Community projects: idea brainstorm
16Last week’s wikimedia fundraising post by @f00l got me thinking again of community projects. What sorts of projects are best suited for an online community to undertake? What projects would a Mediocre / Meh community be best at? Are there “ecommerce projects” out there that are of collective benefit or are they all ruined by monetization and commercial bias? Do we have a purpose or is our purpose our own entertainment?
My thoughts in this direction go back a ways. I’m reminded of an idea I pushed my team to do in 2006 or 2007. We were selling shitloads of screaming monkeys on Woot. Gmail had upped the ante for web email services. White label options to brand your own email service were getting better. My pitch was we give each Screaming Monkey a unique user name. We’d take first and last names of famous celebrities and mix them randomly. So there’d be a Barack Cruise and a Tom Obama and then every other celeb last name for Barack and Tom and vice-versa on their last names. Then we’d create email accounts on our private web email service (many hours wasted looking at monkey/email URLs). When you bought a screaming monkey, it’d have a unique name AND a preassigned email account with a starter password.
The “Monkey Army” would then be employed in various ways. For example, if a new startup formed that we wanted to explore, we’d issue a monkey army directive to sign your monkey up and explore the new service with your fellow monkeys. No one would know who you were but you could build a reputation and robust profile for your screaming monkey.
For better or worse, the technical aspects of this were just challenging enough that my team talked me down from this being a worthwhile idea. It probably would have been the genesis of something out of control like Anonymous or obnoxious like 4chan. In fact my “various ways” list itself was about 1 idea long so the utility of this was not a given at all.
So back on topic here - I’m not wanting to jump in at the scale of Wikipedia or even build a Screaming Monkey Army. I’m wondering about the smallest bite sized endeavors that we could figure out how to distribute the workload to amongst ourselves. Things we could either collect data and organize here, or things that we could do elsewhere online as a cohesive group. For that matter, do you start with ideas or do you start by supplying the platform on which to vote and collaborate on ideas? How far are we from that sort of platform?
Have any thoughts on above or even project ideas?
- 38 comments, 94 replies
- Comment
I don’t entirely understand what you’re asking but that Screaming Monkey Army sounded amazing.
@DrunkCat My thoughts exactly.
@DrunkCat looks like I shouldn’t have posted before a long meeting. Collecting funds for charity isn’t what I had in mind. More distributing work amongst a team that could pay off to the collective alone or the public at large.
@snapster Ohhh. Like mailing out a bunch of Meh stickers so that users can stick them on interesting places and having a thread where we can take pictures of said places?
@snapster is there any other type of meeting? Long meetings are de rigueur…
@snapster so you’re talking about things like seti@home and folding@home…
Except not with CPU cycles, but rather with human cycles…
How hard would it be to set up a “pay it forward” fund, funded by the community and used to help out or cheer up a mehmber in a time of need?
It’ll be strictly a voluntary contribution of a small amount whenever we order something.
@narfcake I’m OK with a pizza delivery fund or something like that. Or a random fuku fund.
How about making a legit Children’s Book with the Meh cast: Irk, Glenn, Chinface, TinyTubMummy…
@DrunkCat
Like
@DrunkCat childrens book??? make one for the adults
@thismyusername yeah like a “graphic” novel (bow chicka bow wow)
@thismyusername Mediocre Serious Graphical Novel for Adults: Irk Counts. Can You Count with Irk?
@InnocuousFarmer It’s a count down book and instead of the end it should be SOLD OUT.
Monthly lottery/raffle. Only people who buy stuff from meh during the month are eligible. Option at the time of ordering to pitch in $1 for a chance to take home the pot at the end of the month. You can gain 1 entry for every order that you add a dollar on to. Each month, 1 winner drawn from the hat at random. Winner takes the pot. Everything resets each month. (no carry-over entries) For legal reasons, this could be disguised as something other than a lottery fund. “click here to add a $1 tip to your order (wink wink)”
…Oh, this isn’t what you had in mind? Maybe the winner gets to choose a charity for the money to go to…I don’t know…as long as I get a piece of the action.
