Humanities official archive for solutions to problems

Citizens and experts need a better way to solve problems.

Even with all the tools we've developed so far, someone could have the best idea possible for solving a problem like homelessness in their city, and all they would get for it is a bunch of upvotes, followed by their post getting buried under an endless torrent of "new content". Sites like Quora let you ask questions, but they're not designed to go collaborate on them. To create change a person pretty much has to devote their entire life to an idea until it becomes a reality, assuming it ever even does. -And that itself makes an incredible number of other people not even try. We have to do better.

By creating a wiki that lets everyone see their options for any given problem, we create context. And that changes everything, because suddenly your post goes from being 'some idea some person posted one day', to (potentially) 'the single highest rated idea for [that problem]'. Suddenly people have a very good reason to consider working on it. That's the first thing Needpedia does. 

The next goal is to make it easier than ever before for citizens and experts to collaborate on ideas, even if they have very little energy, time, or interest.

The first way we do this is by providing the Layer System, which lets you add layers to posts about ideas. So if you had an idea for converting an old warehouse into a homeless shelter, you could create a layer for electricians, lawyers, and other experts, then use the URLs to those layers to link experts back to them, (presumably by posting about the idea in groups where experts you're looking for hangout, on forums and social media sites).

Some pretty cool byproducts come from this, such as students being able to learn applied science, engineering and other subjects by learning about ideas people are working on in the real world. -In their city or any other. If this catches on you could read what scientists are proposing at the LHC if you wanted, or vaccine research. Needpedia could be a powerful tool for improving scientific literacy and transparency, which can then cultivate trust. Scientists can also use Needpedia's Layer System to collaborate on inter-disciplinary efforts. 

Minorities and others can also use the Layer System, so if you have an idea for creating a homeless shelter, disabled people get to create their own layer to talk about it among themselves, (then report back to the public layer if they decide anything).

And perhaps most profound of all, layers for NVC can be created, enabling people to discuss even the most controversial of subjects, without any labels, loaded terms or other nonsense. NonViolent Communication is a simple yet potent formula for translating conflict into straightforward expressions of needs, requests and observations. 

Needpedia also has its own social media section, which in time will offer users the freedom to choose their own algorithms. In time we even hope to create an app that transforms Needpedia into a 3D environment, with each idea post being its own warehouse.

For now we're more focused on finishing a tutorial mode that guides users around the site and shows them how to use it. 

There are already more tools than there is space to describe here so I'll conclude with the single most important consideration about this project: we can use Needpedia to improve Needpedia. And every time we manage to do this, we simultaneously improve our ability to work on literally everything else. Humanity clearly needs an organized way to systematically address and resolve its problems, what better way than creating a wiki for them then cramming it full of powerful new tools?

Needpedia is designed to serve all human kind, and offers members of specific groups numerous interesting new advantages. 

For instance, activists won't have to repeat themselves as much, because they can just link people to the same old discussions that they've been having over and over again. 

And the people who feel like activists are always adding new expectations to their lives without any dialogue, finally get a place to have those discussions. Needpedia lets you drop debate tokens, (and others) into pages as little hyperscript icons that people can click on if they want to. And each one lets you rate individual arguments on both sides, meaning everyone gets to see precisely which concerns matter most to their opposition. This makes it easier to create plans that work for everybody, and see where folks are coming from.

An expert who feels board and useless in their retirement could use Needpedia to empower communities all over the world, all they'd have to do is look up layers that pertain to their field. We've already made that very easy.

A student who wants to learn a subject, but find the course work boring, might find the subject more interesting when it's in the form of a discussion between two experts discussing an idea for something they walk past every day. 

Poor children and others in Nigeria will hopefully gain access to literacy programs where individual resource objectives were listed on Needpedia, and paid for by excited supporters in countries all over the world. 

Kids in wealthier nations can use it to create social spaces and work on cultural things like holidays and new words. 

Needpedia has 2 founders, a brilliant web developer named Murtaza Zarkhwan, and a conflict resolution specialist named Anthony Brasher.

Murtaza focuses on the technical aspects of development, and has a long history of software related accomplishment, including many of the more innovative features of Needpedia itself.

Anthony holds a 4 year degree from Evergreen college where he worked extensively alongside various grassroots organizations, and began studying NonViolent Communication. During the Occupy movement he realized people needed a more efficient way to share ideas and has been working on what is now called Needpedia ever since. 

It's already online and has been tested by volunteers. You're welcome to check it out yourself at Needpedia.org

Presently we have the most content on game development.

Oh my god the legal hurdles alone are daunting. Fortunately now we can use AI or web crawlers to auto-populate the site with content so it won't start off empty, requiring a herculean volunteer effort like Wikipedia did, but we're still in way over our heads with a project this large and a team this small. Even simply winning this contest would tremendously increase our notoriety, but having help from MIT faculty and students would be a dream come true. 

