What is Firestoker? - The Idea

Firestoker News, Ideas by Jevon @ 8:03 am

One of the most frequent questions I have been hearing has been what exactly is the idea behind Firestoker?

Firestoker is really the cross section of four ideas about how people work best (space to talk, space to think, space to play, and space to learn), which boils down to conversation, and safe spaces.

There are millions of people out there who work day to day in jobs that reward them with almost nothing. A paycheck, a Christmas Party, the occasional chance to raise some money for a charity. Some of us have never experienced that, but many do.

We know, from all sorts of research and by just thinking about it, that unfulfilled people can’t do a good job. It is literally impossible. If there is a space, where everyone from the CEO to the front end customer service staff can talk, openly and on the same level, we believe an organization can improve more rapidly and more effectively than through any other method, process or theory.

This isn’t a bunch of theory for us either. We began in the consulting world. Working with companies to help “make things work better”. We tried not to act like consultants, we didn’t claim to know their business better than they did, or to hold some magic key, and we certainly never used the typical fear tactics of most of the other consultants we ran into along the way.

We only claimed one thing: If our client (a CEO, a VP, a President usually) could check their ego at the door, and admit that they had no answers in comparison to what they could learn from their own people, then they could succeed. The easiest way to do that was to create a space on the web where everyone in their organization could talk about what they knew, and what they were learning. We called it The Sandbox and now it is Firestoker.

The Firestoker Project is our way of making that software available to organizations who are ready. We have always maintained that software should be cheap, easy and open, and we are going to do our best to make it all three.