

Cards for Humanity - Thought Experiment on Brainstorming Big Ideas - neltnerb
http://neltnerb.tumblr.com/post/72480442671/cards-for-humanity

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azundo
Really neat idea, I like the push to get people thinking positively about what
might be done to face some huge challenges in the world today.

In that vein I would love to see some of the opportunities listed alongside
the challenges in your different regions as well. While Africa certainly
suffers from all of the challenges you name they are not proportionately
distributed across what is a huge continent. I believe that understanding what
potential there is to unlock is more important than the challenges that
already get a lot of press and invoke pity and a feeling of helplessness. I
would challenge you to do some research into each region and what they offer
in order to leverage those strengths instead of getting caught up in the bad
news that makes headlines today.

Great idea though, thanks for sharing.

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neltnerb
I love it =) Unfortunately, my poor understanding of the specific local
problems in... well, anywhere other than the US limits my ability to do that
coherently. I also recognize as a major flaw that people in the "west" have a
strong tendency to infantilize people in less developed countries.

I feel like the first step to addressing actual problems in these places is
always the same step you would use in identifying a market problem -- find
people in that market and ask them what they think would be helpful!

So for me, I see the idea of this as to provide a context for engineers to
look deeply at what is really going on in these places, by ideally asking
people there how they can help.

Imposing ideas never works well, so I think that while this is hopefully
useful as a motivation tool to learn and think about where your tech skills
might fit in to solve major problems, ultimately it's only going to be useful
if people who actually live in these places are involved. I'm hopeful that
this lesson will become apparent as people look in more depth at how their
ideas might work in practice, but it would be neat if there were a way to
incorporate that directly... I just don't have the knowledge to do it.

Certainly Somalia and South Africa have very, very different problems, for an
obvious example. I think this game would best be played with ready access to
the internet, an open mind, and that just researching the ideas that are
developed will improve our overall understanding of just how difficult these
problems are.

In any event, I really, really would love it if other people added or modified
these templates to expand it to fields I'm not familiar with. For instance, I
didn't include "art" or "music" as tools, although I am quite sure they could
be.

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georgebonnr
Looks cool. FYI a game called Cards for Humanity exists
[http://cfh.io/](http://cfh.io/)

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acomjean
I think these are both games named after the 'cards against humanity' which
harbors no grand or good ambitions. Also available in a print your own
version.

[http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/](http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/)

