Steve,
I've been working on a similar project for the past three years -- connecting and empowering world-changers. Here's what I've learned from my experience.
Previously, I was co-leader of the Freak Revolution. Our slogan was "Normal people won't change the world; we will!". Our message was very powerful and resonated with a lot of people, but it was out of alignment with oneness because it created an "us vs. them" mentality.
We created a forum where our freaky world-changers could connect, and it was good, but insular. It helped people know that they are not alone, but not a lot of growth and world-changing happened. So we shut it down and evolved into the Connection Revolution.
Our goal with the Connection Revolution is to attract like-minded people, help them connect with each other, and help them develop the skills they need to change the world.
On the skill-development side, we've offered courses in personal development, world-changing writing, entrepreneurship, and teaching. We blog about these topics. We wrote a book about communication and relationships. (The Usual Error; remember that?)
On the connection side, we've highlighted people on our blog, gotten to know people online and off, encouraged people to connect via social media and blog comments, created course-specific forums, taught in-person group workshops and online group coaching. We've got a list of allies on our website to point our people to them.
What I've learned from these efforts at connection is that most people feel like they're the only ones. They're thrilled to find a place where they belong with people who share their values and passions. But then when they find it, they don't really know what to do with it. If you dump them into a big forum, they might connect with a handful of people and make a few friends, and that's awesome, but they don't self-organize.
What we've found works better is, instead of having one big community, to organize specific groups of people for a specific purpose. For example, students taking the same course joining an online forum just for that course. At first, everyone wants me and Kyeli (the leaders) to pay attention to them, but since we're interacting in a forum and encouraging people to interact, they start helping each other out. The momentum and focus still needs to come from the leader(s), though.
The same principle works well for offline groups like workshops. You need a leader, a facilitator, a moderator.
This is why this forum right here isn't sufficient to achieve the goal you're talking about. We've got all these amazing people in the same place talking to each other and discussing ideas, and it's awesome, but it's not the thing you're envisioning.
When I first started out with the Connection Revolution, I thought I would be gathering world-changing leaders together and helping them act cohesively instead of independently. Instead, we accumulated lots of followers instead of leaders. The leaders are already doing their own things.
Also, just having a big list of "these people are awesome and here's why" helps a little, but a personal recommendation or introduction is much more effective. A lot of what I do is introduce people to the other people they need to be collaborating with or talking to. I haven't figured out an effective way to automate or systematize that.
So I think that creating one great big community of world-changers would just create a great big mess. The two useful separable tasks are:
1. provide support structures for YOUR people to do what they came here to do, and
2. do something completely different for the leaders who already have their own groups and are already actively pursuing their own visions.
Trying to lump both together fails because they have different needs.
Let me know if you want to talk about this more. It's a big chunk of my life's work, so I've got a lot to say about it. (:
*hugs*
Pace
p.s. DannyS: I'm in Austin! *raises hand*
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