Aaron Huslage

My pal Rich Gibson came up to Redmond for the Thanksgiving holiday and over lunch we had an idea (big surprise to those that know us). We both have tons of ideas that we have no intention of acting upon. This isn’t in and of itself something unusual; people have ideas all the time. The problem is that it’s very difficult for “normal” people to effectively broadcast and incubate their ideas so that those who can our would act upon them can get a good sense of what they were thinking. We asked some good questions:

• How do you capture ideas and let them grow?
• What’s the best way to know if any given idea is good and useful?
• Does linking ideas in either loose or strict ontologies aid in a community’s classification of them?
• What are good processes and techniques that can be used to aid a community in ideation?

It turns out that we were trying to figure out a good way of capitalizing on the emergent properties of lists of ideas. If we provided a structured process of ideation and categorization of those ideas then maybe we can give away much of what is currently living in our heads. If we separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, then we might actually be able to get to the things that we actually want to do.

So here’s the system as I see it:

• Any active user can submit or contribute to an idea. Each idea and user gets a score based on volatility, amount linked and other factors. The scores are used to create implicit, hard to game reputations and feed future simulations (Monte Carlo, etc).
• Brainstorm ideas in one or two sentences.
• New ideas are presented to users for categorization and matching. We would need to determine the usefulness of various ontologies (tags, formal, etc) to find out what works best.
• Ideas are presented to users for expansion. As users submit more, things can be periodically rolled up into a more formal specification.
• If ideas stay at a low enough score for long enough then they will be archived.
• If a community forms around a particular idea, the leaders of that community can create a separate blog and workspace to continue to build on it.

This is a loose write-up of the idea we had. I’m not at all sure if such a system already exists or not. But it should be built and worked on. I would love to hear what people think.