It would be interesting to see how the team will decide which document to let in, without that users cannot start the interaction process. Perhaps, a two stage process. Soft area where moderators interact and decides on the validity before posting to the public area. This allows you to create a pro community, but I personally do not like what these moderators have done to Wikipedia.

Avneet, feel free to contact me through ranaweeram on skype. It’s always good to speak to like minded individuals. Wish you all the best to a successful launch. We got few months before we move to Beta!

Thanks for taking the time to explain the answers. Good luck!

Rather than posting another lengthy response here, I posted them on Insightory’s blog (http://blog.insightory.com/).

“We hold Wikipedia in very high regard and try to learn from their model, especially as they strive for the right balance between “experts” and “lay people”.”

Can you explain how people are supposed to edit the documents on the site? Looking it over now, it appears to be a collection of white papers. There are plenty of sites that have that, so I am not sure how your service is different.

What is unique about your site?

Thanks also to all those who sent comments. Rest assured all positive feedback is gratefully accepted, and any negative feedback will be reviewed very carefully to ensure we improve.

There are a few specific points I’d like to touch upon:

1. We will certainly try to keep the quality high. Since we are running a Contest right now, we look at all documents before posting them. Often times, we are faced with a dilemma : a particular document may be poorly written and have some comments that show bias or inexperience, and yet it may have a couple of good ideas which would benefit our readers. Do we post it or let it go? Right now, we’re just using our judgment, but soon we will be able to have something more powerful: the community’s opinion.

2. We did a soft-launch of our site in leading Business Schools in India, hence a large number of contributions are from there. That is changing rapidly – partly due to the “TechCrunch” effect! Our goal is to have a global site, with content that is globally relevant (most management principles, tools etc.) as well as content that is specific to certain locations.

3. Comparisons to Wikipedia are made for “ease of understanding” only. We want to embody the spirit of Wikipedia i.e. knowledge and wisdom are not “closely held assets” . . . they grow with sharing, not with “hoarding”. We hold Wikipedia in very high regard and try to learn from their model, especially as they strive for the right balance between “experts” and “lay people”.

There was a time when we seriously thought of creating Insightory as a non-profit. But that would have limited the ways we can recognize and reward our users, so we went the for-profit route.

4. What you see right now is a small fraction of the functionality we will roll out in the next 4-6 months. (I know, that is 2 lifetimes – but we’re bootstrapping so we can’t do it all!) The next priority is to improve various user features (including our very crude search – thanks for pointing that out, Ben), and then move on to collaboration (much more wikipedia-ish than what you see right now) and finally networking. We will enable global corporations to connect with management professionals, academicians and graduate students around their areas of expertise, and thus enhance the revenue stream for the latter.

Thanks again for checking out Insightory and for taking the time to write in comments.

There are several decent summary sites out there, but most of them require you to pay a lot to sign up, and don’t seem to provide much of a ‘community’, which could make the book and/or summary more valuable, by letting people debate and discuss it.

That’s why social filters can amend the above statement so that people have a better chance at identifying when the above might be true and/or applied.

Potential, because you can not only attract a wide variety of information, but use social filtering (voting, ratings, edits, etc) to bring the best ideas to the top and/or provide the caveats and context necessary to flesh out information.

Pitfalls, because without significant filtering you run the risk of bad ideas and/or inexperienced people being given too much credibility, as Kevin X pointed out.

@8 it looks like a lot of the articles are written by Indians, too. Are they gaining initial market share in India, or are they paying for cheap initial content? I know you need to start somewhere for a startup, but right now it’s kindof apparent.

Tech-wise, search results only return matches on document title and extract — not the actual document contents. E.g. this document

http://www.insi...trapak_in_india

has the word “jamshedpur” on the first page, yet doesn’t come back in a search on “jamshedpur.” I assume that’ll change down the road.

Most of the contest winners concern themselves with topics regarding India. It seems like a narrow focus.

Is there a way to edit the documents on the site or do you download them, edit them and then resubmit?

What about the copyrights on the articles? If I edit a document do I retain copyright on the changes or the new document?

How is this different than Bitpipe or Information Week’s white paper site?

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

In my opinion, if this is targeted to the top execs, professionals, professors, and graduate students, how much credibility can be given to random documents found online? Sure they said they would check and moderate everything carefully but there is still that whim that these were created by people and my managing job is on the line, can I really trust what I read online? (hehe on the line, online, punny)

To promote you have not to excel in your current role (otherwise there is no reason to remove you from there), to show the boss you think like him and to be at the right place at the right time.