The Collaborative Micro-Enterprise

So what? "So you can create your own business? Big deal! There is nothing new, or exciting, or overtly-empowering about creating your own business, is there? It's generally too much work for the average person. Too much of a struggle, right? Not to mention that large established corporations can obviously give us stable employment, and supply retirement and health benefits far more securely and easily than we can procure these services ourselves, right?"

Well, if this is what you think, you might have been right 15 years ago. But, increasingly, there are social and technological systems that are emerging that make "creating your own business" a wholly different concept.

The biggest differences are:

New technologies that give people access to tools and knowledge that previously was only available to a select few. These new technologies give people universal and direct access to markets. They allow people to create and maintain collaborative knowledge bases. They lower the cost of communication. They remove or greatly diminish the overhead cost of doing busniess on many levels.
New decentralized concepts and technologies of cooperation and collaboration that allow solo enterpreneurs to join together and fashion themselves as an outsourcing option for corporations, governments, communities and general markets on all scales.Ideas like "micro-investing, micro-lending, and micro-enterprise" are not just for developing world contries. The same concepts can be applied here in the United States on local levels, working directly with people in communities and neighborhoods of all types. As more "traditional" employment roles are outsourced and offshored, a new opportunity has arisen that can allow any individual to create and grow personal wealth and enrich their life.

Related Sites And Telecommunities

The Emerging Micro-enterprise Paradigm WebDesk: This is a WebDesk that is being used to organize the concepts that we are developing at Enterprise 4U around the idea that the technology and conceptual framework now exists for virtually anyone to leverage their personal expertise to create a personal micro-enterprise.

We are also exploring the idea that these micro-enterprises can collaborate and sustain themselves and grow, using new technologies and new conceptual frameworks.
Enterprise 4U Telecommunity: A TeleCommunity is a web based cooperative or knowledge collective: a social network, of which the members self-organize and cooperate online. Participants may include managers, designers, programmers, researchers, marketeers, lawyers, trainers, sales reps, cybrarians, people involved in education (including students and housewives), consultants, journalists,... and all other creative knowledge workers including writers, film makers, musicians... from all over the world, connected to each other over the Internet.
Social Synergy: My own Emerging Micro-enterprise!

SOCIAL SYNERGY provides customized social software solutions, and training to clients who need intuitive collaboration environments.

More info about services:

Social Synergy aids people and groups in learning how to efficiently use tools, and create virtual environments that help users:

* Recontextualize and share knowledge in many different ways.
* Learn how to effectively collaborate in virtual environments.
* Help make tacit knowledge explicit.
* Effectively and intelligently integrate knowledge from many different areas of thinking into useful and dynamic knowledge bases.

Social Synergy offers training and consulation to organizations of all sizes, and individuals in the effective use of powerful emerging social software and Knowledge Management/Integration tools. Concepts such as Blogs, P2P, IRC, IM, RSS, Skype Tagging, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking Software, Wikis, Content Management Systems, Podcasting, etc. are very foreign to most people. But, they need not be. Social Synergy can show you put these tools to work for you and your organization. Whether you are an organization needing to develop an in house knowledge base/collaborative system, or an individual solopreneur, we can help access and effectively use web and software tools to enrich your life, and work faster and better with others.
Smartmobs Weblog: An intro to this subject by Howard Rheingold:
Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Check Smartmobs weblog for latest trends and informative analysis of Technologies of Cooperation, Sharing Economies, and more!
Corante Hubs: Corante Hubs are web "destinations" for readers who are interested in staying abreast of the latest developments in specific fields. Corante Hubs will be launched in our core content areas - marketing, law, web technologies, science, and media - and will grow from there.

Based on a new publishing paradigm, Corante Hubs provide editorial drawn from a variety of sources - including the independent blogs authored by Corante Network Contributors - and original commentary and reportage created by dedicated Hub editors. Corante Network contributors are respected and renowned bloggers in their field of expertise who have agreed to have their blogs tracked, cited and synthesized by our section editors, and syndicated through our hub.
The WebAssistant TeleCommunity: What is WebAssistant.com?
WebAssistant.com is a company founded in 2004; a spin-off from Ecotopia, founded in 1993. Both are headquartered near Brussels, EU.

What does WebAssistant.com do?
We produce, distribute and sell the TeleCommunity (TC) platform, and provide support & customizing services.

What is the TeleCommunity platform?
The TC platform is a knowledge accelerator, and a platform for the knowledge economy, with which you can create, frame and trade knowledge products and processes, and manage intellectual capital.

What is knowledge? What is a knowledge product?
At WebAssistant.com, we define knowledge as organizing principles for personal and collective worldviews, plus the content to which these principles refer to.
A knowledge product consists of information, framed into a context that makes sense to the user.

Examples of some knowledge products can be accessed in the WebAssistant eLibrary.

What is a worldview? What is intellectual capital?
At WebAssistant.com, we define a worldview as the sum of an actor's intellectual capital - a more or less integrated collection of information, knowledge, know how, experience and expertise - on the basis of which an actor interacts with the world. Actors can be individual people, but also groups and organisations. Elements in worldviews are often surpressed and unconscious, lacking coherence and integration, which leads to underperformance and conflicts.

The Social Synergy Weblog

Social Synergy is the enterprise that I have created to help people deal with the complexities of knowledge, understanding, change, human systems, evolution, foresight, cooperation and collaboration, and technology.