Technically speaking, Needpedia is so innovative that we can literally use it to innovate upon itself. The moment someone encounters a problem with Needpedia, they can list it as a problem with the site itself. then begin sharing their ideas and hearing from others about it. They can use the layer system to invite devs/programmers to help them learn more about their idea, and possibly what they'd need to do the work themselves. Devs trying to build some experience gain access to a large body of ideas and excited communities, so even just keeping track of how fast Needpedia itself is able to innovate might become a challenge.

The "Layer" and "Token" systems we've already developed offer extremely valuable abilities to users despite being surprisingly simple, code-wise. There's presently nothing else like Needpedia's NonViolent Communication layers, which brings the cutting edge in conflict resolution psychology to the masses, while letting them de-stress the dialectical process itself.

It's also a fact that people get excited about ideas, so convincing them to share theirs with 'the whole world' tends to be fairly doable. They've been trying to do this all on their own through social media sites for years now but those haven't been designed for collaboration or problem solving, so a lot of people simply lost hope. On Needpedia we'll hand them all kinds of interesting new tools to showcase their ideas, and once they see others interacting with them, the site might become downright addictive. If anything we're actually worried about over-engagement, and have even started creating tools to help them mitigate that.

Needpedia can also be used to innovate other things. You simply list the problem you're experiencing and start sharing ideas, or posting around in different groups for help whipping up a few.

My goals for next year:

Locally, I plan on volunteering with orgs near me and gaining an insider's understanding of the problems they face. -As well as an understanding of what ideas others in the org have had for those problems. Then I'm going to list them on Needpedia and show them how easy it is to add new ideas and collaborate on existing ones. The more problems we can solve the more credit Needpedia will gain, while the flaws will inform us about our current designs and any changes we might still need to make. 

There's also the prospect of transforming specific sites throughout town. Needpedia offers users a world map to drop ideas such as that, which is great because we can improve physical spaces in the world while also leaving little signs that help inform residents that the tech used to transform that space can be used to transform more. That there's new tech and a community which has already started using it.

Globally, I want to begin world level discussions about subjects and begin testing how well modern translation APIs can enable citizens globally to collaborate directly. 

I also want to begin helping communities start developing ideas such as literacy programs, which are inspiring but also relatively doable. 


In the next five years:

Master all of the 1st year functions, and amass a vast community of users who each have a handful of posts they care about enough to sign up for notifications if anyone edits them, (we call this "tracking" and already offer it to users on posts, so the goal's basically to have thousands of people using it, defending their own little corner of the wiki from bots and trolls).

If we can seriously start creating effective literacy programs and empowering people internationally with ease and efficiency beyond what anyone's ever seen before, they're going to get excited and start absolutely running with this technology. They'll use it to re-design their schools and workplaces, and even aspects of their culture. In five years I'd like to be giving a state of the collective speech to the community showcasing all the cool stuff we've managed to do for humanity, and the most popular ideas we have for accomplishing even more.

Our primary metric is the number of people we can directly help, but that's hard to measure so our real focus is to just always do our best

In the larger picture, there's a few statistics we feel compelled to help change. Global child mortality for one, we firmly believe that in an age with technology such as ours, no child should ever die from poverty, nor from contaminated air or water. We believe there should be 8 billion people who know their water is tested and safe to drink. We believe the percentage of women dying from their boyfriend should be 0. To measure our success in the end we will count the tons of CO2 pollution that citizen-expert coalitions managed to prevent, and the tons of aid our community was able to produce.

And should we ever solve humanities most dire problems, we will turn our sites to the beautification of the world. Cities will be designed by thousands of people, who love them as only their own people could. (both filled with spots people had ideas for, and with spaces which people finally got a change to discuss openly and pragmatically with everyone else). People will hopefully someday realize that the same tools used to end homelessness can be used to enable everyday people to travel the world, one city at a time. And should that glorious day come, we will measure our success by the billions who finally and truly live free.

Our theory of change is built on citizen-expert coalitions. The world is a complicated place, so citizens simply banning together is usually not enough. Very quickly they have ideas for things that would require lots of experts, and even if you added all the right experts to a group of passionate citizens, the way information would flow between them would be scattered and chaotic. This appears to be why the Occupy movement didn't lead to greater change, countless citizens came together to share ideas, even innovating dialectically, and yet there was no archive for the ideas and once the people stopped being able to meet like that, their ideas seemed almost to vanish with them.

Experts ruling alone creates an elitist ruling body that is typically so small that its members can be bribed or threatened. So a system built from them can't work either, despite them being our most knowledgeable people.

