Internal private draft of 2013 (Updated Oct 2018)

If anyone else stumbles upon this private web page, I explicitly do NOT give permission to publish or otherwise share with others about it. I can be contacted at "econdemocracy" at the domain "gmail" and may decide if/when/how, someday, to share with the world the remarkable similarities, parallels, and coincidences of ideas shortly after mine were circulated at a conference, with those that were used to create a Billion-plus dollar company

T h r e s h o l d w a r e :
A   B r i e f   H i s t o r y


  • 1999: Main Thresholdware concepts are conceived by internet activist Harel B [Bio]

  • 2000 to mid-2001: First full draft think piece on thresholdware published on EconomicDemocracy.org by Harel, titled On funding: A Plan to Put the Movement on Solid Financial Ground, some 7-8 pages long. Detailed proposals for financial applications and early ideas for non-financial (civic/activism) uses. File name later changed from funding.html to fund-and-act.html

  • 2002-2004: Thresholdware proposal expanded to 12½† pages; detailed non-financial applications, and subtitle 'with applications to voting, democracy, draft-resistance, and more' are added. Non-financial uses of thresholdware are conceived on or prior to end of 2003 and added to online piece by January 2004 [copy saved 1/05/04 note "2004" date]. Applications include labor organizing; last major expansion by end of 2004 adds civil disobedience.††
         † Due to html format, exact page count depends on browser and printer
         †† EconomicDemocracy's overlapping proposal of 2003, uPangea, suggests other applications: micro-local (e.g. tenant) organizing.

  • 2000-2006: Periodic updates via email list ( ~150 members) and usenet with latest on Thresholdware and other projects, proposals based at EconomicDemocracy.org

  • Circa 2005: Examples noted of use by activist groups (e.g. RTmark) of a few elements of the financial half of Thresholdware.

  • Fall 2006
    1. September of 2006: Dan Bashaw attends Web of Change conference; blogs that month, "One topic that resonated with several..conference participants was the concept of thresholdware," which he shared with them, coining the term for the set of ideas in Harel's paper; adding, "as far as I know, Harel is the originator of the concept."
           [Screenshot of Sept. '06 post]

      Nov. 2006 Dan posts summary of non-financial thresholdware applications, Queue|Cue the Revolution
           [screenshot 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 of Nov '06 post]

      A follow-up post in January 2007 was titled, Thresholdware: Making Change by Leaps
           [screenshot]   [pt 2]   [pt 3]   [pt 4] of [ Jan. '07 post]

      Dec. 2007 post titled, Thresholdware: The Code Pink Tax Rebellion
           [screenshot] of [Dec '07 post]

    2. Sept. 2006 Hard copy of Harel's 12½ page thresholdware think piece sent to Jon Bosak (who "led the creation of the XML specification at the W3C" -Wikipedia). April 2007 Bosak's email: "Please forgive the long delay in replying to your letter and proposals of last September. Believe it or not, I've read everything you sent at least twice.." but pressing projects kept interrupting attempts to email reply, so he suggests chatting at a restaurant with Harel; such a meeting takes place shortly thereafter; there he says he sees a lot of potential in the Thresholdware idea which he very much likes; but adds that I'd likely need to put in full time job time commitment for next several years to get people to listen/adopt it.

  • January, 2007: Andrew Mason posts on his then-primary website, PolicyTree.org: "Hello! Policy Tree is indefinitely on hold -- I'm busy working on The Point..." [Summer 2011 screenshot] of [policytree.org] Billionaire send $1M Funding for ThePoint in January 2007 as well ("Lefkofsky, E: "Accelerated Disruption", page 15, Easton Studio Press, 2007")

    Mason states that the idea of tipping-points based software, i.e. thresholdware, came to him "sometime during 2006." More specifically, per a 2011 article in Chicago Magazine (by Chicago Tribune) “In September 2006, Mason left Lefkofsky's employ..That was about the time he encountered problems with his cell phone contract ” which supposedly is what was sufficiently motivating to be the mother of invention to spur him to innovate; so motivating that it made him want to start "working on a web-based platform for organizing collective action based on the principal of a tipping point (the number at which many small individual items reach critical mass)."

  • November 2007: ThePoint.com is launched by Mason, who received $1 million in venture funding. ThePoint develops software for the thresholdware concept proposed on EconomicDemocracy.org some 6-7 years prior (fall 2000 to fall 2001, versus fall 2007 depending on which version of piece one considers first full version). As Groupon becomes better known, Harel is pleased that Andy is also interested in, and in fact started with, efforts towards progressive social change. (Mason became CEO of groupon).

    "A Web platform based on the tipping point principal, The Point was launched in November 2007" -- Andrew Mason talk on youtube on ThePoint for activism (Wikipedia for Lefkofsky citing page 15 of Lefkofsky's 2007 publication Accelerated Disruption $1M funding was received 8 months before the official launch, i.e., January 2007)

    12:35 of Mason's talk, he doesn't just refer to the future version but imagines a future version of himself using the system: "This is just the beginning..where could something like this go? I actually have some insight into this because my future self recorded a video of a future version of ThePoint.com and mailed it back to me.."

    That's Mason talk of (posted by the hostring organization ChicagoConvergence in) 2009. On or before the January 2004 version of Harel's paper, and included in the version Dan Bashaw informed people about, at the conference in Sept 2006:

    See if you can recognize elements of these [existing simpler versions of Thresholdware-type methods], as well as other [more advanced] elements, in the following scenario. Let's us put it in the form of a fictional narrative from some point in the future:
    Dear diary: Today I surfed over to projects.indymedia.org to look at how things are coming along. I spent a half hour catching up with summaries, then another half hour participating in interactive, on-going discussions for fine-tuning plans for various media projects. I then went over to look at the financial state of each of the two projects I was most interested in.

    The first one had reached 45% of it's start-up goal, and was estimated to be increasing by about 5% per week,[...]

  • In November 2008: ThePoint is re-named as Groupon (technically not re-named, but becomes 'parent' of Groupon; however most of what parent company does is Groupon, Hence Groupon is essentially the new name for the company initially launched as ThePoint). Kickstarter is launched somewhat later, in April 2009
    • -HB.
    Above is internal private draft of late 2013(updated Oct 2018)

    Next: link to Thresholdware: Unfinished Business
    Go Up to Thresholdware Project main page
    [Add link here to general Projects Page of EconomicDemocracy.org including uPangea]