At the core of Service Space lies a large community of people all engaged in “instant gratification” service. They are the angels, all with halos by their names.

Up until now, we have been suffocating by the inability to keep engaged the large number of volunteers and by the inability to provide the kind of attention we would like for those who have requested service. All this is about to change.

The Service Space ‘support section’ will be a revolutionary FULL-SERVICE area where people will come for the sole purpose of ‘helping others help others’. Our approach will be hands-off – we will let people self-organize around helping one another, but we will build a system that supports this in an elegant way.

When someone comes to the site for the first time, instead of having to figure out what is going on, they will be channeled into an area that introduces them to Service Space, describing what it has to offer them. They will be given a great big “welcome hug” – something they have never before received from a website. It will be clear to them from the very beginning that the Service Space Angels are here to help them get started and guide them throughout.

As Amazon.com has a jiggly “Gold Box” that encourages users to click it, that’s how welcoming the support section will be throughout the site. By providing this level of personalized help, we will be streamlining the process of getting people to utilize the full potential of Service Space. The more generous the level of help and the more quickly people become fluent with the site, the more quality Angels it will go onto generate.

Is this possible?

Building Service Space in this way, instantly introduces a bottleneck potential of enormous proportions. Could this possibly be wise? I don’t know, but it requires an extraordinary leap of faith. The genius behind this is that it demands from the community an intensive level of service, which instantly sets the tone for what this site is all about. This tone of FULL SERVICE will move on to permeate everything that stems from it.

We can build the support section in a style somewhere between Craigslist, the former AskMe.com, Google Answers, and typical Forum boards. The user can pose a question which will be instantly marked as an unanswered question. When helpers spot the unanswered questions, they will then try to answer them. Helpers can answer on top of other helpers to ensure that the questions are answered fully and accurately. By reading the answers, helpers will continually increase their own knowledge. Either the user can at some point respond saying that the question was effectively answered, or if two helpers both agree the question was answered well, it will close the question. All unanswered questions will be answered.

Helpers will go through a simple initiation process, where they get their halo. The halo will always appear by their name, kind of like a “staff” t-shirt, indicating that they are part of the Service Space support team. People will wonder why some have halos by their names and will also want halos by their own names. This will provide enough incentive to generate the angels we need to sustain this.

Service Space angels will span the entire spectrum of duties and responsibilities, such as: general help, orientatiation help (buddies), project admin, volunteer coordinators, advisory positions, tech help, etc.

Again, this is just the core of Service Space. We will still build all the features that we have discussed so far.