Some problems seem so intractable they just won't lie down.
How do you keep the ideas coming when each idea for improving the situation seems to produce more problems?
The World Bank Institute in conjunction with infoDev, and the Korean Trust Fund on ICT created a social networking game - Urgent Evoke to allow thousands of people to collaborate not just on developing ideas, but expanding on the problem via blogging of text, images, and video around core themes or "evokations" that you can then invite others to participate in. Turning problem solving into a game where everyone can take part and evoke responses from others by sharing their problems... and their ideas about potential solutions... makes problem solving both interactive and much more engaging. This infoDev article summarises some of their successes.
The Evoke leader board on global giving for the last evoke event shows the kinds of challenges people are struggling against and additionally provides a means for people to donate to support the individual initiatives emerging to combat those challenges.
For example, Organism is planned as a non-profit website fostering collaboration, where internet users can develop concepts into working projects for the greater good. Their perspective:
"The world is rife with challenges exceeding the capacity of any single person to solve. With 1.6 billion internet users world wide, digital collaborative networks have been seen as a potent solution for the last decade. Networks have been started, yet not one has attained widespread popularity. We have identified four components essential to a collaborative network's success, and determined that the absence of two or more elements has been the cause of every failed attempt."
Their aim is to "solve the worlds problems by catalyzing collaboration among the 1.6 billion internet users"... something to keep an eye on.
One effort to catalyze the internet in a common effort is:
ReplyDeleteeliminate-all-corruption. pbworks. c0m
The effort is to promote national economic development through the creation of a broad ethical investment environment.
The problem I have found with scaling development on the internet is that people are here for entertainment and have no real interest in developing anything substantial.
"The ONLY way to attain Respect from others, is to Teach them something useful that can be taught to someone else. Respect is ONLY given when that which is received can be given to others to obtain Respect." UA-KITS. c0m
So attempts to foster broad altruistic development of an effort is doomed unless conveyable useful education is attached to the effort.