A website for sharing ideas

Part 1: A website for sharing ideas Version 1.0 02.10.12 The website described here will have many functions, and has the potential to be useful foe a broad range of people for a broad range of purposes, but if the goal of the site was to be summarized in one (long) sentence it could be: To create a platform where people can share ideas, find ideas and collaborate on implementing good ideas, where the ideas are organized in a way such that people easily can find ideas relevant for what they are looking for and so that good ideas can be found by the right people.

A short and incomplete summary of how the would site work •

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Ideas would be posted in two category-hierarchies: One where ideas are placed in according to what they will improve upon (what the goal of the idea is) and one where they are replaced according to what they are (is it a product, a service, etc). This category-hierarchy would have many functions, among them making it easy to look for ideas within specific areas, broad or narrow, that you are interested in. Ideas would be rated and ranked.

You can give a long description of the idea with pictures and so on, but you also have to give a short description with about the same maximum length as that of a tweet, so that it's easy for people to quickly browse through many ideas and click on the ones they think look interesting.

For each idea a “site within the site” is created, which has many features with the function of (1) helping the poster of the idea communicate his or her vision, (2) making it possible for people to give feedback and discuss the idea and (3) making it so that people easily can get together to implement the idea.

This, making a platform for people to form teams so that ideas can be implemented, is one of the important functions of the site.

In addition to ideas we have “challenges”. A “challenge” links to all ideas that address a specific challenge, and thus makes it easier to get an overview (hopefully it will make more sense once described in more detail).

The sites algorithms would help people find ideas that are of interest and help people who want to implement ideas easier find people in the right area with the skills that are needed.

Why this site is needed When Larry Page, co-founder of Google, woke up with the idea of downloading the whole web, and keeping just the links, it was his lucky day. It was also the world’s lucky day. Now anyone with access to Google has better access to information than the president of the United States did 20 years ago.

Some people have what it takes to turn their ideas into reality. But there are also many people who don’t. Or they might, but they don't have the willpower and motivation to make the large investments that are needed.

We also have people who want to create something and are looking for a good idea.

These might be people who want to start a business and become rich, or people who want to make their mark on the world in a positive way, or both.

One might wonder about the percentage of the good ideas in the world that don’t get turned into reality because of the mismatch between those who have the good ideas and those who are ready and able to follow through on the ideas. (How many “googles” have we missed out on?)

Even if you are willing and able to work on your idea yourself, you will probably want some help. You might be lucky enough to find people who can join you among friends and acquaintances, and you might not. You might go to a college or somewhere else where people all around you have special skills, and you might not.

Whether or not you do, the people that are available for you to ask, the people you know about and your friends know about etc, are just a small fraction of the people and human resources that are out there. (That being said, even in a time where you can Skype for free with someone across the globe, I do of course recognize the advantage of collaborating on something with a friend and/or someone who lives the same place you do.)

Some might say: “You can already post ideas on the Internet and make them available for the whole world.”

This is true, but how can you today make sure that your idea is found by the right people? By posting them on your blog?

And how can you get an overview of the ideas that are out there? You cannot, and even making a try takes a lot of work – trying different searches, thinking of websites and forums you should try out, clicking around on the web, etc. There is no place where where all or a big portion of the ideas are gathered and neatly organized, and where you can get an oversight of the ideas addressing a specific issue.

There are several inefficiencies in the world this site could be able to fix or at least improve significantly upon, more than the ones mentioned here, and once the system is established its scalable in the sense that up more functionality could be added.

Anyone who has seen a sufficient number of TED-talks featuring innovators know there are great ideas out there - awesome, world-changing ideas that the rest of us had never thought about. Some of these ideas are so great that they can give elegant solutions to problems looked upon as unsolvable, provide huge leaps in efficiency and/or open up new possibilities we had not even thought about. But given that so many great ideas make into TED-talks, imagine how many ideas that don't.

Ideas One of the central functionalities of the site would be the ability to post ideas. These could be ideas for: -

New products New services and business models Apps Computer programs Technical devices Improvement on existing technical devices Websites ++

Here are a few examples of ideas that could be posted on the site (if they had not already been realized or set in motion): -

The core principles of Google’s original algorithms Kivia.org Khan Academy Lynda.com Spotify Subway Plotline or parts of the plotline of the movies Slumdog Millionaire or The Sixth Sense Selling bread that's already sliced Wolfram Alpha

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Matternet The Ansari X-Prize and The X-Prize Foundation The computer game Foldit Mars One TED-talks and Solve For X-talks Google Earth Youtube Kickstarter.com Kindle Instagram Wikipedia

The company SolFocus sells solar panels that use cheap mirrors to focus a lot of sunlight on a small area of high-performance solar sells. You don't have to be an expert to come up with an idea like that, but expertise is a huge advantage if you want to implement it.

Skimming through many ideas When you post an idea you can choose to write a long description of it with links, documents, pictures, illustrations, embedding of videos, etc. However, you are also required a very short explanation of what the idea is about. The maximum length of this short explanation should be roughly the same as the maximum length of a tweet.

This will make it possible to skim through lots of ideas and click on the ones that seem interesting if you want to read more.

It might be a good idea to require the user to choose a picture to accompany the idea (either a picture they upload or link to themselves, a picture they can take of themselves with their webcam, or a picture from an archive that we provide easy access to when posting ideas). This could make it a lot more appealing to skim through many ideas then if there's text only.

