Innovation on ILLUMINATION

Innovation Agenda

for ILLUMINATION Community of Practice

I can safely call ILLUMINATION as a community now.

We turned to a Community of Practice (CoP) with the contributions in the last five days. The community spirit is evident from contributions and conversations. Support, dedication, commitment, and fun are noticeable factors. I have strong background on leading CoPs for innovation and invention teams which I plan to share details in future articles. In the meantime, you can learn about CoPs from here.

In this post, I want to touch on the importance of innovation, out of box, and even beyond the box type of thinking for our mission.

We are all in difficult situations globally. As I briefly commented in a well-written article by Madoc Maduka today, we have two significant issues intermingled but one of them have lower focus.

Even though the world perceives the current situation as a health problem, the current Covid-19 situation has a tremendous effect on the economy. For example, many businesses closed in my home town and I lost thousands of dollars (at least 5 years of income) from my Superannuation fund for my retirement. I keep it in the right perspective but many people are extremely stressed and anxious about their retirement funds.

Health and economy are tightly related. As the economy slows down, we are prone to more health issues. While we are trying to kill a virus, we may end up many more physical, mental, and emotional health problems caused by economic and business issues.

Why do I mention this point to ILLUMINATION team?

I want to leverage this difficult situation as an innovation opportunity and strategy for ILLUMINATION mission. My proposal is to add the current difficult situation to our innovation agenda.

What can we do and how can we do that?

We have now over 150 super brains in our community. These brains serve as our content creators, knowledge harvesters, and insight disseminators. We call them writers and editors.

Our writers and editors are from different cultural, educational, and professional backgrounds. Writers and editors are creative by nature. They are also thinkers and solution designers.

My proposition as writers, we can bring novel ideas from our domains on how to address the health and economic issues keeping people in the center of the problem and solution circle.

What I mean for more precisely is to develop innovative content to address global problems in two broad categories health and economy.

These two disciplines can be further categorized under multiple domains such as healthcare, corporate business, small business, families, children, critical infrastructure, education, safety and so on. The innovation focus is on how to contribute to current global health and economic crisis.

I am not suggesting to write traditional and academic articles but bringing innovative ideas which can make people even laugh, frustrate, and challenge their thinking. This activity can certainly take us from our comfort zone to growth zone. Some of us can even operate in risk zones for this mission.

We can still use comfy content for information, entertainment, and inspiration purposes, but with this new goal, we can generate fascinating ideas and connect our ideas to create innovation.

This approach can help us raise our voice, create more visibility for our content, and contribute to the well being of society.

The grand rule for the community spirit is to be open-minded, not judging the ideas with traditional knee jerk reactions, but extend and expand ideas by politely disagreeing but still valuing the idea and its potential.

As you know, ideas come from our higher self, beyond identity, or spiritual domain. Therefore ideas require respect, unless they are overtly destructive ideas for humanity.

Sometimes the ridiculous ideas can save many lives and change life conditions. Innovation is our key weapon to win this battle.

To this end, I recommend two actions to the community:

1. Write at least one article within next 10 days on touching any aspect of the current situation in your domain. Ensure your article has a novel idea belong to you. The more unusual the idea the better it is. Explain your idea using your writing skills, whatever style suits you. It can even be poem or a witty paragraph.

2. As readers, we support the ideas by extending and expanding them. For example, we can comment on ideas, link them with other ideas in other articles. By linking relevant, conflicting, and contrasting ideas we come up more synergistic ideas. We will find innovative ways to combine these ideas.

My vision is to make the ILLUMINATION, an innovation center producing ideas to contribute to alleviating the pains of society and improve the quality of life. I look forward to your insightful, humorous, challenging, engaging articles with new ideas.

After this key message, I want to provide our progress in the last 24 hours.

We covered the social media in content strategy and marketing point of view yesterday in the attached article. Based on the points and actions in the article, I noticed that our Twitter list started working. I am also impressed and honoured with the connections in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Thank you for taking our content marketing strategy seriously.

