What’s up Carrotmob crew!

Did you miss us? Over 2 months without a new post, you must be PARCHED. This update will cover the following:

- General Carrotmob update
- The next SF campaign
- Introducing Virgance
- The most important part of this post
- Ghostbusters 3
- Office

GENERAL CARROTMOB UPDATE

Things are glorious. Over 80k views of the video, and more people
signing up every week. Here in SF we have been largely focused on
building our team and a web application for planning Carrotmob events
(we’ll probably let you all start playing with a rough draft version of
that app some time next month). Meanwhile, groups of Carrotmob
organizers are springing up all around the world…one crew recently
tried out a campaign in London (see an article in the Guardian here), and there’s another one in Helsinki this Saturday (RSVP here
if you speak Finnish)! There are more people looking into organizing
Carrotmobs all over, from Kansas City to New York to Shanghai…. We
will let you all know as these ideas start evolving into more official
Carrotmob events….

THE NEXT SAN FRANCISCO CAMPAIGN

The next SF campaign is going to be focused on cafes and coffee shops
in the downtown/SOMA neighborhood of SF. We want to experiment with new
approaches to campaign organizing, so this time we’re going to decide
the winner in a new way. We’re going to have each business make a video
in which they argue why their business is worthy of receiving the
"carrot," and make offers of what they are willing to do if they win.
Then, we’re going to let everyone (it doesn’t matter whether you live
in San Francisco or not) discuss the offers and eventually vote on
which offer does the most to advance the cause of sustainability. Then
we’ll see who wins the vote. Finally, we will set the date for the
magic day, and the winning cafe will be swarmed by coffee-drinkers and
scone-eaters, just as many central Asian confederations were swarmed by
Genghis Khan’s overwhelming mongol hordes. Cafes are currently deciding
what their offers are going to be, and as soon as they’re done deciding
we’ll put those videos in front of you…if you’re curious to see more
you can poke around our Carrotmob video channel and find a video made by a local volunteer who filmed some of the initial conversations with cafe owners.

INTRODUCING VIRGANCE

Now, you may recall that Steve and I have been working on starting a
company in order to make Carrotmob the biggest possible success, and
manage the application we’re building. But this company is going to do
much more than that. There may be some people out there who still think
the company is called "Carrotmob," but that’s not the case. We are
called Virgance, and you can think of Carrotmob as a wild beautiful
beast roaming through the open plains of Virgance National Wildlife
Reserve. Basically, Virgance is a for-profit company that takes new
activism ideas and uses the power of online social networks to scale
each idea into a large-scale, citizen-powered global campaign to
improve the world. We have a couple other projects that have many
similarities to Carrotmob, and we just revealed some info about them
for the first time. We hope you will check out our big new ideas at our
brand new website:

http://www.virgance.com

THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS POST

Now that you have just checked out that website, go back and take a nice long look at the jobs page.
We want to hire you or someone you know! We are hiring for the
positions listed on the site, and you should probably drop us a line if
you are exceptional and versatile because we believe we can find ways
to fit the best people into the organization even if they don’t see a
job listing that perfectly describes them. Do not miss this train.

GHOSTBUSTERS 3

Did you hear they’re going to make Ghostbusters 3? Dead serious. Google it.

OFFICE

If you know
of any great office space in SF that we should be interested in, let us
know, because we’re about to be looking….

"Who you gonna call?"

Brent, Steve, and the Virgance Crew