

HN: Share an unused idea - lachyg

I'm always seeing people with tons of skills, but don't have any ideas to execute! But then I see a lot of people with a lot of ideas! So I thought that the people with plenty of left over ideas should share them, get critique on them, and let others build them if they like 'em!
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malandrew
UserVoice for congressional districts as an alternative to lobbyists.

The idea is to use technology to disrupt traditional lobbying to the point
that it is more difficult for the bad lobbyists to have a negative impact.

With the science of reputation and filtering systems getting better by the
day, one solution might be a service that makes everyone a potential lobbyist.
There are about 118,000 citizens per pair of ears in Washington according to
Clay Johnson, author of the blog InfoVegan. The website I am suggesting would
allow all 118,000 people an equal chance to voice their opinion. Those 118,000
opinions are then voted one by those same 118,000 people. The most upvoted
items "float" to the top and get past the filter to the Congressman or
Congresswoman's ears.

If you also make it so that people can't link and vote for opinions directly,
you remove the one major avenue used to game the system: one person with too
much time or influence spreads the link to their idea to those likely to
upvote it.

Instead the system can be designed like a double-blind experiment. Ideas are
stripped of names of people and organizations. The system randomly assigns
ideas already submitted to be upvoted or downvoted to all participants. A
participants ideas does not get submitted for voting by others until they have
"bought" that right by voting on the ideas of others. Participants get a
limited number of upvotes and downvotes to use, thus preventing them from
giving out too many of one or the other and being forced to make a judgment
call.

Those are a few ideas, but there is no reason the mechanics of voting and
reputation systems can't be used for this end.

As I said above, this is a bit like UserVoice for government in that it allows
users (citizens) to "lobby" the product managers (congressmen and
congresswomen) for product feature requests and improvements.

~~~
maguay
This would be really, really great. The biggest challenge would be to get
people really using it, but if it was as widely used as UserVoice is today, it
would definitely get attention. And webapps that would change society for the
better would be really exciting to work on.

~~~
malandrew
To be honest, I don't think that would be all that hard if you use the bowling
pin strategy (naming credit goes to Chris Dixon.

Open up the system for only one congressional district at a time. Opening it
up countrywide could kill it due to perceived inactivity. Instead you start
with the congressional district where Silicon Valley is located. There's a lot
of very smart people there, who typically have strong political views and are
active about them. Those are prime early adopters.

Those early adopters will also include many of the best and brightest tech and
product minds who will give the best feedback early in the life of the product
(just like with Quora, Forrst and Dribbble).

Once it has a high level of adoption there, it should be making national news
already. You then roll it out slowly over the most politically active
congressional districts one by one until it's used all over the country. I
would also choose strategic "trend setting" cities with high levels of
political activism such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. shortly after the
congressional district where Silicon Valley is located.

~~~
maguay
Sounds like a great strategy, and trying to target the early adopter crowd
would definitely be the best way to get buzz going early. With it being 2
years before the next presidential election now, it'd be a great time to start
getting it going. When are you releasing it? :)

~~~
malandrew
Unfortunately I'm not working on this idea. I gave it and the others in this
thread away to community because I'm currently working to make one of my ideas
a reality and I already have a second one planned for when I'm done with this
one.

On top of that I'm not living in the United States right now. I plan to return
one day, but at the moment I live in São Paulo, Brazil.

By all means feel free to work on it, share it with others or whatever. I'd be
more than happy to advise anyone who wants to work on it.

I have way more time than ideas. New ideas appear daily. I wish I had as many
skills as ideas.

~~~
maguay
Very funny ... I'm in Thailand right now myself. So hey :)

And I actually have more ideas than time myself. The hard thing is picking the
things that will payoff the most over time, knowing what's most important to
tackle first. The best step, I guess, is just to get started and see how it
pans out :)

~~~
malandrew
Getting started is the hardest part. After that you just need to pick up
momentum.

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malandrew
Social Babysitting.

A social network where parents fill out a profile of themselves and their
child and the site tries to match up parents with children of similar ages and
interests. The parents then can meet one another, check out each others homes
and introduce the kids to each other to confirm compatibility. Once that is
done, these mutually compatible parents can rely on each other to babysit each
others kids when necessary.

The site would keep track of karma points between parents.

This would permit couples to have more alone time together without having to
spend lots on babysitters.

~~~
photon_off
Very cool idea. Like couch surfing.

~~~
malandrew
To be honest, I think one of the hottest spaces today is social sharing in the
real world. There are so many possibilities it's mind-boggling. In this case
and the dog one I posted below, you are sharing personal responsibilities.
However, I think most of the potential is in sharing personal capital
expenditures that are almost always at a low-level of utilization for most of
the population. For example:

\-- Sharing cars/bikes

\-- Sharing toolboxes (in an apartment building for example)

In fact, I think the apartment building is the perfect size unit of sharing
for a lot of goods. The key challenge is developing the interfaces and
mechanism that prevent the tragedy of the commons.