@medz This sounds vaguely illegal.
@medz You can all send me a dollar for each order this month and bet on if I will still be active come October.
@MrMark Put your address here and I’ll send you a dollar.
What about a monthly charitable sponsorship of some sort? Mediocre and customers could contribute and propose suitable recipients.
Might start with the EFF?
I would suggest avoiding hot-button stuff, charities that have a controversial or partisan agenda, or charities that promote a specific religion or point of view. Although charities operated by a religious organization what offer equal practical assistance to everyone, and who do not use the charity to supports religion, would seem fine to me.
Or we could jointly create a Mediocre scholarship fund. Or a fund that would find teachers/classrooms in need and then pitch in to help buy books and school materials.
Like this
https://meh.com/forum/topics/please-give-money-to-buy-books-for-poor-kids--or-dont--up-to-you
@f00l Ohhh! How about having a deal that’s specifically designed to submit proceeds to a charity or goal of choice (e.g. funding teachers/classrooms). Like all proceeds from this knifedock go to buying tools for a shop class.
@DrunkCat kinda like what 13deals.com does? Seems like a cool thing to do.
I still think we need to pull our resources together so @Matthew can make a greatest hits CD.
@conandlibrarian He has hits?
@conandlibrarian I want a 180 gram vinyl release of “If I Was Batman”
@Cheddy uh, yeah! How about “Fridy” or “Xmas Up The Butt”? And who can forget his debut single, “Anything Can Be Jerky.”
@conandlibrarian I stand corrected. I had no idea his discography included “Xmas Up The Butt.”
It seems to me that ideas of charity in the forum tend to have a brief but brilliant glow that then fades. The super hero thread and the help out a school thread come to mind. I like it going organically.(Although i do like the name screaming monkey army)
If we do official charitable then I like the idea of once a month having a charity of the month and a staffer or forum member writes a write up and silly video about why they think it is an awesome program and tie in the product to it. Then every dollar raised for charity at meh get the meh match ( and i think 50 cents per dollar raised sounds appropriately meh)
For example we could sell some random beverage container and support https:,/www.firstgiving.com/downtownsailingcenter/2016-charm-citys-ya-gotta-regatta
And then talk about how water is important and thus waterbottles and helping handicapped kids learn to sail and then post a stupid video of irk sailing and maybe getting caught up in the sails.
@CaptAmehrican I’d also like to support mehmbers who are involved in community fund raisers such as @mzsooze who is involved in a JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) walk.
@Barney There are a lot of us that have our own causes and charities… I’m getting ready for my marathon on November 5th… It’s going to be brutal!
So far I can see we’re pretty far from a platform that can brainstorm and evaluate project ideas beyond asking people for money. I guess that’s not a huge surprise. Money was invented as an efficient way to trade value.
Nonetheless, I’m interested in ideas where we (or a subset of us) would participate with effort vs. money. Potentially the only way to make it feel charitable is if it was done without commercial benefit for anyone (ala Wikipedia)
Plenty of you remember deals.woot. It was also an attempt at that sort of participation project, though it did have monetized affiliate links. I guess it’s safe to call it a failure but is there anything in that direction worth doing?
@snapster Slickdeals pretty much has a monopoly on that type of repository, but how about curated reviews?
@DrunkCat do we collectively suffer because of any Slickdeals bias towards affiliate partners? I’m not saying we do but it’s a clear example of opposing interests.
@DrunkCat I’d love to look at the review space. I feel like it’s been tried a bunch outside of Amazon but perhaps not in a non-profit sense? Could we solve the authenticity problem to boot?
@snapster The problem with deals woot was the deals were not good and if they were they were picked up by say dealnews which curates the good deals.
@CaptAmehrican It would be interesting to elevate your observation above the tactical point in time you saw this to be true and say “paid curation of deals always beats crowd sourced curation”.
I’m an idealist who believes that not to be true and where it is observed to be true, the platform could be adjusted to beat an individual curator/team. Especially where that curator has a bias opposing the objective (Dealnews making money vs saving the consumer money).
