Ideaoverflow Ide Plan

@jacobreal list public extra-exports jacobcole-net systematicawesome Updated 2026-04-10

Ideaoverflow Ide Plan

started by jcol e @mit.edu , jacobcole.net
IdeaOverflow IDE (Idea Development Environment) Discussionideaflowplan.jacobcole.net
[[The question is, what do you want to create[a]](#cmnt1)[b]](#cmnt2)?                                                                                                               GDoc URL
Explanation under construction. You can comment.
This document is a centerpoint in a constellation of projects[c] to project the human creative process into the digital space...it is a meta-database of dreams and ideas, threads of inspiration, human intentions.
Which is, incidentally, the key ingredient AIs are lacking -- as human motivation is rooted in human experience.

Key Links
- (under construction)
- Ideaflow Background

Idea Overflow, SuggestionBox, and PoliticalProgressBar
Comments are appreciated. Team members for any aspect sought - email [email protected], we have funding.  This is the single thing I’m most passionate about in the world. Poke me if you need inspiration. I have extra.

[1. Intro and Two Hypotheses]
[2. PoliticalProgressBar and SuggestionBox][d]
[3. IdeaOverflow Original Vision]

  1. Introduction
    [IdeaOverflow IDE(Idea Development Environment) and Progress Visualizer (prototyping on student gov) mockup]
    In general: this is a platform to a)  facilitate the human creative process, and b)  measure and manage humanity’s progress towards achieving its ends. It is a projection of the incredibly powerful framework of gestalt psychology into the digital space. We came to approach this larger challenge from 2 convergent directions.

First, two hypotheses:
-I hypothesize that if we clearly list out all the things in the world that there are to be done, either because we have to do them, or we want to do them, we’ll find they are largely easily achievable if we work together, if we make people feel included in what Kafka called the “circle of humanity.”
-Economics is the art of satisfying “unlimited demands with limited resources.” But if we concretely list out our ideas, our dreams, our demands, I think we might find that our the harder problem is actually nailing down those “demands”  -- dreams that are inspiring and worthwhile -- in the first place. Every moment a person spends uninspired is one that could be improved. The goal of this system is to create a way for the brushfire-fluid of positive inspiration to flow through the veins of the Internet, and to create a platform that will lead to the realization of submitted ideas. (in other words, we are building Eywa from Avatar, or a website one might call “genie.io” :P).

  1. PoliticalProgressBar and SuggestionBox
    [Background: Last summer[e]](#cmnt5) (2012), I worked with friends to build Politify.com, a website that makes it easy to see the economic impact the stated policies of different presidential candidates will have on you personally, your community, and the nation. This, we reasoned, would help cut through fear, uncertainty, and doubt/false advertising/general hysteria, and would allow people to focus more on meaningful issues when voting. This, in turn, we hypothesize, will help combat political apathy, especially in the under-voting young, tech-savvy demographic. Since our launch, we’ve had over 3,000,000 forecasts generated, and been featured in Forbes, CNBC and several other major news outlets, and we are very excited about where the project might go. (We’ve since been contracted by MA State Gov to build tools for citizen engagement)

The ultimate goal of this project (see Super UROP proposal) is to lay the groundwork for creating a tool that might be integrated into Politify that will help citizens easily answer the question "What is Congress is actually achieving?" The vision is to create a project that can evolve into a simple graphical user interface  -- a set of timelines showing important milestones -- that voters can use to quickly see what government is trying to accomplish and how far it has gotten towards achieving its goals. More generally, the deeper significance of many news items can be revealed on interface such as this -- if a certain piece of sustainable energy legislation passes, how much closer has it gotten us as a nation and planet to actually being energy sustainable for the foreseeable future? This system would graph that kind of information on a timeline/"progress bar," the position (% completion) of which could be determined roughly by raw metrics such as "net national carbon output," and a consensus of scholarly opinions.

On a fundamental level, this project is a new mechanism for promoting rationality in government. It would create is a database of thoughtful people and politicians' visions/dreams -- their collective positive visions for how the world should be -- and then act as a tool to help leaders find the most rational way to make those dreams real (e.g. elect the senators that have the competence, vision, and concrete plans necessary. Are trickle down economics or Obamanomics better for creating a vibrant economy that allows people to live the American dream? I don't know. Let's look at the research and find out, and take the most rational action.)

In the concrete, over the course of this Super UROP, I hope to create a tool that achieves this result on a smaller scale -- for student government -- as an expandable proof of concept. Polling 12 random MIT students with the question: "What does student government actually do?" I received 10 answers of "I don't know" or "not much." It would be extremely powerful if there there were a way to see all the goals student government set out to achieve and concrete milestones as to how far they have gotten. This would help students see who is actually setting the agenda they like most, and who, in the past, has been more successful/unsuccessful at achieving their goals.

(rough)
Above all, I want to lay the groundwork for making a database of thoughtful people and politicians' dreams -- their collective positive visions for how the world should be -- then find the most rational way to make those dreams real (e.g. elect the senators that have the competence, vision, and concrete plans necessary. Are trickle down economics or Obamanomics better for creating a vibrant economy that allows people to live the American dream? I don't know. Let's look at the research and find out, and take the most rational action.)

