Gary K. wrote in yesterday: "YOUR web site, which I discovered by accident is one source of goodness that helps to restore the faith in this nation and the people.  THANK YOU and GOD BLESS!"  The day before, a Korean and Vietnam vet posted a long article saying how happy he has been to discover HelpOthers.  Despite have read these thank-you's daily -- via email, stories, comments and donations -- it never gets old for the entire team of 60 who anonymously manage HelpOthers. 

What's perhaps curious, though, is that because we are largely anonymous to the average HelpOthers user, the avid fans are redirecting their gratitude to "step up" their kindness activity.  Case in point, ModestoBob. :)  And as we deepen the many-to-many communication pattern, it is curiously bringing us into the realm of crowdsourcing -- the idea of opening up closed-network tasks to an undefined group of many.

As you may know, we recently introduced a kindness contest on HelpOthers: If you had an extra $100, how would you use it to bring more kindness in your community?  We inobtrusively posted that small blurb in Smile Groups and within two weeks, dozens of ideas were posted from gifting plant seeds to paying coffee for unsuspecting stranger to taking slum children out for a movie to buying food for the homeless.  In parallel, we also asked people to add 'smiles' to the ideas they liked.  Dozens more smiles.  Last week, we announced two winners and they will be report back with their reflections in the next month and as we build our infrastructure (thanks Geet!), we hope to have this contest every week.

Consider the value generated by $100.

Attract people via a purely crowd-sourced platform in HelpOthers, get their intellectual capital around kindness ideas, get the inputs of other like-hearted folks to help vet the ideas, get three volunteers to responsibly maintain integrity of the process and manage transactions, get the winners to commit to actually implement that project as a volunteer and report back in a way that inspires even more people to participate.  Let alone the service to the community, the inevitable ripple effects, and the transformation in the heart of the giver.  Whoever gave us that extra $1000 must be quite happy, :) just as we are quite grateful to have stumbled into yet another experiment in service.

A perfect way to kill this experiment, though, is to say here's $100K and let's scale it.  And yet, if it organically heads in that direction, we certainly hold open the vision of using our ripe  trust-network to offer gift-economy fellowships to ensuing generosity entrepreneurs.

'MakeSomeoneSmile', who has gifted more than 14 thousand! KarmaBucks in Smile Groups, was one of the winners and he wrote in with: "I am very humbled to have been one of the winners of the contest. I cannot wait to get started!  I have about 100 extra smile cards but would need about another 100 to put 2 in each envelope. Thanks again! I hope this brings both great stories and some more members to the site!"  Like ModestoBob, it's that same pattern again -- gratitude for an anonymous HelpOthers team, taking ownership of the platform and asking others to step up their participation.

Let's see where this goes. :)