I posted this idea on the Startup Weekend  idea page, and figured I’d post it here as well:

The Idea: Vevo.com as in Vote Early, Vote Often.

Whereas twitter asks “what are you doing” in 140 chars or less, VEVO asks  “what are you deciding?”

The idea came from thinking about the Startup Weekend model. To eliminate the need for countless number of rules and to keep the Startup Weekend model self-organizing, we will need to rely on a democratic voting process to guide the course of the group’s action. I imagine we’ll be making a lot of decisions during the weekend through group votes. We will want a method to make these decisions quickly so we can focus more on developing and less on decision “overhead”

VEVO facilitates this process by allowing decisions to be made by a group through a quick, efficient, and accurate democratic voting process.

How it would work:

1. A group moderator sets up a voting group by adding group member emails and configures the parameters of the voting group (anonymous votes, voting duration, etc)
2. Group members login and setup their account (turn on notifications via email / SMS / whatever)
3. When a group member wants the group to vote on a decision, they can, in 140 chars. or less, enter a description of that decision (either online or via a SMS short code)
4. Decision request is broadcast to group members via their specified notification channel.
5. Group members have, say 5 minutes (configured by moderator in step 1) to vote with a simple Yes, No, Abstain (Y/N/A) response via email/SMS
6. After the voting period has expired, VEVO.com tallies the votes and updates the group members with the results of the vote via their desired notification channel.
7. Group members can go online to get a history of all decisions / votes processed by the system along with pie charts of vote outcome. If the moderator has configured the group such that voting results are public, members could see how each person voted on each issue.

Additional Features:
1. Multiple choice voting

Markets:

1. startupweekend
2. Classroom settings - enable feedback / quizzes in large lecture halls and eliminate the need for the “clicker” devices
3. Board Room / organizations
4. Advertising Agencies for instant focus-groups or quick-response surveys

How to make money:

1. See twitter.com
2. 37signals model of varying service levels based on # of groups that a moderator can form, # of decisions per month, security, archiving of vote outcomes, notarization of votes
3. Advertising (last resort)
4. Maybe Diebold will be interested in acquiring us

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.