What will Jonas do in 2010?

A friend of mine is embarking on the journey of his life. Me and a couple of others decided that a fun way to say goodbye (and hello when he gets back) is not to throw him a party, but rather a project. One that could potentially change his life. I’m addressing this post to certain people (Jonas, Anders and Simon so far), but it might be interesting for others to follow as well. Here’s the idea.

The premise: Jonas is quitting his job and leaving his country to go to New Zealand with his girlfriend. He’s going to be there for half a year. When he gets home, he has no clue as to what he is going to do. He’s a really clever, bright, talented and hard working guy, so he could do anything – if he just knew what he wanted to do. How is he going to figure that out?

The solution: A few of his friends issue him a challenge. During his six months in New Zealand, he will deposit 500:- SEK each month into a bank account that he cannot touch. For each month he will also create one possible action plan that he would like go through with. These action plans can be rather rough, but must be feasible and have the potential to provide for Jonas. When he gets home, a jury of interesting people will decide which plan he should go for. As starting capital he will get the deposited money. Jonas is, one could say, investing in himself.

The possibilities: Beside getting an incentive to figure out what he should do, this project brings possibilities that could strengthen Jonas life after New Zealand. He would gain if he got three things during this little game:

1. Creative entrepreneurial input to get his thinkin’ juices flowing
2. Some word-of-mouth to make him more interesting to potential employers
3. More money to fund whatever venture the jury decide upon

How do we do this? From my point of view there is only one way: we let other people join in on the fun! Basically, that means two parts:

1. Building a platform to centralize communication, and
2. Producing goodies and involving people to get them interested.

What must be done before Jonas leaves? Building the platform and testing it out. The rest will fall into place quite naturally with some hard work and persistence. I assume that I don’t have to argue that the platform should be on the ‘net.

So, what will be the sites’ primary purposes? Three things:

1. It will let Jonas share his thoughts and talk to the rest of the world (in entertaining ways)
2. It will let the rest of the world talk to Jonas (y’know, two way-communication)
3. It will enable people to support Jonas

To satisfy number one, the format is given: Jonas must have a blog. As it turns out, he already got one, so we’re going to evolve that. Jonas is also an iPhone-guy, so if we integrate the site with Flickr and Twitter he will be able to communicate on the go with both pictures and words. The blog format lets people talk to Jonas through comments, which is great. But we can do better. How about we also give people a section of the site where they can post ideas for him? And maybe, if we have the time, to enable people to vote on the ideas? Maybe we could have a whole Support Jonas-section where people could post pictures and messages and whatnot? And, as a final touch, we set up a way for people to donate small amounts of money to Jonas.

All of this might work, and it might not – either way it will be a fun experiment.

So, what do we need for this to happen? Here’s a few roles we could fill:

• Someone to build the site
• Someone to work out the tone of Jonas’s voice (copy, site layout etc)
• Someone to take pictures
• Someone to do fun animations
• More! What?

What’ve I missed? Please, fill me in. I’ve got thoughts regarding all of the above so far, but I’m keeping it to myself until I’ve managed to express them better in my head and have gotten some thoughts from you guys. Here’s the confirmed people involved so far:

• me
• Jonas Lundström (the man)
• Anders Larsson (the myth)
• Simon Zetterberg (the legend)

Between us we got the skills to make it happen. Here’s what I want you guys to do:

• Think: how can we evolve the idea even further? What do we need the site to do? How do we do it? Who do we need to do it?
• One of the pitfalls that can (will) make us lose time is organization and task splitting. We will do this together, but people will need to take responsibility over certain areas. I talked to jonas over the phone today, and we assigned the project managing role to Jonas: he will communicate with and organize all of us. Until someone says otherwise, I will take responsibility for the creative lead on the project. This is a do-ocracy – what’ll you do?
• Make room for us to get together on either the 6th or 7th of June.
• Until then, discuss in the comments.

And that’s it. Please, lets discuss this in the comments. (And feel free to do so in Swedish, I just wrote it in English since the rest of linusbohman.se is in that odd foreign tongue.) Now, Simon, Anders, Jonas – let’s get crackin’. (And if you just stumbled upon this post and want to join in on the fun – great! Let me know!)

Peace out.