That said, I think the primary problem is people’s interest in avoiding bias. No one cares about affiliate links because they corrupt in such small increments.
@snapster with crowd sourcing you got a ton of deals and they were sourced by whomever random with often no sense of what actually is a bargain. However with dealnews you get them looking through the slickdeals and woot deals but also curating it must be so good to make the list. So curation matters now if we could get mods who did that for free. Or the waze model where if enough people vote down a cop on side of road isnt there or votes down not a good deal it goes away you could crowdsource. But you need a curation of deals. Also there needs to be incentive for people to find deals and share them.
@CaptAmehrican the deals.woot model was curation by community vote combined with a time deterioration factor such that vote accumulation rate was the measure.
@snapster When deals.woot was in full effect it was an awesome tool and a great community. Although only a few deals appealed to me, most of the deals posted were worthy of the bandwidth.
Then the scales began to tip. The Asian spammers started to monopolize, moderation became scarce, anarchy ensued, followed about a year later by the unfortunate demise.
Without more reflective consideration I am hard pressed to offer any kind of meaningful suggestion pertinent to exactly what/why it failed. I wonder if you’ve contemplated the pathology?
@ruouttaurmind yes, I believe it’s apathy. You’re at meh dot com. Boil it down and all we do is predict and then measure your apathy to different things…
Writing more haikus in public forumsWhat we should do is
tell people to post haikus
in public forums
Serious answer: Cost vs value of subscription boxes, categorized and ranked
Core feature building a collaboration tool for subjective value
@Moose Subscription box with items selected by community
@JerseyFrank A community cultivated subscription box based on subscriber vote driven value scores? I’ll be honest… I don’t hate it. There’s a starting point here. With some thought it could be fleshed out to become something very unique.
@snapster, I think @JerseyFrank might be onto something there…
“Subscription box with items selected by community”
So what we have is a bunch of amateurs at stuff.
What we need is something a few hundred people with no particular skills can do and do well.
Ideas
@CaptAmehrican 1. best idea I’ve read all day
@snapster That’s just my idea but with meh replaced with googly eyes.
/giphy sad googly eyes
@CaptAmehrican
Dr Firk (Flat Irk) goes around the Galaxy?
/giphy The Doctor Is In.
@CaptAmehrican @snapster re: googly eye idea: I started a group back in my college days that would ‘attack’ campus buildings with little green army men. Hundreds at a time. We would sneak into a building at night (usually the fine arts center where we were studying) and put them everywhere: in the hallways, on shelves, in classrooms, on the top rail of bulletin boards, on exit signs… all over the place.
The best part was going to school the next day and watching the joy on people’s faces as they started noticing them everywhere. It made people happy.
The best part is that the tradition has somehow carried on to other parts of campus and I still receive reports from a younger sibling who finds them on campus.
@snapster, I’m sure you could bulk order army men or googly eyes or something and send them out to VMP members or in the next fuku or something with instructions on where to put them in our local areas and report back in a forum thread with stories and pictures.
@CaptAmehrican @snapster The googly eye thing sort of reminds me of BookCrossing.com. You put a sticker in a book and “release it into the wild.” Meaning you take a book you no longer want and leave it somewhere for others to find. The releasing and capturing of books is tracked on the website. It’s pretty cool.
@pitamuffin There’s a site that does this with dollar bills too - http://www.wheresgeorge.com/
@pitamuffin Bookscavenger.com is a similar idea that gets kids interested in reading. You leave a book somewhere, provide a clue and wait for it to be found.
This is definitely a CEO-fuzzy-vision idea if I’ve ever seen one. What I’m hearing is that you want to know if there’s a desire and method by which we can do some greater good at very low individual cost, but high collective cost; and if so, what might that look like? And what group do we want to benefit - mehtizens? corporate? public?
That said, here’s my contribution to the brainstorm:
@JerseyFrank
yes exactly. high collective value from small efforts by our audience. non-commercialized if (presumably) that makes it better.
Unboxing videos… in reverse.
