After reading Jeff Howe's book on crowdsourcing, I was driven to look hard for a new project to get started. Combining Tribes, Here Comes Everybody, and Crowdsourcing, my creative urges were working full time thinking of potential applications for all of these concepts. After debating various possibilities, I finally stumbled upon one that I felt would be something enjoyable as well as empowering. The idea was to create an entire setting for a non-electronic role-playing game complete with history, geography, people, places, and things. There was even a domain ready for me to use create this using the community aka the crowd aka the swarm: bySwarm.com.

Using a voting and comment model to rate content, the site will build a complete fantasy setting from scratch based on the ideas put forward by the Swarm. While there have been other open efforts to build a setting, this one will be the first to have a company behind it with profit as an additional motive.

Taking the crowdsourcing idea to completeness, I am also in essence crowdsourcing the company formation by trying to recruit a handful of people to found the company that will be responsible for the community and tools. That means recruiting one or two programmers, a legal person, an accounting person, and possibly a designer to not only put in a microinvestment of $50 to $500 but to also do work using their skills and expertise much as I have so far. I have the big picture abilities, but I would like to have some experts as partners to fill in the details where my broader knowledge could use extra help.

With those meager financial investments, I think that the investors will be able to get a return on their initial funds within the first year. This belief is based on my experience with other projects around online communities. As a possible long term exit strategy, the project would be successful enough that we could sell the company to a larger publisher which would have significantly higher returns.