Want to make a living by hosting an online community? See this thorough post on exactly how Motley Fool creates multiple ways for amateur investors to help each other make smarter choices. 

Because the process and results are transparent you can see credible comparisons. That’s a trust-building feature for attracting members to any community. 

Denis Hancock describes how they evoked this Wisdom of Crowds effect to grow a profitable business.

Hint: They “used the insights from their community to enhance their core value proposition, rather than replacing it.”

To keep your community members happy hear insights from veteran Patrick O’Keefe.

… a good guide. Now here’s a new company I’ll use and hope will succeed.  GoodGuide has recruited scientists and other “trusted advisors” and gathered facts from a wide range of resources to enable you to make wiser choices about the consumer products you buy. It rates products three ways: health, social and environmental. At home or on your mobile, standing in the store, get the facts that are most important to you about the kind of product you are contemplating buying.UC Berkeley professor and Good Guide CEO Dara O’Rourke’s lofty aim?  To be “the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies.” He sure has impressive partners.They are in start-up mode so there will be bugs in the system. Make suggestions about how you want it to operate or the products you want them to rate.  See and vote on others’ suggestions too.  (Ah, the Wisdom of the Crowd at work.)Tell me if you find it helpful.P.S. Months later Church of the Customer is giving it a thumbs up. 

Bluntly speaking, we are more likely to cooperate in a group when those who don’t get punished. “Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn’t see how important it is.” Little has changed until relatively recently.

We were raised to compete because we were taught it was a matter of survival of the fittest. Yet, as David Brooks noted, even today, some believe in upfront combat and some in consensus.

Speaking of working together (or not), in many situations experts are not as accurate as a large group can be. “In fact, large groups, structured properly, can be smarter than the smartest member of a group.”

Want more insights on when and how we will act to accomplish something better together than apart? Explore The Cooperation Commons, a project co-sponsored by The Institute for the Future and today’s interviewee, the ever colorful, Howard Rheingold.

Last February this somewhat unconventional Stanford professor won a MacArthur Foundation grant to create a social media virtual classroom, “to show use how and why to use social media. What’s worked and what hasn’t, so far, in this experiment – and how can we learn from his experience, to hone our use of social media? Unlike many other academics, as Rheingold has written, “Talking about public opinion making is a richer experience if you’ve tried to do it.”

A veteran commentator on participatory and social media, he covers Second Life, flash mobs and group swarming that inspired Improv Everywhere, our instinctive desire to participate in a compatible group, ways the faces of political candidates influence voting, civic participation and the proliferation of uses for cell phones to riot, buy, protest, protect and play together.

Following up on how cell phone use is changing us, read the new book, by sociologist Rich Ling: New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion.

We’ve all served on committees where a few diligent people did most of the work. Or gotten stuck in a boring meeting, where some just yakked and yakked. No agenda. No incentives to work smart. Time drags. You could get it done faster and better on your own.

Collaboration is only as strong as the weakest link. As a former journalist, I was accustomed to mostly working alone. No excuses. No “crowd” of other reporters to explore how we’d write the story – and meet the deadline and beat the competition. So, as a speaker, I was startled to work with so many companies and associations where things, well, took much longer. Those who did not do their assignment weren’t lambasted. Consequently, for a long time, my instinct was to duck serving on boards, avoid volunteering for committees or accepting invitations to be part of business start-up teams. But that’s changed. I am now an advocate of collaborating – in smart ways. Got so fervent on the power of partnering that I wrote a couple of books about it.

I realized that, with the right Rules of Engagement, where people are motivated to contribute their best effort, everyone can win. More opportunities appear. Sometimes friendships happen. When we are working from our brighter sides together then we tend to become ever happier and higher-performing.

The secret seems to be two-fold. Creating the right method to
1. attract the best of “us” (the right mix of people in the best roles) for a task ….
2. to contribute the best side of “us” (talent, temperament, experience, etc.)

Don’t let group participation be a wearisome bother but a benefit for all.

Following up on yesterday’s post about Crowd Wisdom (avoid the Crowd Stupidity experience), here’s three more sites that involve advocacy and polling. Set up a poll. Offer your opinion. See what others think. Then use the results to be quoted on the topic by the media, improve your product or mix of services that for firm or not-for-profit provides.

1. Tribyounal: From child custody to copyright, you can post a question on a social or business issue, share evidence and create a poll for the crowd to contribute more information and then vote on the question. My thought here: when you ask the right question, the poll results can provide a news hook for the media to interview you.

Suppose, for example, that you work for a child advocacy group. You might submit the question, “Should TV shows that involve violence be shown before 9:00pm? The poll result and the kinds of evidence contributed by both sides are grist for a human interest story for newspapers, radio talk shows and mommy bloggers.

2. Avanoo: Take a stand, contribute evidence, include photos other media to support your view then start a poll to see what others think.

3. CrowdRules: Share the url of your video to get feedback from other users. The responses could help in market research and to find helpful allies to improve your idea.

Here’s more places to propose a question or to get an answer from an expert in the crowd, including my two favorites.