You Help Design Our Blog?
You’re already doing quite well. I do have one suggestion. You could sign the articles so it would be easier to figure out whether Mark or Tim is writing.
Thanks, Dwight, you’re right — it says “by Tim” or “by Mark” when the post is on the top page, but that disappears after it’s been archived. We’ll get that fixed.