Progress made on ILLUMINATION in the last 24 hours

8,512 minutes of read

9,669 views

350+ articles

209 followers

135 writers

50 editors

We have five days of data sample in front of us. I am glad Medium has this feature for us to visually see the progress.

Data shows that we are making good progress and growing steadily.

Congratulations

We have ten articles distributed to the topics as shared in previous messages.

Why being distributed in topics matter to us?

Not that distribution matter in the traditional sense, but the reason I enjoy and support our articles to be distributed is reaching out to a wider audience for our publication.

I noticed that the distributed articles show the name of the publication, as shown in the attached screenshot. Readers can click on the publication and can be amazed by the diversity, variety, and quality articles and can participate in our mission. This means that your articles can have more views and more reading time. Who knows they can even get viral one day! By getting more curated articles from our publication we are creating serendipity.

Today we have two new articles from ILLUMINATION distributed to the topics.

1. Accountability: How to Stop Being a Victim by Kathryn A. LeRoy, PhD distributed to #Leadership #Work

2. 7 Tips To Stay Connected During ‘Social Isolation’ by Lyndsay Landrey distributed to #Mental health

I read both articles and found them informative, insightful, and engaging.

These articles can bring new readers to our community. Congratulations to Kathryn & Lindsay for promoting our publication.

Thank you, Sylvia Love Johnson for introducing herself. With her article, we know Sylvia better. Sylvia’s experience inspired me. We are lucky to have Sylvia in our publication as a prolific writer.

I highly recommend all ILLUMINATION writers submit one article introducing themselves. This is a critical task; hence I keep repeating the importance of this in my last three posts.

Final Point

Clarification for the role of Editors on ILLUMINATION

The reason I choose this topic today is that unfortunately, a few of our editors had to stop their position due to the unnecessary alerts sent from the system spamming their mailbox. I am tagging and begging Medium Staff to give us a workaround solution to stop the unnecessary editorial messages.

All we need is a button to stop the unnecessary alerts. I understand that it is workflow function however giving options to the owner of the publication is not a big ask and not a big job. It requires a simple script in the system.

We have a constraint in using the term Editor on the Medium system. In Medium publications site there are only two roles: editors and writers.

However, we redefined the role of the editor in our publication and community.

ILLUMINATION Editors are not traditional editors like in other publications. Our editors are more harvesters and curators of knowledge. Our editors search for insights, wisdom, and meaning hidden in the ecosystem and bring them to the light on the ILLUMINATION publication.

Interestingly, some readers of ILLUMINATION send me private messages and emails why ILLUMINATION has unusually a large number of editors. They correctly assert that the most significant publications have only one or two editors.

My answer to them was:

We are not a traditional publication. We use the publication format, but we are a knowledge building and sharing community. Our editors harvest knowledge by exploring the ecosystem, clean the specks of dust from the neglected articles, and bring them to the light on ILLUMINATION.

As this is a new, unusual, and an innovative concept, some readers may be raising their eye brows, but that is fine by me. I have no fear of innovation and having original ideas.

It has been only for five days, and we made substantial progress as depicted in our stats above.

Thank you for performing with your current level of commitment and support. You can see the order behind my perceived madness within three months times. To confirm, I have vision, strategy, and capability. I am also determined and committed to our mutual success with your support.

My key message to the editors, please ignore those messages. Until Medium provides us with a solution, you can safely delete those messages. Instead, let’s focus on finding new and exciting content from our articles or our follower articles and bring them to the light on ILLUMINATION. This is the primary role and responsibility of ILLUMINATION editors.

Our editors are not proof readers. Articles submitted to ILLUMINATION so far are at high standard. Our writers are professionals who care about the quality of their content.

As final update, I am working on an FAQ for ILLUMINATION and share with you and prospective writers and editors soon.

Thank you for your wonderful and inspiring support.