But if you combine citizens and experts in the right way, they can share ideas and begin collaborating on the most promising looking ones. The experts are no longer alone against giant corporations and governments, while citizens are empowered by experts to see which ideas are actually likely to work, and some idea of how much work they'll need to become reality.

We also believe people solve problems less efficiently in groups because of things like anxiety and missed opportunities. If someone mentions something important, but someone follows that with a dumb question, it could take half an hour to get a change to bring it back up. In person meetings are incredibly inefficient, being able to simply approach the subject matter itself, when you have the time and energy, is infinitely easier. You don't have to waste any time, you can literally skip over all content that doesn't interest you and move right along to the stuff that does. And this changes the game because now people can collaborate without hating the experience. Which means they can do it more, and that more people will be interested in doing it. Both are great signs for increased civic engagement. With Needpedia we've successfully combined relevance, convenience, purpose, play, and social connection into one experience, so we believe user engagement will likely be high, and especially productive 

The core technology here is the internet. The key innovation is what we're doing with it. Instead of sharing fluffy cats and bad news, we're trying to create the ultimate tool for sharing specific ideas, for specific problems. 

What's interesting is that we can both use Needpedia to begin optimizing anything, AND incorporate anything into our listed strategies for solving things. So we can use Needpedia to build a better drone, (listing problems with aerodynamics or something), and use those drones to more cheaply deliver medicine or something as part of an idea. It's extremely flexible and open ended. 

We're affiliated with the Northwest Alliance for Alternative Media and Education (NAAME.org).

As a half middle eastern person myself I am absolutely elated to create a space for people of all races, and other back grounds. As I've said before Needpedia's Layer System can be used by minorities to discuss ideas among themselves and they're also free to simply create their own posts like anyone else so it's going to be fascinating seeing how often they choose different courses of action. -and under what circumstances.

I'm also extremely curious to see how well Needpedia's Token System works for them, as they will now finally have the ability to say whatever they want, whereever they want, without even interrupting anyone. I'm curious if people will be able to guess factors like a users ethnicity or culture based on the statement a token's been dropped next to.

I'm also very excited to see what women do. They've worked so hard to have the dismal level of representation they've been able to gain so far, what will they do once they have absolute equality in governance? How often will they ban together or choose to work publicly and why? And what could this all do for people who connect through solidarity? Could we create a extra healthy alternative to drinking at bars, where people join together and work on stuff that excites them? I can't wait to find out.

Needpedia is not a business, it is an open source collective. And as such it has some very special abilities to bypass the need for a lot of funding. For instance, when an idea for improving Needpedia gets popular, it becomes the perfect place for devs wanting to gain experience and build their portfolio to collaborate. Because it's not an obscure idea or project, they can say they helped develop a part of Needpedia, and they did so knowing there was a community of people interested in seeing their work. The users get free help from an expert, the expert gets an unlimited source of ideas from the users, and the people actually running Needpedia just have to pay to inspect and test the code, and keep the servers running. And when people have ideas for promoting Needpedia or something else, we imagine it working in a fairly similar way. -As long as the idea is popular enough.

In other words, we crowdsource, and keep our expenses low. 

We also plan on using a stewardship model to keep expenses low. When someone tries vandalizing a page on Wikipedia, the people tracking that page get a notification about edits, and often end up fixing the problem within minutes. That's how we want Needpedia to work too, through dedicated communities, and a few AI double checking things for us, rather than employing an army of moderators

Our first funding goal is to use Patreon subscriptions, acquire grant money, and start selling merchandise. Thanks to our partnership with NAAME.org we can also accept tax-deductible donations.

We plan on leveraging our crowdsourcing functions to keep expenses extremely low, while also focusing on high value, low cost objectives that we can act on first. As we accomplish increasingly sophisticated goals our users will share more ideas and connect with more people about them, further growing Needpedia's community.

In a nutshell our hope is to keep costs so incredibly low that a portion of our users committing to 1 dollar a month is enough to fund operations. If we actually manage to start creating literacy programs and changing the world people will become increasingly interested in committing to a small amount each month. 

If they have an idea that requires tons of funding, we ask them to fund it in isolation rather than trying to create a budget for Needpedia that would enable us to fund ideas. Our goal is to keep our core operations extremely lean and efficient.

I honestly don't even show Needpedia to people yet because I want their first impression to be really good. So I'm not able to ask for funding yet the way I will be once it's finished and actually working for people. -I believe we are very close to this point however. People seem very interested in the project and getting them to commit to a dollar a month on Patreon seems feasible. We can also look for volunteers to help us apply for grants too, as we've seen a fair amount of interest from volunteers on Volunteermatch.org too.