@JerseyFrank
/giphy two-way petting zoo
A site that keeps user and service manuals for every product, ever, starting with whatever today’s item up for sale is.
Or a wiki of them… just brainstormin’
@JerseyFrank This was the first thing that came to my mind, but I couldn’t really figure out how to express it. But a lot of stuff that pops up here, people have experience with and help each other with in the product threads; and certainly a lot of the products leave a thing or two to be desired in the manual department. A product-centric knowledge hub of sorts seems quite fitting.
@JerseyFrank This was my idea as well- it’s useful, and we only need one person to do it per item.
What would be ideal would be to get a permanent link to a manual on the Internet Archive added to the post of each item.
Yes, and we could allow people to ask questions and this service would ping people we know who bought it. And it could allow people to ping others who asked the question to see how it was solved. And we could do it in a way that wasn’t just text-box filling. An auto-follow up that asks anyone who asked a question how they ultimately solved it.
Case and point: I got real questions about today’s item that just aren’t going to be answered before it sells out. It’d be really helpful if I could get a solution at any time.
@JerseyFrank in the example of items we’ve sold, posting link and continuing the thread of the item would be most convenient right? Maybe if there were a wiki style embed that appeared at the top of the thread for future reference?
In the case of random other products, could we use a grouping of threads like here on Meh and just rely on Google indexing to the product name/model #?
@snapster I’m just the idea man. I trust you to handle the implementation details.
@snapster But srsly, I think we’d need some mods if we were to use the forum to implement. We’d want control over presentation (or for an MVP, just a way to arbitrarily re-order posts). We’d want to have an infinite edit window on posts too.
@snapster And we could further refine what exactly should go in one of these posts later… rough ideas are:
@snapster Maybe the info could be ‘packaged’ along with Past Deals? I believe those are currently just listed by posting date, but maybe there are other, more coherent groupings that could be created & expanded upon (perhaps using wiki format)
@JerseyFrank I think there are other “user manual collections” out on the net already but I’m not sure how broad the effort is. I run across them price checking stuff all the time. The most nefarious try to sell you the manual when you need it which sucks because they don’t own it to begin with. The best seem to offer free views but presumably there’s still value lacking we could add? Like a lot of things in ecommerce, this connects then to other ideas which then oddly feels discouraging because it feels like a momentous undertaking. Maybe there’s a way to keep this super lean with the forum and some evergreen editing / wiki style work. Agreed on mods but we could promote super users to do some of that work.
@snapster At certain points, there’s been a Quality Post-like feature on product threads- you could bring that back.
Also, you could create a separate forum that’s read-only for non-staff/moderators to host the good bits about each item so that we don’t bring dead threads back to life constantly, and you have a stable place to refer to that isn’t in danger of going away, changing address, or linkrotting. You can then easily grab the best parts of previous threads and put it into the new product thread then.
@snapster When I said “mods” I meant modifications, but moderators too, I guess. With respect to a momentous undertaking, I presume you meant “monumental.” You could add a field to post objects that allow you to order posts. We could get fancy with arrows, but your MVP could just be a validated text field.
I think we’re going to run into copyright issues if we store the documents locally, but I don’t see value in this if we don’t have some reliable way of serving them. It might fall under “fair use” because it’s a public service, but IANAL.
@snapster Forgot to talk about the monumental project aspect. Think of this like an agile project. All we need for our first sprint are entries for User Manual in the bot post. Next sprint we can move it to a second post. Third sprint, we make it openly editable. Fourth sprint, ???. Fifth, Profit.
@snapster Maybe it’s time we open a Trello board for this and start throwing shit against the wall.
I’m keeping all my best ideas to myself until you cut me in - there may be no way to escape commercialization.
(I want half. HALF, dammit! But I’ll settle for 49.99%)
@Snapster, this of course is his way of saying that he can’t come up with anything good.
Whatever it ends up being, I am game. We can use my friend’s site for it
considering that, like, you know, he owns it…We can always have the home page video.
www.channelindependent.com/
Can I just send all my Box Tops for Education to Meh?