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malandrew
An online reputation/credibility aggregator. Do the same for credibility that
TransUnion, Experian and Equifax have done for financial credit. Aggregate the
reputation of one user across many sites. Here are some examples of sites and
reputation metrics to use:

\-- Hacker News upvotes/downvotes

\-- Quora upvotes/downvotes/followers/Endorsements

\-- Twitter followers/retweets

\-- Disqus Likes

\-- Facebook Likes

\-- LinkedIn Connections and Endorsements

\-- GitHub Followers

\-- Forrst Followers/Likes

\-- Dribbble Likes

\-- Etc.

All the pieces are falling into place to establish an online credibility
rating. Possibly even multiple credit ratings for difference dimensions like
coding, graphic design, business advice, life advice, career advice, etc.

Here's a possible use case of such data:

Imagine a debate erupts between two users who claim to be authority. Maybe
they are arguing on climate change. Each argues his side of the issue and
makes claims. One has a high credibility rating of 720 and the other has a low
credibility rating of 590. Others watching the debate can then take the
credibility rating into account when considering which side to trust/support.

That may not be the best example, but I honestly think such a credibility
rating would have value and that we really won't understand the value of such
a system until you put it out there and start seeing what others do with it.

~~~
malandrew
Can the person who downvoted this please explain why?

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krabat
Skills - a site, where you split up and clearly define your skills, offering
them to the public for sale or trade, if order for people to find what ever
skills they need in the vicinity.

max. three skills registered pr. person. Professionals need to register as
such, but log in on equal terms with every one else.

Everyone is judged by those helped, on their assistance, from a decimal
valuesystem. Friends inside the system can recommend skilled people.

Suggestet intro: SKILL - a skill can be anything, you do very, very well. You
don't have to be a chef with a restaurant in order to be a good cook, but
quite possibly you don't know as much about hygiene as the professional chef,
and should restrict your skill to specifics. Like "Couisine of XX country". Or
"The best kitchen utensils at any given price".

"Will aid for \- cash contribution to me, a charity, my church etc. \- DVDs,
LPs, Comics, whatever collectable" \- assistance with my car (a xx model yy
19zz) \- food in the fridge \- minimum wage for max. xx days \- a homecooked
meal \- a friendly/intelligent chat \- and so on

If you use it, credit me, or mail me krabat a menneske dot dk with willingness
to jam more on topic. If it already exists, please let me know.

------
jonhendry
Learning Paths: compile a database where you specify a goal, possibly a fairly
vague one, and users contribute the bits of knowledge that would be useful to
accomplish it, all the way down to the very basics.

So if the goal were "Write a 3D graphics engine", users would collaboratively
add items going all the way back to, say, basic geometry or trig.

I was thinking that llvm sounds pretty interesting, but I don't know anything
much about compilers or interpreters, so not only do I not know how I could
use llvm, but I'm not clear on what it could do. Another 'learning path' could
lay out what knowledge and/or experience I'd need to build to get to the point
of being able to understand and use llvm for an interesting project.

This could also be useful for teachers. A kid interested in video games could
see the things they ought to learn and master, and would see how they build on
each other. That would help answer the "when am I ever going to use this"
question.

~~~
karanbhangui
I've been working on a simple graph based UI called ConceptsMap that creates a
map of all the topics involved in a concept, and how they're connected. Users
then submit materials that are related to each node on the graph, and vote on
existing submissions. So if you want to learn about LLVM, it'll show you all
the branching topics, and you can pick the 5-6 best resources for that
concept.

------
malandrew
Social dog kenneling and dog walking. Basically AirBnB for dogs.

Basically when you go out of town you can leave your dog with other users on
the site who have dogs and vice versa. Every time you take in a dog of another
user you earn karma points. When you kennel a dog with another user you spend
karma points. Users get a certain number of karma points for free upon signing
up, but once they've used them, they much take in the dogs of others to get
more back.

This site could also be used for dog walking as well. Maybe even bathing dogs
could be included.

The site would need a Terms of Use that limits the liability of those that
participate and those running the site.

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jawns
I started coding this idea a while back, but had to abandon it for lack of
time: A site for civic associations that allows them to post announcements,
coordinate events, and collect dues via a credit card.

Because civic associations in my area are voluntary but handle essential
services such as snow plowing, I came up with a novel way to guilt residents
into paying their dues: A Google Map showing which households were up to date
on their dues -- a way to subtly pressure neighbors to pay their fair share.

