( Your comments are highly appreciated)

I believe that in our time the online business communities organised by common professional interests can provide value to their members and the industry as a whole by creating the members’ generated content that can solve pain for an individual member and at the same time to disrupt the current business model.

The members will benefit because (1) they will receive services that are efficiently and truthfully provided; (2) they will buy products and services that do what they are supposed to do;  (3) prices will fall because of the reduced need for advertising and because the “recommender community” will give service providers the recurring revenue model. The vendors themselves will be among the beneficiaries of our pain remedies because their cost of search will be greatly reduced.

Risk management industry characterises by three factors – complexity, isolation and regulation:

Our business is regulated and complex, people are isolated in their company’s view and agendas and behind their firewalls from the other peers.

These three factors make it perfect case to start a successful online community where people can use WEB 2.0 technology for collaborating, sharing knowledge and exchanging valuable information (within the borders of legal and confidentiality agreements of course) to achieve their goals in much faster way.

I believe that a “rating or recommendation online community” will create a new way to launch new products and services.

People feel the need to form review, rate, and recommend in order to find the truth about products and services, the customer experience that others had, vendor’s support and many more.... 

The research shows that consumers consider customer reviews more valuable than experts reviews. Now it is the time to implement this approach in the area of “Risk and regulations” products.

The “recommender community” will lower the price of all products and services by gathering users into membership clubs where they will have conversations about products, services, and other related issues.

HOW

 We want to organise “peer sourcing” or a “recommendation community” on our site which means members can

· anonymously provide ratings of service providers and their products.

· provide "pain solving" to an individual member by generating relevant content and recommendations.  

We will organise a process in the following way.

1.  Appointing the Advisory Board consisting of leading professionals around the world. The Advisory Board will generate recommendations, policy statements, design the general process and meet periodically to discuss main issues.

2. We will setup the panel of experts consisting of senior practitioners in their area of expertise ( >10 years experience). Every expert will be responsible for generating  ratings and reviews in their area of expertise. He/she will be responsible to set-up scope of  products and services which his group will rank, invite members from inside community or outside who are willing to contribute in delivering ratings and reviews. The experts can appoint deputy or deputies.

3. Quality assurance will be guaranteed by the Internal control group or “police department”. The leader of IC will be appointed by the Advisory Board. One of the main tasks of IC is to maintain truthfulness of the conversations between members and name and shame members who have double agendas (for example an interested party disguised as an independent) .   

WHAT will we deliver

Ratings and reviews on products and service providers per discipline. It can be application vendors review, consultancy ratings, recommendation for regulators and so on.

The first issues to discuss with the advisory board:

1. What are the legal ramifications? My opinion is that there is nothing illegal in forming associations in order to recommend and buy products more efficiently. We got to have a very good legal opinion on this issue and prepare Disclaimers or other necessary documents.

2. Experience in providing solutions for "risk and compliance" products teaches us  that most organisations will not want their employees commenting about their experiences on implementing and using those products. I think most individuals would consider this a risk not worth losing their employment. Think about how to address this issue
3. How to ensure that both the anonymity and accountability by the person providing the review can be guaranteed? How to overcome
that issue?
4. How to overcome biases of the users for example “The vendor is always to blame mentality” and guarantee quality of the reports?
5. How to keep the interesting parties from polluting the data? Establish a strict intake process of review generators.

6. Intake criteria - add new fields in profile?