@ELUNO busted me up laughing. Boy I detest how bizarre a scheme it is for my kid’s schools to lobby me in repeated emails to collect bits of product packaging for them. It’s like a saturday night live skit.
@snapster seriously. Here’s $10. Surely I’m good for a year.
@ELUNO Do you remember when it was soup labels? It was a long time ago, when I was a kid. That was so much worse, mostly because we had all these stripped cans of soup in the house and no idea which kind we were opening.
@pitamuffin I was the parent in charge of counting the damn things and you wouldn’t believe the number of parents that waited until the last day of school to turn them in. For a while it felt like “How I spent my summer vacation.”
@pooflady Oh wow, that must be the worst job ever.
Maybe a Meh.com jobs board? Perhaps focusing on remote positions and expanding to geographical regions? It can have mentoring, software sharing, and learning clinics?
@connorbush linkedin of meh?
@connorbush ah - for some reason don’t think I’ve considered this one before.
I’ve always found LinkedIn’s monetization practice interesting. Basically the more you connect to people the less they can monetize you for wanting to connect to people. Let’s break this off into a discussion and see if there’s any pro-tips on creating a clever group there.
@snapster @connorbush I don’t much care for LinkedIn, so I fullly support any and all mediocre alternatives. I’m out of a job in Feb., though, so if we could just expedite this…
@snapster The connection stuff in linkedin always seems pointless. These days linkedin falls into the social media trap - algorithm detects something is “popular” and so it promotes it, making it popular. My resume was with recruiters for 2 weeks, got barely anything. Then I list myself on some online sites that connect to linkedin, and suddenly my profile was so popular I was getting 2-3 people reaching out per day.
Trying to think of something that either the Internet can’t corrupt and ruin, or else that gets better when the Internet corrupts and ruins it.
/giphy cats and porn, cats and porn
@f00l Rule 34 makes this impossible.
how about a homework help network? we probably have at least one regular smart in each major subject?
ok, if not that, how about we collectively calculate the highest prime number not yet known?
hmmm, still no winners here? how about a career advice collective with open discussion of salaries and interviewing strategies?
if none of those work, i have a bunch of kitty litter coupons i’ve been collecting, perhaps i’m not alone?
@Yoda_Daenerys Rolling with your prime numbers idea, if we all came up with like… I dunno, ten random numbers, we could make one truly mediocre approximation of pi.
@brhfl ok, i’ll start it off with 3
the smoker i drink, the player i get
we could establish a network or sign makers for the homeless, first thought is the sign would say “could you spare a dollar in exchange for a random joke?”
“we” (the network) write that (or something better) out on 20x20 cardboard for a homeless person we pass on occasion. we also provide a sandwich bag full of printed jokes that can be handed out (maybe 100 jokes cut from 8.5x11 paper 25 or 50 to a sheet).
we can source the jokes from the community here and track the progress of the method by checking in with our homeless friends to see how their revenue has been impacted.
i have told one joke i heared here countless times “skeleton walks into a bar and yells get me a beer AND A MOP!” (emphasis mine)
@snapster Your idea reminds me a lot of Gishwhes- tons of things, some of which are downright trivial to the right person when they would normally be nearly impossible, and lots of good that can get done because it’s spread over a large number of people.
When I was employed by eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions before they sold off the business unit where I work, I participated in their “Little Bits of Good” employee engagement program using the Wespire platform (formerly known as Practically Green). Although this is designed to help companies engage their employees in corporate sustainability and responsibility programs, I am sure the concept and principles could work here as well.
http://www.wespire.com/
https://ebayinc.wespire.com/
Once I signed up for the program, I started earning points in different categories for doing good things for the community and environment. It could be something as basic as changing to energy efficient bulbs (purchased from Meh, or course) or bringing lunch to work for a week, to something more complex like organizing a community fund drive or working at a food bank. For some categories we could do simple things like post pictures of our pets or our favorite park, or just share ideas with other participants from around the world. We also received email newsletters letting us know who currently had the highest points, as well as what folks did to earn new points. So there was a competitiveness to this as well.