Site could also include a neighborhood marketplace -- sort of a hyper-local
version of Craigslist -- and other tools useful to civic associations.

~~~
LeBlanc
Great idea! You could probably do the collecting dues stuff with the WePay
API. I'm using it for a project right now and it's pretty awesome.

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smbwrs
A mobile app that allows users to create ad-hoc points-of-interest maps, both
public and private, based around events.

My inspiration came from spending time at the Brimfield Antique Show this
year. My lady wanted an easy way to note specific vendors with items she liked
and wanted to revisit, but the iPhone Maps app only let me drop one pin at a
time, for some unknown reason. This lead me to imagining a map of the area
with dozens of pins dropped by all sorts of people, with tips ("this lady is
willing to haggle", "don't get your hopes up, this guy wants twice what his
stuff is worth") and recommendations ("avoid the seafood place. trust me.").
It's a little Foursquare-y, but less about, "I'm here" and more about, "let me
tell you what I've discovered."

I imagine something like this could be used for all sorts of things, from
large concerts like Coachella or Lollapalooza to keeping track of where one
parked in a parking garage. The idea scales from personal location tracking to
a sort of event-focused hive mind of wisdom.

Of course, it is entirely possible this already exists, and I just didn't
check the App Store throughly enough. But if it doesn't, it should. I'd use
it. We were at the Topsfield Fair last night; it would have been wonderful to
know exactly where the maple cotton candy vendor was, or to expect an
unbelievable wait before riding the ferris wheel.

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sirwitti
groups.

create a group by setting it´s name.

join a group by knowing its name.

send messages to everybody in the group.

get contact info of everybody in the group.

create/accept/reject dates/deadlines.

share comments/links/files

this is for people who where at camps, workshops, classes, university, play in
bands, work on any type of project together,...

sounds interesting?

~~~
photon_off
Yes. I've been infatuated with this idea for 3 years now. Specifically, having
the groups centered around threaded forum-like discussion. So many times I've
wanted to throw up a temporary forum online, and I just could never find an
easy enough way to do it that didn't require lengthy registration and
administration.

It would be nice if I could just tell someone, go to "foobar.com/<some word>"
and we'll discuss it there.

I have a killer domain for the idea, but sadly have always been too busy
working on other projects. To tell the truth, I'm a bit intimidated by working
on forum software. Last time I tried, I feature-creeped myself to burn-out.

~~~
eAlchemist
Check out <http://MicroMobs.com>. They do almost exactly what you're talking
about.

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dholowiski
Outsourced giveaways. Basically a blogger/podcaster/company pays me a fee to
give something away for them (a book, an iPad etc) and I handle all the
backend stuff like contest rules, entries, selecting a winner, contacting and
shipping the prize. Eventually the site could match up companies who want to
give stuff away for free with people who want to run a contest/giveaway (for a
fee of course) I gave up on this idea because you'd need massive lawyer
involvement as game/contest rules are different everywhere and not well
understood. You would probably need a lawyer co-founder to make this work.

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ljegou
A graphic design assistance app : summary of colors and fonts used, automatic
detection of design blunders, misalignments, blurred / reduced previews,
masked symbols etc.

~~~
lachyg
I like it, a lot. Could do something similar with coding (PSD to HTML)

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jayliew
Exchanging contact information with new people you have just met is still not
as easy as one thinks. I'm not going to convince someone I've just met to
install some contact mobile app that I have that the other person does not
have.

[http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/05/half-baked-idea-of-
the-d...](http://times.jayliew.com/2010/10/05/half-baked-idea-of-the-day/)

------
lachyg
So if anyones interested, I'll kick it off:

A tab candy-esque site to share tabs, or specific sites with friends, instead
of bookmarking, you can share a site with a friend, or a group of friends.
Your friends could also allow you the option of automatically opening tabs
that come from you. Would also be an interesting social experiment!

~~~
clojurerocks
I actually brainstormed a similiar idea about 6 months ago.

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revorad
A site for parents/grandparents who live away from their kids to read stories
to their children.

It should be really easy for the parent to record a story in their voice -
ideally a mobile app. The kids go to a website or even just run a desktop app,
say iTunes, which receives the recorded stories as a podcast.

~~~
maguay
A Story before bed (<http://www.astorybeforebed.com/>) already does this. It's
a webapp but also has an iOS app for mobile reading and playback. They don't
offer receiving the stories as a podcast, though, but you can play them back
online or on your app forever.

~~~
revorad
Awesome! I'm really happy someone made it.

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jayliew
A product that aids you when you browse the web: the moment you land on a
page, it warns you if it thinks the article you are about to read might be a
waste of your time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776409>

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logicb
I am looking for feedback on my own ideas -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435>

