Philosophy & Pricing

A few years back when I started using Airset there was a very clear difference between what it offered and what everybody else offered. This difference came from a core philosophy, and had very practical implications. It was the reason we chose Airset.

Every other online group-organising software I have come across, from Google Apps and Zoho Business to educational CMS like Blackboard and Moodle, proceeds from the same assumption. I join. I am asked to name my organisation/company, and then I become King of that company. I am the Super-Administrator, and I can appoint administrators and give them privileges. They can appoint juniors and so on. The structure is a pyramid and if anyone wants to create a new group/project/whatever, they have to ask the person above them in the hierarchy, and sometimes the request needs to go all the way up to the King at the top. This is the kind of hierarchical system that rules Medieval England.

Airset, on the other hand, more nearly modelled an ideal 18th century town. Everyone is queen of her own castle, and people join together in different overlapping groups, needing nobody else's permission. I am the head teacher in the school and I rule the school group. Jeff is the head volunteer fireman and I am a member of his group. And so on. Importantly, groups can come and go. Some of us decide to hold a summer fair. The originator oi the idea starts a temporary group. We join. The fair is held. The task is done and the group is disbanded. In this model there is no King, and groups are tools through which people come together for as long as necessary - and groups interact and overlap as needed.

These two models are very different philosophically, and have different pedagogical and practical outcomes. They have different core objects. In the first model the core object is the organisation, which has an administrator who admits members and assigns them roles. In the second model the core object is the individual who bands together with other individuals in a variety of groups that are of varying degrees of permanence. In the first model, when I leave the company I leave the Airset group, and all my relationships inside the company group are lost. In the second model, when I leave the company, I lose membership of my official work group, but retain all my other relationships.

The second model has been important to us, because our students can form their own research/workshop groups without having to ask my permission, and then share anything they want or need to share from that group to the "official" course group. This has proved flexible, popular and empowering.

Originally, as I understood it, Airset's goal was to create a personal and social organiser for people who organised in the way suggested by the second model. You joined Airset individually and then formed or joined groups: family, work, church, hockey club and so on. The tool set acknowledged this, providing non-business applications like music and photo albums. In this model paying for Airset by the group would make no sense at all. Let us call these the individual users.

On the other hand, it appears that a lot of people (maybe most people) are using Airset for some variation of the first, organisation-based, model. They probably have no need of music and photo albums, and would be quite happy to pay by the group - because their members only use one group, plus (maybe) their own personal "web computer". Let us call these the organisation users.

Brian asked the question: how can we set up payment options that will not confuse or anger people, but still take care of these two types of use? (I am paraphrasing here!) I think that there is an answer hidden in the current AIrset feature set that, with a bit of tweaking, could differentiate between these two uses, and provide the basis for the two different uses. Here is how it would work.

1. Premium individual users pay $2 per month. For this they can join or start as many groups as they like. Each group has 1gb of storage, and each member gets 1gb of personal storage. Each group can contain a mixture of free and premium members. Free members see advertisements on every page they visit in Airset. Premium members visit the same pages but see no advertisements at all.

2. Premium organisation (business?) groups cost $10 a month, which is paid by the person starting them. The group gets 25gb of storage. Each member gets 1gb of personal storage. Everybody who is invited into the group gets an advertisement-free view of Airset.

3. The master group option is only available to premium business groups. In fact every premium group IS a master group, and every group organiser can create as many child-groups as they wish, linked to the main master group. The only rule is that only members of the main group can be invited into the child-groups.

4. Master groups are tweaked so that sharing information from the master group to the child-groups is optional. This provides a new level of functionality that allows separate sub-groups to be created within a premium group. (From recent forum posts, it would enable groups to be created for two separate stage shows, assuming that everyone involved in the shows was also part of the master Theatre group.)

Airset would then have two clear offerings:

1. Airset Personal (for people who joined as individuals and formed "informal" groups, as in the original model; and
2. Airset for Organizers (for people who want to organise and maintain businesses, churches, clubs, and so on).

Does that make sense, Brian? Does it make sense to anyone else - LOL?

Cheers
Owen