I personally found it fun, educational, thought-provoking, engaging and ultimately helpful to be guided into action, while helping others and the planet in the process. It also gave me something interesting to do on long conference call
tl;dr
I think you are overlooking one of mehs biggest achievements - running an open community with little moderation where most of the comments don’t devolve into trolls insulting everyone. Truly a great community service
What if any time community members joined another site, we all added a “k” in front of our name, or maybe an “m” for meh, or even added meh in front, (I would be mehdemo). Our presence across the internet would grow, others would begin to wonder about it. We could organize here then visit the sites to post haiku, compliments, or maybe life hack tips or whatever. Think internet flash mob?
@KDemo I already do this. I’m “mehsux” on like a dozen sites.
/giphy community brainstorm
Only tangentially related but this reminds me of a forum i used to frequent, where a moderator made large Kickstarter pledge for Wasteland 2 to name a weapon in the game. The mod turned around and posted about it as a kind of community project, asking forum members to help put forth money and help choose a name for the item. Once again, the mod made the pledge in advance, so this sounded super fucking dubious, like the guy had buyers remorse or wasn’t going to make his rent and decided to bilk a bunch of nerds out of their money out of tenuous solidarity.
It was a success!
@Twiminy somewhat similar but I only want your life. Or well, the only resource that matters in your life - your time. Money is for myopic comic book villains.
@snapster I’m trying to think of sincere ideas but i can only come up with jokes, such as:
A site where internet app start-ups post what their product or service is and the community helps them figure out and vote on a twee mispelled word to name their company.
INeEdCaPiTaL Posted: "I am starting a service where you can order custom colored bubble wrap, please help us name it"
xXGokuSeverus420Xx Posted: “How about BublRp”
@Twiminy not sure of the site concept but BublRp is an awesome business idea and name!
@Twiminy there was some.goat game where the meh community got one of the goats named meh if i remember correctly it was the purple goat
@CaptAmehrican I love purple.
@Barney Really
nobody could tell.
Something like SETI@Home, but for squirrels.
@medz OOh, I have a lot of squirrels in my backyard I can lend to this project.
@medz I’m in. I have lots of squirrels and I’m ready to send them signals…
@medz We have gray squirrels and black squirrels but I wonder about the intelligence. I keep seeing them carry walnuts from one side of the yard to bury them under the oak tree on the other side.
@pooflady They’re trying to start a Tree War. I saw it happen once, and it only ended when a Brazil Nut intervened.
I do like snapster’s monkey army idea. In particular the part about have an anonymous account set up for us ready to use for whatever. Maybe shawn can just incorporate this into the meh account page where if you click a box, you opt-in to have a fake google account created for you that is linked to your meh account. These accounts could be used to infiltrate and review start-up websites, post product reviews, post youtube videos, etc… We could even use it as a way to private message other meh members via the fake email address. Heck, even google hangout parties could happen.
Also, shawn needs to set up a vpn or proxy server or whatever so anything we do with our fake google account isn’t traced to our local IP.
@medz glad to recruit you to the idea. I think a core need of the Screaming Monkey Army idea would be that you could ultimately gatekeep entry with an email server and then authenticate users with that same email domain BUT still be anonymous.
The physical monkey becomes the private key setup password. Random sending of monkeys seems possible via some third party like an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. Public verification that it is a legit Screaming Monkey would be by email domain. I’m not sure how you’d anonymously verify membership other than a public/private scheme like that.
A site for kickstarting projects, except instead of offering money (but maybe also that too), people are encouraged to offer skills, advice, and resources. Instead of kickstarted projects ending with “oops we spent all the money but can’t make this stupid cup/camera thing/drone to work because it turns out we didn’t know what we were doing” you get “hey I want to make this thing but I don’t know shit about half of the process, anyone here work at a plastic factory?”
So, kinda like this thread.
@Moose considering how upset i see artists seem to get when you ask people to work “for exposure” i dont think this would fly?
