Telecafe

Telecafe is the entreprenurial arm of the PortlandWiki contributor team.

Splash Screen

The essential idea is to launch a business enterprise that would seek commercial work and devote a portion of earnings and/or development resources to PortlandWiki.org. Telecafe's origination comes from the notion that the existing contributors of PortlandWiki are equipped with commercially valuable skills. These talents could be leveraged to provide a bridge to PortlandWiki to professional level resources, while fostering a more robust network of contributors.

Goals

• Sustainability - By creating a revenue source, we compensate contributors. This will create stability and consistency that can only be obtained from salary. Volunteering has a high burn-out rate, Telecafe will counter that trend.

• Resource Symbioses - Telecafe serves PortlandWiki in areas that is difficult for PortlandWiki. Such as funding events, providing financial rewards to editorial, pay for hosting and technology infrastructure. As Telecafe increases in value, so does PortlandWiki. As PortlandWiki increases in value, so does Telecafe.

Service Proposals

• Seed Writing - A wiki is only as good as it's contribution level, but freelance writers by themselves are incongruous. A client might lack skilled editorial staff to hire and manage them. Telecafe serves as a wiki editorial agency to plan a unified editorial strategy complete with editing and writing services for a corporate wiki, that would be needed to flesh out their initiative.

• Wiki Integration - Design a wiki platform integration, that would allow wiki's to be embedded easily into commercial portals. Much in the same way that forums are added to customer support areas. Wiki's in some ways can serve as forums, since the bulk of great content, tend to be research and analysis. By not being married to a particular technology, we can match the solution, whether it be wikia,Wet Paint or a hand-rolled version.

• Wiki Design Shop - Wikis have been around a long time, and while wiki's like Wikipedia continue to grow in visibility and interest, there has yet to be strong design work in the wiki market. Most wikis either look like Wikipedia (like we do), or they look like blogs (like Wikia sites do)

• Knowledge Management and Extension Development - Similar to the wiki strategy services, there is also the possibility of helping clients with Knowledge Management which is a market that is largely untapped. Clients who own large amounts of knowledge for public and proprietary purposes struggle to make it available to customers, with our experience in working with wiki and other web-based media we can provide valuable direction and development solutions.

• Vertical farming - This might make the Telecafe misleading. But perhaps urban gardening, wikis, and technology could come together in an interesting way. This and this and this might be used as model of this arm of Telecafe.