The Magic of Collaboration
A single person, committed to a task and thinking creatively, can do incredible things. This is how many authors, writers, and academics work. At the same time, when we isolate ourselves, we tend to sacrifice the multiple perspectives that come only in more collaborative community environments. This is something that programmers and software engineers know well, sharing their skills and ideas to create more powerful and more innovative projects, generating concepts and insights that they certainly would have taken their entire career to complete if they had been working on their own. To make collaboration simpler for themselves, they all work using an open-source piece of software – called Git (version control).
Through open collaboration and a community environment, people can accelerate the growth and evolution of ideas. This is untapped potential that many industries and fields – essentially all of them other than tech – have failed to recognize.
It all happens via version control (Git), which is essentially a tool that programmers, engineers, and developers use to build their applications and software projects. Git is an open-source software that keeps track of changes and differences between edits while allowing the owners of a project to peer-review and accept change requests.
Empowering Authors, Academics, and Literature Students
Seeing what Git has done for software development, we want to imbue the same type of collaborative support system into the writing process, opening up new worlds of opportunity for authors and academics to join forces and share their ideas, creating better works in the process. From fiction stories to non-fiction papers to textbooks and everything in between, creative and scholars can use our system to share their workload with one another and draw out even stronger ideas and approaches to the projects that they have in front of them. Students, aspiring authors and academics can get in on the system too, taking on small projects to build their portfolios and learning from established professionals.
FOA.PLUS – Applying the Git Concept to Authoring, Academic, and Apprenticeship
Thanks to FOA.PLUS, teachers can collaborate with other teachers nationwide, offering input on their subject expertise to fine-tune the content of a textbook much better than one or two teachers ever could. This is a massive improvement over the current model, and it will benefit millions of students while still allowing authors to add their own personality to the content, introducing more effective ways to explain and illustrate concepts in multiple different versions. Textbooks will not be one-size-fits-all anymore, and we are going to put teachers and students at the center of the $350 billion+ online education industry.
A New Way to Think about Authoring and Academia
There are three primary aspects of FOA.PLUS
* Website hosting for authors, academics, and literature students. On these websites, authors, academic, and literature students can monetize their services, and we will host daily, weekly, and monthly group writing contests to showcase the potent hypothetical potential of collaboration (based on detailed prompts) among our users. We will host these websites as subdomains of foa.plus.
* Gig market for literature students. This will feature microjobs through which students can provide research and other services. We will host this gig market on jobs.foa.plus.
* And of course, the collaborative side of FOA.PLUS, where authors, writers, teachers, and literature students can contribute to joint ventures and projects, submitting change requests to collaboratively-written textbooks that tens of thousands of teachers will participate in, managing projects via tools that have proven successful for industry-leading business management applications, and other useful features like messaging, forums and chatrooms, which will empower collaborators to co-create books, short novels, and other works.
Who Benefits?
The way that we see it, FOA.PLUS is a platform that will make everyone’s lives better.
* Students benefit by getting real-world experience working alongside professional authors and writers through internships and apprenticeships, learning to use live business tools to better manage their school lives and their everyday lives.
* Teachers benefit because they can coauthor digital textbooks, taking part in the inevitable switch over to digital. We are building the foundation of open online education market with teachers in mind, which is why they will share in the profits from sponsors placing advertisements in digital textbooks.
* Authors benefit because they get access to ideas they would have never thought of on their own. Everyone can still hold onto their “best” ideas but throw other ideas into the community, which will in turn lead to a major development force overall, matching creators up with one another.
* Academics benefit because they connect with other academic collaborators.
* Readers benefit because the stories and books available to them are more engaging. On top of that, readers can become micro-investors in books, novels, and other projects, earning a 10% profit share from the proceeds of the books – and perhaps even getting lucky and investing in the next Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.
* Authors, writers, teachers, and students can purchase affordable fully-featured websites and set up their websites on a FOA.PLUS subdomain.
* Bookstores can also set up their site, where they can host subscription services at a fraction of the normal cost, among all of the previously mentioned features that are available for everyone.
