Things the Collective Should Do: Developing World B2B Portal

Let's imagine a website which gives small businesses in developing areas around the world access to free web-based business software, financial planning resources, commercial contacts, and other information they need to be successful.

This website will provide leaders of new and developing businesses access to a suite of software that provides simple and reliable double entry bookkeeping, payroll processing, sales forecasting, and other necessary business management functions. Additionally, the website will include a free portal to crucial services such as employment postings, regional legal guidelines, sales opportunities, and business development tools. Access to local and global contacts via this portal will give businesses more viability, give them access to wider markets, and put them in touch with the contacts they need to be successful. Businesses may be able to apply for microfinanced loans, government incentives, and other means of attaining capital.

This website will address informational and logistical barriers to entry of small businesses in remote or underdeveloped areas without an existing support network, widespread infrastructure, and preexisting culture of entrepreneurship. The

Entrepreneurs in the developing world would have better access to verified information, support networks, and new markets. This empowerment of individual businesses would also lead to new local jobs, increased availability of goods and services, and the generation of wealth throughout communities.

The first step to properly implementing this website would be to conduct a needs assessment of areas that would benefit from online business development software to figure out who we could reach and what we could offer them. Creating usable, reliable online business management software with the features needed by small businesses in the developing world, translated for many possible markets would follow, and finally, recruiting business experts to share knowledge of standard practices, financial howtos, and entrepreneurial techniques would get the site up and functioning.

Optimally, those businesses that used the website would have better access to crucial information and would be more likely to succeed and grow. These businesses would set an example in their communities and share their knowledge via the website, enabling sustainable business practices to spread through their localities. One would compare the outcomes of a sample of businesses who used the software with similarly equipped businesses in the region who did not. For product-driven companies, an increase in the number of potential customers who would like to import their product would lead to fairer, more competitive pricing for goods.

Game Design as Programming

What is it about game design that lures software developers? Both are geeks, to be sure, but there seems to be a special draw that somehow grabs hold of both.

Andrew and Kristin Looney are good case studies to start with. Before starting their own company inventing games, they worked as as computer scientists at NASA. The love of computer science is evident in their games, which are rife with simple mechanics that end in beautiful systems of input and output.

Richard Garfield, designer of Magic: The Gathering and other wildly popular thinking games, also began as a Bell Labs scientist. Magic's inventive abstract system of interaction between cards was completely new at the time, but appeals to many - Garfield's game is absurdly popular around the world.

Paul Sottosanti is a php developer-turned Magic-designer turned game-developer. His latest work, Tiny Adventures, builds cleverly on the new paradigm of social networking games.

There are a lot more examples of software devs-turned-board game developers, but take these clever people as examples to start with. Common geek-appeal aside, what is it that draws programmers? The game as a microcosm of reality with its own rules, structures, and beginning and end seem common to all four of our cases. Software is similar in its use of interconnected modular parts. The shared Ludism and limitless exploration potential of programming languages and games is equally likely.

Thoughts?

Things the Collective Should Do: Free Online College

We're talking completely free, accredited, online associate-level college courses.

A free online college offering courses adhering to high levels of quality. The courses are (in US terms) in the 100-300 level range, enough to satisfy general education requirements and demonstrate a student's commitment to an institution of higher education. Courses are accredited by relevant standards bodies, and admission is not restricted in any way. Students' knowledge of the course topic is vetted by open-book online tests, peer reviewed papers, peer-judged class competitions, readings followed by captcha-like comprehension tests, class discussion followed by peer ratings, and/or other scalable systems of measuring comprehension of materials. Courses are copyleft and the subject matter is crowdsourced and peer reviewed.

Cyclical educational disparity exists worldwide. Entirely-online classes are becoming increasingly common but still have costs that preclude the enrollment of the average world citizen . Education is not a zero-sum game, and information is easily recyclable for many minds. Everyone should have a chance at achieving a high level of education, and this idea removes some of the social and economic barriers to this.