At the very least, this could be applicable to student government. What does student government actually do? I'd love to see all the goals they've set out to achieve and concrete milestones as to how far they've gotten. This would help me see who is actually setting the agenda I like most, and who is more successful/unsuccessful at achieving their goals."

The progress-bar-based project management system (our vision for which is partially represented by this mockup ) and the paradigm surrounding it is what interests us more. We want to create a set of dashboards that government can use at each level to measure and manage progress/milestones on relevant initiatives. We're creating an "API for government" if you will. I'm actually already implementing a proximate version of this as a Super UROP project, advised by MIT Prof. Danny Weitzner, who is the former Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House. Here's my proposal <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0ngxt6Jn0IttTckaUI8CT3DyNecJbI6aRV8q-Bwrnw/edit>

The "political progress bar" system – which we envision as being basically structured as three-dimensional trees of progress bars and subprogress bars (fundamentally the idea graph w/ measurement) is fundamentally a project management tool that can be applied to all sorts of enterprises. A company's goals can be broken down into sets of cool ideas that they want to implement. We could create an enterprise-ready project management system that helps people people feel more connected by letting them see how what they're doing for work plays into making a really powerful/cool idea real. It's like a cross between Asana, a brainstorming system, and Battle.net.

  1. IdeaOverflow Original Vision
    (This is where the project began; it won 1st place at the MIT t=0 hackathon)
    There were ~100 people at this hackathon. Around 50 of them walked away without an idea or a team. I was almost one of them.
    When this happens, powerful ideas needlessly die.
    That it is possible to make billions of dollars off of a project that can be started in a weekend in this industry shows how important hackathon creations can be. It's insane that the most important stage, the beginning of it, is a complete melee.  Yesterday, we solved a big part of this problem.

Proto 1: IdeaOverflow.tk -- A place people can share good ideas that they don't necessarily have time to implement themselves online. We trying to make a map, a connected graph, of all of peoples' ideas (and implemented engineering projects) that shows the relationship of these projects to one another. At the borders of this graph would lie the ideas that are yet to be implemented -- investigating them more deeply is  analogous to exploring undiscovered terrain on a map. This tool helps people to come up with awesome ideas for hackathons, class projects, startups, and fun, and it also allow people to see  the trends/relationships in exciting ideas that are surging at a given point in time. Most of all, it's inspiring to think that through this system, we might be able to bring vitality to the education industry by reducing every class project to, at worst, implementing an idea that someone, somewhere would be really excited to build if they had the time to.
-›StarCraft-like “Game lobby” for hackathons -- what if you could go online, click join game, and suddenly not be in a starcraft battle, but a collaborative virtual hackathon with partners working on an awesome project in a seamless environment (because when you try to sell coding itself as a game, all the sticking points that would cause players to quit -- the same issues that silently frustrate developers -- quickly become apparent. Then people can get into flow and become one with the pure code). This game would have on its home screen a cool visualization of the world map of all the ideas out there, like on the last slide of the mockup, and the game would be to go and “explore” this world map with your friends by implementing the ideas. This paradigm could eventually encompass all human work.
-›touch a button on your phone to go online
-›join others hacking/see skills
-›transforms software engineering, and eventually all careers/work into a game
›  
But even more importantly creating, powerful hackathoning communites is critical to the future of education, as they are the places where young people become inspired. I think the biggest underutilized resource in the world is people's time they spend uninspired. And on the flip side, I just watched my high school friends go into hackathoning clubs like hackers at  berkeley, and come out transformed and on fire with ideas and passion for building things. They've since won some of the biggest hackathons in the world, eg greylock.

Finally, people have seen the light that edu startups are a trend. But the biggest sites out there right now like Coursera, while great, at best clone a system that only intermittently  inspires a few at the top. This changes the paradigm, creating a system you can use today that brings the atmosphere of great hacking clubs like Hackers@Berkeley online, which includes YOU in a culture that will show YOU why it's fun to hack as well as how.

Facebook is a projection of a certain class of social connection into the digital space. Asana pitches itself as Facebook for your working life. IdeaOverflow is a projection of an even deeper process, that of idea-discussion and hacking -- that is, play -- into the digital space.

Goal: make quora for ideas[f]

IdeaOverflow Low Hanging Fruit Ideas Matrix
http://ideamap.tk/
http://minimalisthomepages.tk/

Comments

Commentors:
Justin Wenig
ashokan ch

[a]Jacob, I was thrilled to find you on the internet.

Even though I am surrounded with very intelligent friends, you are the first that share a lot of the same ideas as myself.

About this specifically:

Best collection I seen so far:
http://www.boardofinnovation.com/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/

And one in particular (in beta)
betterific.com

Stay awesome.

Anton
[b]Thanks for that reference! I'm super curious: how did you find my site?
Also, there maybe a way for you to help if you want - what are your
background skills?
[c]@[email protected] - 

I have been following along on your constellation of ideas. Some great vision to help people find ways to HIVE MIND their ideas to interface, drawing Tim Berners-Lee concepts of GGG.
Assigned to [email protected]
[d]I don't really know where to start.  I see a lot of raw energy.  Reminds me of the Kabbalistic concept of "Lights of Chaos in Vessels of Structure".
[e]date/year reference please
[f]Wait, another goal...?