Rather than go through the excruciatingly drawn-out process of obscuring message with prose, I’ve decided to simply post my outline.

Introduction

• We consider The Point’s flexibility to be one of it’s greatest strengths
  • Change the day of the Super Bowl, fund a musical, or make election day a holiday
  • To really influence the status quo, The Point needs to attract more than self-identifying activists
• But flexibility is also a liability
  • Browse today’s popular campaigns you’ll find a lot more that doesn’t interest you than does
  • There’s the risk of finding content that clashes with your ideology, which could alienate you from the site as a whole
  • No, not “you” as in you – I mean, everyone else!

About Channels

• Channels divide campaigns into topics of interest.
  • Provide a more focused, rewarding browsing experience.
  • Election 2008, Social Experiments, Fund an Artist, Consumer Rights
• You can follow any channel to be notified when new campaigns are gaining some traction

Profound ending

• Falsely attribute one of the following quotes to Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Channels, had I knowneth thee, I’d have not besmitten my folly”
  • Check to see if it’s actually “knownedeth”
  • “Tally, on the hill! T’was it campaign channels?”

-Filed in The Point

We’re excited to announce our newest site section: Community.

Community is a one-stop-shop for you to keep up on what people are saying and doing on The Point.   The goals for Community are to help you find people to connect and collaborate with, and to inspire you by highlighting success and recognizing people who are doing great things at The Point.  Community includes the latest discussion, top contributors, new members, success stories and more.

There are lots of useful features wrapped up in Community, with more to come.  We hope you like it – stop by and let us know what you think or give your suggestions on how we can make it even better.

Here are the highlights:

Discussion

Keep up on the discussion going on within campaigns at The Point, start your own conversation by posting your campaign idea to the Brainstorm forum, or join the General Discussion.

You’ll always see the latest posts in all forums right on the main Community page, and be able to dive in with a click.

We also gather all discussion happening within all campaigns into a single view called Campaign Discussion, where you can see what people are saying elsewhere all around The Point.

Find People

You can do a quick search to find people you want to connect with on The Point.  We’ll be expanding this in the future to help you find people by geographic location, your address book entries and more.

Success Stories

From time to time, we’ll be featuring people who are having success with The Point, and we’ll talk about what made their campaigns tick.  We think this will help you find ways to make your campaigns more successful, or inspire you to start a new campaign.

Each time you visit the Community page, you’ll see a randomly-chosen Success Story.  You can click to see another, or click-through ‘Read More‘ to see a mini case study.

New Faces

You’ll see the newest members of The Point on the Community page.  We only show new members with profile pics, though.  Generally speaking, we find that people are more successful when they have a visual identity online – even if it’s a picture of your dog with a party hat – so we’ll be favoring people with a profile pic when we feature members around The Point.

Top Contributors

We like to give recognition for a job well done.  Here we’re showing people who are having the biggest impact on The Point.  We use a scoring system that gives points for creating successful campaigns, joining campaigns, and recruiting others to join campaigns, and contributing to discussion.  The Top Contributors leader board is just a start – we’ll be adding more ways to recognize our members’ great work in upcoming releases.

Successful Organizers

People who have run successful campaigns are given some time in the spotlight here.  Like Success Stories, we randomly choose a group to show each time you visit Community.

The Point Blogs

Finally, at the bottom of the Community page, you’ll find the most recent posts from here on our blog.

-Filed in News, The Point

For those of you who get your news from The Point Blog, here’s a quick update: the economy is kinda bad. So are the good times over? Not if we leverage the collective buying power of online communities.

The Point is powering a new site that will launch later this month called Groupon, as in “group + coupon.” The idea is simple: each day there’s a huge discount on something fun to do (launch version is Chicago only), but only if enough people join to “tip” the deal. By guaranteeing a lot of sales, Groupon is able to offer some amazing discounts.

Much like woot, each Groupon includes a fun writeup, often by someone who went out and experienced whatever it is you’re buying. Aside from the great deals, I’m excited about Groupon simply to get a daily dose of interesting new things to do in my home town.

So if you live in Chicago and you’re interested in great deals on local stores, services, and entertainment, stop by and sign up to be notified when Groupon launches. And if you’ve got something you want to sell, send Groupon an email

-Filed in Groupon, Tools