Manifesto!
Manifesto?
Imagine if Craig, of craigslist, built a tool to help local networking.
This is what we envision for imby. Free, fully transparent, locally focused, and highly useful.
The principles that guide our efforts:
- Working with people in your community has tangible and intangible benefits to both you and society overall
- People have a limited amount of time for networking and want to make the most of it
- Not all networking is about sales. Professionals are often just looking for compadres, people to learn from or who they can relate to
- Transparent and interoperable systems reduce gaming and foster trust.
- Professionals want to use the identities that are most broadly useful - Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc
Web services such as LinkedIn and Twitter are being embraced by business people. They work. They've done a phenomenal job of delivering value. Community tools of this sort are helping professionals discover each other and network across the globe. However, when you ask a professional where they work they will say "I work in Madison", look at their LinkedIn network and you will see an overrepresentation of Madison professionals, their Twitter timeline will have many tweets between people within a few miles of their location.
This is not an artifact, its because even for services that can be sourced from anywhere on Earth, working with local people has tangible and intangible benefits. Because of this, virtually all professionals seek to connect and network with other professionals in their local community - regardless of how actively they network with distant markets.
imby is built to allow professionals to optimize their local efforts via the efficiencies that have made globalized efforts possible, to do so without creating a local "closed garden", without asking users to sacrifice any of the power or reach of the services they have already adopted.
We're just getting started with imby. Please signup and let us know what imby can do to improve your local networking efforts.