(See twitter.com/forexposure_txt for examples)
Opinions aren’t art though so i kind of like the whole review site idea i vaguely remember seeing earlier.
@Moose quirky kinda does that
I think there is a phenomenal idea in here. In fact it’s almost paradoxical in that the idea itself if a perfect example of how the idea could best be fleshed out.
There is a great problem-solving resource available in people coming together online who all have different perspectives and different abilities.
The problem is how best to focus and use that resource and this idea is addressing exactly that. If we could focus our energies on how to design/develop/implement a tool to utilize that resource something fantastic could be created.
The problem is sifting through the noise to extract the nuggets that really propel the root idea forward. It’s inevitable that there will be 90%+ noise when dealing with crowds, never mind adding in the internet which means lots of cat pictures, bewb posts, etc.
So then we could crowdsource ideas, the good ones would bubble up to the top. Like getting thousands of people to mail a random person a birthday card when it isn’t their birthday. Or go darker and mail the person get well cards.
@Bingo Cat pictures, great idea!!
@brhfl I agree! A collective effort to post new and original cat pictures!
/giphy cat-tastic!
How about a bake sale?
Mechanical Turk for charity
@toposhaba2
At a designated date and exact time, everyone goes to a designated site and just holds the F5 key down for a solid minute. Then we see what happens for science.
@medz Woot on Christmas at 1:00 a.m. EST.
Oh wait, some of us already do that.
How about we all do yoga or pilates together?
https://gigaom.com/2013/02/19/skip-skype-workout-with-friends-online-with-wello/
You had me at Flying Monkey Army.
The ideal kind of projects here are ones where there’s a lot of a rather simple task to do- doing 5-10 of something isn’t difficult, but doing 50, 100, or more of the same thing is tedious, error-prone, and not fun/rewarding for many people.
To give a couple of examples (which hopefully illustrate this):
iFixit has a device wishlist spreadsheet for their device donation program, which really isn’t as up-to-date as the site, so just looking at the sheet, you could think a device is wanted when there’s already a guide and so they don’t need any more of that device. With 300+ items on the list, it’s a serious chore for one or two people to check all of them, but for a group, it’s not so bad.
The Internet Archive has an absolutely massive collection of playable in-browser games for nearly every non-Nintendo system in existence. The popular games have nice descriptions, metadata, reviews, and more. The more obscure stuff just sits there, with just the game and possibly some screenshots. Playing the games and mentioning what kind of game it is would help surface more of them, and make it easier to see how genres have evolved or been birthed.
@dashcloud That reminds me of an app I heard of that randomly plays tunes in an online streaming service that haven’t been played on that service before. Sometimes they get massive libraries of obscure music which, if you didn’t know of them, you would never see them.
Anybody here ever see Brewster’s Millions?
Just a grass-roots movement to put the “None of the Above” yard sign in yards across America.
This one is nice:
I think it would help with any kind of community project if we had a way to communicate with each other privately than didn’t blast our email address all over google and the waybackmachine (eg your screaming monkey gmail thing or, preferably, an irk or the red and white handsock Matthew plays with whose name escapes me at the moment, and use the money you earn from us buying those to help build the infrastructure to operate this).
Looking at the informal community projects we have done so far, there are a limited number of people who seem to participate. I think the odds of participation are higher if the individual effort/time/money involved is limited but the collective effect means that people will see a significant outcome. People participate in things like that for different reasons and so we’d likely need a variety of “projects” that are really different from each other and also aim to meet different individual “needs” to participate/gives back different kinds of intrinsic rewards from participating.
I am not a technogeek so some of what has been talked about here is over my head…but whatever is done likely will need someone to take ownership of an individual “project” to keep the thing focused, on task and to make sure that it is “finished”.
I don’t know what % of your net profits you plan to donate to charity (if any at all)… but it might be worth setting up a side 503c to channel some of this through - and then use that to provide seed money for projects that need it to get something started. This whole thing would probably need someone at meh (likely paid) to gently nudge/advise/guide the thing to keep it on track (and if a 503c was used as the vehicle to make sure everyone colors between the lines)…