Moving Forward from Here
Our plan is to create three distinct sections of FOA.PLUS: the section for collaboration, the section for students’ jobs, and the main section through which teachers, authors, writers, and literature students can set up their own websites on our platform. To make all this happen, we are looking to raise $120,000, and long-term, we intend to make FOA.PLUS work for the people, donating 10% of our profits annually to 2,000 different authors, writers, teachers, and students.
A democratically-organized business, we will create merit-based job opportunities, and as a FOA.PLUS backer or employee, you will get to submit your vote to elect a headmaster figure, who will oversee the platform, selecting the next generation of students to receive scholarships and mentoring (based on an essay that students submit). On top of that, you will get early access to the job opportunities on the platform.
Challenges Ahead
We are taking on powerful structures – the established concept of sole authorship, the multi-billion-dollar textbook industry, the large powers that have a vested interest in keeping media and academia as they are – but we are not going to back down. We believe in the value of collaboration, evident in the tech boom over the last three decades, and we are intent on putting it within reach for authors and academics as well.
We know that there will be pushback from the textbook publishers and other media figures, but we will navigate this pushback as it arises. You can count on us to stay true to our democratic principles and send out regular updates about the work that we are doing to get FOA.PLUS up and running.
Tell Your Friends
Do you know a writer, blogger, vlogger, journalist, copywriter, ghostwriter, website content writer, speechwriter, literary agent, novelist, editor, proofreader, copy editor, or researcher? An academic, coach, counselor, librarian, school cafeteria worker, school cook, school bus driver, school janitor, security guard? An independent bookstore owner? A literature student? These are people who will benefit directly from FOA.PLUS, and we want them to know what we are up to. In addition to contributing to our campaign, you can help us by sharing a link to the campaign on all your social media accounts. Let all your friends and family know what we are doing and make sure that they understand the power of collaboration to change all our lives for the better. Even if you don’t know someone you can share it with right now, you can back our project to hold a spot open for a family member as a gift.
Thank you for your time and for your ongoing support.
$60 - more
As a backer, you will get access to the Paradise Package. You contribute $60, and you write a short essay on Paradise/Utopia. That is all there is to it. In return, you get access to the following:
* Comprehensive e-commerce website with free hosting for life for an author, writer, teacher, or literature student. Your website hosting will include a free SSL certificate (a $50 annual value), which is a requirement for credit transactions, and AWS backed hosting hitting 99.9% uptime. We will take care of maintenance, installation, SEO, and new themes every season plus full customization (and early access to new features for backers). On each website, authors, writers, teachers, and literature students can accept donations, sell books and services, crowdfund book projects, provide monthly subscription services to written content, accept freelance gigs on jobs.foa.plus among many other benefits,
* Behind-the-scenes webinars, vlogs, and tutorials, which we will release during our development phase of the FOA.PLUS platforms.
* Early access to any job openings that arise.
* Inclusion in a weekly and monthly AMA (ask me anything) webinars, during which you can interact with our development team as part of a series of Q&A livestreams.
* Inclusion in our monthly group writing members-only contest. This is a major advantage because others will need to qualify for the contest by winning daily and then weekly contests, and as part of the monthly contest, you can win $1,000 plus other exciting prizes.
* Fee-free service on all our platforms and features, including our project management tools and chatrooms.
* Unlimited access to private and public chatrooms creation for all your books, classes, and projects.
* Access to a six-month crash course seminar about building and operating a business, empowering authors, writers, and literature students to earn a living from their talents, gleaning insights directly from tech industry professionals who are building the FOA.PLUS platforms.
* A share in the 10% of the platform profits earmarked for backers. (Note: This is only available to current teachers, current students, and writers or authors who have published work within the last twelve months. We will share the profits as a sponsorship to authors and writers, as a donation to teachers, and as a scholarship to students as long as you still qualify.
* A vote in the process of creating the FOA.PLUS guidelines and rules, covering such issues as maximum wages, merit-based succession, and leadership. This also means that any of the original 2,000 backers could run FOA.PLUS in time.
* Input as to how we should allocate the other 10% of our profits earmarked for another 2,000 teachers, literature students, and writers or authors every year and within a decade, FOA.PLUS will be dedicating 100% of its profit to 20,000 teachers, students, writers and authors.
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