Dan Brown Announces His New Project

doing and being your own boss is that there's no set time as to when you have to be working and when you get to be playing. It all kind of meshes together and you have a lot of free rein to figure out what works best for you. And one thing that I have found works really well for me are 2 AM brainstorming sessions while sitting half naked in my bed with a Snuggie and my laptop. And it was under these circumstances that the idea for Dan 3.0 first walked up and smacked me square in the face. I was using the StumbleUpon toolbar and I stumbled across a documentary called "Us Now." And it talks all about the internet and the cultural impact it has already had, continues to have, and will have. I mean, it's a fantastic documentary. It should be required viewing for everyone, but particularly for everyone here at VidCon. And they give all sorts of examples. My favorite example was of a soccer team from the UK called Ebbsfleet United. Now, Ebbsfleet United, they're not one of the best of the best UK soccer teams. I don't know that much about soccer. But they're not the Premier League, but they're probably equivalent with like a minor league baseball team here in the US. And they were average, nothing too particularly special, until one season they decided to try something radically new and different. They replaced their traditional management structure with one where instead of, you know, white-collar people deciding everything, they put all of their major decisions in the hands of their fans. The fans decided what players they wanted to go after at the beginning of the year, The fans negotiated the contract with the players. The fans even got to decide when they wanted to swap players out in the middle of the game. And they did this all through an online voting system. And over the course of that season, they went from being meh, average, to being whoa, really freaking good. They were beating teams who were literally way out of their league, and they even advanced to a tournament they had never been to before in their club's entire history. So, I'm watching this documentary, along with all of the other examples, and I'm thinking, "Man, that is so cool!" It's an organizational model that just makes so much sense, and yet it had never been laid out in front of me in such straightforward terms. But it also got me thinking, "Why don't we see this in more contexts?" I mean, what would happen if an NFL team decided to put control of its decisions in the hands of their fans? What would happen if a company like Microsoft decided to put control of their decisions in the hands of PC users? What would happen if the United States Congress decided to put all of their decisions directly in the hands of the American people? And what would happen? What would happen if a videoblog decided to put complete control of his life in the hands of his viewers? So with that said, my secret project is I'm starting a Justin Bieber cover band. No, I don't have an answer to those first 3 questions, but I do have an answer to that last question. And that answer is: I have no freaking idea, but we're gonna find out. Starting on August 2nd, For one year, I am very literally putting complete control of my life in your hands. And in order to make this project a reality, Dan 3.0, which I consider to be just as much a social experiment as it is a project, I've teamed up with a truly visionary company in this new media landscape, Revision3. Woo! Yeah! And we're working with them right now to design what we refer to as the decision engine, the website that's going to allow you guys to collectively decide what it is that I should be doing on a daily weekly, and monthly basis. And the way that the decision engine is going to work is pretty simple. There are going to be 4 different Digg-style hierarchies where users can submit ideas as to what they think I should do, and other users can vote those ideas either up or down based on whether they like them or dislike them. And the best ideas will naturally rise to the top. The worst ideas will fall to the bottom and fade into obscurity. And those 4 lists are— there's one for short-term daily goals, one for medium-sized weekly goals, one for big monthly goals, and another, my favorite list, for technical changes to the project. So if there's something that doesn't work out exactly the way we thought it would, the community can decide that we can either axe it or change it or tweak it. Or if there's something that we think needs to be added, some sort of an element, we can add anything. This project will be able to live and breathe and evolve any way that we want it to. So yeah, that is DAMN 3.0 in a nutshell. I wish I could stand up here for another hour and tell you point by point what it is that we're going to be doing for the next year, but by nature of what the project is, we aren't going to know until we know. But let me just say this: I can see where someone might look at DAMN 3.0 and say, "Oh, okay, it's just a silly little project that Dan Brown is doing." And it is! It is! It absolutely is a silly little project that I'm doing. But in a lot of ways, I also see it as something more significant than that. Because Our generation has a lot on its plate. As we forge boldly ahead into the future, we're going to come head-to-head with issues like global poverty, global terrorism, global warming. And these are issues that no one country or institution can take on unilaterally. Global-scale problems require global-scale solutions. And while by no means am I trying to insinuate that Dance 3.0 is going to solve all of the world's problems, It is an exercise in exactly the sort of worldwide collaboration that's going to be necessary to come up with innovative, creative solutions to the problems that we face. So— thank you. Thank you. So DAMN 3.0 is a project that, by design, is limited only by the imagination of the community behind it. And we are— a pretty imaginative bunch, I think. And, uh, so I have no idea where this is going to be going, but the one thing that I do know is that we're going. I hope you'll go with me. Thanks. Dan Brown! I think we're all looking forward to running that guy's life.