The Thiel Foundation has offered $100,000.00 to be paid out over two years as a fellowship award to 20 students, ages 15 to 20 years. To be clear, that is $100K per student, and 20 students under the age of 20 years, 20 under 20. Keil Taylor Fleischbein submitted to their request for proposal by answering their two questions:
- Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true.
- How do you want to change the world?
The following is Keil’s response transcript, and here is his YouTube video submission for the Thiel Foundation Fellowship:
Hi… my name is Keil.
This is what I think is possible and most of the world has lost hope for:
Utopia, a concept for an ideal community cooperating and offering hope.
But forsaken for corruption, pragmatism, bottom-line thinking and a need to be realistic.
But, imagine, a multitude of people subscribing to a cooperative community that participates in a wiki of food prices that serve the common good by enabling these participants to know what-to-by-where for the greatest money savings; and, provide the cooperative with several buying strategies that are not available without a cooperative.
Additionally, the cooperative becomes a source for education about frugal living, healthy meal planning, and the powerful benefits of planning based on the group’s knowledge through cooperative sharing.
The cooperative also provides a competitive method to encourage sharing by paying back 40% of its monthly proceeds to everyone who shares with returns based on percentage of total sharing done by each person who shares.
Imagine 108,000,000 people in the top 17 United States metropolitan statistical areas living in places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Washington-Arlington, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Phoenix, San Francisco, Riverside, Seattle, Minneapolis and San Diego with 10% or more of them becoming a food price sharing cooperative.
Imagine the social influence and change for the common good. This is the cooperative of people experiencing and feeling their collective power in a very real, practical sense.
Now I will show you how I would like to change the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVgcO5YLIhc
In conclusion, this is why I think this is possible:
Social networking and user-contributed content has become a big deal on the internet. The proof is seen in the massive traffic activity found at places like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Wikipeida to mention only a few such sites.
Large scale, enterprise collaboration projects can be a risky proposition. But when rewards can be realized by individuals, then the project based on storing and sharing information minimizes the chance of failure. Collaboration projects succeed when advantages are provided to the users.
To succeed, the food price sharing cooperative community must be able to leverage and build upon the information shared by all members.
This is Keil, thanking you in advance, for your consideration.