Marginalized populations who currently do not have access to high school or college would be able to obtain a higher education, and would be able to apply to other colleges with proof of their academic experience. Existing colleges would have a much wider pool of applicants from more diverse backgrounds. Additionally, seniors and working adults will have the opportunity to engage in life-long learning. Society worldwide will be enriched by a general increase in education.

The first step is the creation of software that would allow people to freely contribute to open sourced course material. The success of Wikipedia is indicative of the willingness of Internet users to contribute information and editing to worthwhile causes. All course content would be reviewed by Professors to ensure that accreditation standards are being met. The software in question would also be usable by students. The college would require marketing designed to appeal to a diverse student body. Peer editing and adherence to high levels of quality will facilitate wide spread accreditation of classes.

If more people obtain free college-level learning, the idea will be a success. The disparity within education can be measured in terms of average levels of learning across overlapping boundaries of gender, income, nationality, and race. The number of person-credit-hours would impart the degree of success of the free online college. A shift in international attitudes toward learning would also indicate improvement. A measurement of the educational divide will be demonstrated in an increased proportion of college students from marginalized backgrounds.

10 to the 100th!

Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. The due date is October 20th - get your revolutionary ideas in as soon as you can! - and the vetting process includes expert consensus as well as internet voting.

I've sort of been waiting most of my life for someone with a lot of money to ask "How can we change the world for the better?" and I'm taking this as my chance to get it all out of my system.

We're going to be speaking Truth to Power, man. With Love, man. We're going to be posting some of my pinko, humanist, fossy, digerati-ass ideas here in the next few days, after they go through the formal proofing and rigorous editing process and all that.

Community Wi-fi

I'm expanding my Meraki network as quickly as possible, now that my little Apple-imposting device has nearly paid for itself. My rationale on originally starting the network several-fold:

In my AmeriCorps days, I would have lied, cheated, or killed to obtain internet access without having to pay $50 a month for it. As it happens, I never killed anyone, but I'm fairly sure the other two were covered depending on your interpretation of local wireless network laws.

The vicious amount of bandwidth (note: not nearly as much as is still advertised) I'm paying for from my ISP is barely consumed even at our peak hours with several devices connected and active.

Sharing with friends is one thing, sharing with strangers is both more rewarding and more dangerous. I didn't trust my network administration skills enough to allow strangers any access at all to my internal network, but I still wanted to let neighbors and bus-stop-waiters have access to the many useful functions of the internet.

Meraki is an inspiring, well designed service, as NetEquality and others can attest. I can't call it revolutionary until some real gains are gotten in areas where access to the internet is a paucity, but I'm for it.

More IP Polemic

Aside from the aforementioned pragmatic rejection of IP that I and many others hold, there exists a (currently very unpopular) idealistic aversion to it. The argument states that there is no way to 'own' ideas. Given that we've legislated a lot of other intangibles into existence (citizenship, time, etc) I'm not doubting our theoretical ability to legislate the ownership of information. I'm not even asserting that information wants to be free, though the statement has its merits. I'm just very, very skeptical of the idea that information can belong to a person.

For one, unlike other types of property information isn't even close to a scarce good. Once it exists, it can be replicated over and over for free, being built upon in any number of ways. To have exclusive ownership of something infinitely replicable seems beyond human ability.

Once a person invents something - a joke, a meme, a new and useful process - I can agree that they're the sole holder and proprietor of every iota of that idea. But once it's outside the mind of that person, I'd be forced to argue that it belongs equally to everyone who witnesses it. They've already multiplied it in their mind, potentially forever, and can't disown it for any amount of money or effort. Are they just borrowing it? If they don't own the copy in their mind, does the creator (or whoever the creator sold the idea to) own that region of their thoughts, or just the observer's rights to share it?

The idea strikes me as preposterous on a really basic level. Please remember that I'm thinking of this as someone who traffics in information for a living, at let me know where I'm differing from a thought-out schema of our ability to own data.