Sorting ideas with the help of categories When users posts ideas they have to place them in categories. The categories are decided by what the goal of the idea is. Is it to improve the environment? Improve communication? Increase efficiency? Make peoples lives easier? Reduce poverty?

First the users have to choose which of the main categories to place their idea in (environment, energy, education, communication, governance, poverty, efficiency, entertainment, ++). There should also be a category called “Other”, but we should strive to have fitting categories for every idea, so that people don't have to use the “Other”-category too often.

When you have chosen one of the main categories you are good to go, but you can also, if you want to, choose a more specific category within the category. Say that you have chosen energy. You can then choose among the categories that are within the energy-category (electricity, energy storage, renewable energy, nuclear energy, energy efficiency, ++). If you categorize your ideas in any of these sub-categories your idea is still in the main category as well. Anything placed in a sub-category is also in the category the sub-category is contained in.

This picture does not show all of the different sub-categories - only some of them. As you can see “Renewable energy” is a sub-category of both “Global warming” and “Energy”. Since anything placed in a sub-category also is in the category the subcategory is contained in, any idea categorized under “Solar power” is also automatically also in the “Renewable energy”, “Global warming”, “Environment” and “Energy”-categories.

Here is an important point: If you think your idea fits in several different categories you can place it in all of them. You don't have to limit yourself to one category! You can place your idea in as many categories as you want (at least within bounds of reason). So if you e.g. have an idea that directly will address both poverty and the environment it can be placed in both of these categories.

Here is another critical aspect of how ideas are categorized that I have not mentioned yet: There is a separate hierarchy of categories that works just like the one described above. Rather then answering the questions of what the idea will improve upon or what problems it will address this hierarchy of categories answers the questions of what the idea actually is about. Is it a physical device? A computer program? An app?

A business? A creative way to organize a governmental service? A website? A product? A proposal for social entrepreneurship?

In both of these independent hierarchies of categories you have to choose at least one category, but you also choose more if you want to.

Having these two independent hierarchies opens many possibilities. For example: • • •

It's easier to detect duplicates.

It's easier to find a specific idea and thus see if someone already has thought about your idea and if its being worked on A person who e.g. loves making apps and cares a lot about the environment can easily look for ideas that are apps and address environmental issues.

How will we make sure that all the categories that should be included are included?

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First of all we have to think a lot about it. We need to test out a lot of ideas (e.g. ideas that already are realized), and think about how we would categorize them if we were to post the idea on the site. If the categories we would look for when categorizing the idea aren't there, we need to add them.

We can look at the categories that are used other places (e.g. in the faculties of universities, but also lots of other places).

People should also be able to add their own categories. If these categories are among the main categories they would have to be reviewed before they are added, but of they are sub-categories, or at least if they are sub-categories of a category that isn't a main category, I propose that it should be possible to automatically add categories – both as an action in itself and when posting an idea. We could see all the categories that have been added, and if we see categories that should not have been added or have been added in the wrong way, we could delete them or edit them.

Hopefully we will find many good ways of browsing ideas. I imagine that when you are looking at ideas from specific categories, it will have similarities with browsing files on your computer in column-view (folders being analogous to categories). On the column furthest to the left we will have the main categories. If you pick one of them, then the different sub-categories of the category you have selected will appear in the column to the right. However, the ideas will not appear in the same box that you use to choose categories. Rather the ideas appear bellow. So when you have selected a main category the top ranked ideas within that category come first. If you select a subcategory within that category, then the top ranked ideas within that subcategory will appear first. Hopefully it would also be possible to have two boxes, one for each category-hierarchy, and when a specific categories are selected in both these hierarchies, only ideas that are in both of the selected categories will be displayed bellow. Hopefully this could be combined with search and other functionality as well.

Rating ideas When you click on an idea to read the full description of the idea you get to a site with a lot of functionality (more on this later). One of these functionalities is the ability to rate an idea. I envision three different ways in which this can be done: -

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Three buttons: “Like”, “Dislike” and “Favorite” (the buttons would work roughly as they do on Youtube, including the functionality that favorites appear on a users profile if the user approves). In addition to these three buttons we could also consider a “Bookmark”-button.

Buttons with text (instead of stars): “Revolutionary idea!”, “Good idea!”, “Fairly good idea”, “I'm skeptical” and “Bad idea” (or something like that, I haven't thought it through in detail). Maybe there could be a button as well for marking an idea as not being creative and new.

Buttons with text as described above, but also the option of making an idea a favorite.

Like and dislike button, and a favorite button, and a drop-down-menu for more specific feedback (as a replacement for the buttons with specific feedback described earlier).

The purpose of rating ideas would be to let ideas with good ratings (in proportion to the number of views and other factors) get higher rankings. Ideas with higher rankings would appear higher up than those that have low ratings when browsing ideas, but at the same time it's necessary that the system has ways of giving new ideas a chance (there are several ways this could be done).

There are several things we can measure and try to optimize for when choosing which ideas to give high rankings, etc. One thing is ratings and favorites. Another is clicking on the short description of the idea to read more. Yet another thing is how much constructive activity an idea gets per view (we haven't gotten to this aspect of the site yet, but it's important). The goal of the site is to be a platform where good ideas can be spread and realized, and the field of statistics gives us many tools and models that I think can be used to find algorithms that optimize for this. I think there is great potential for finding good algorithms and for improving upon them as the site grows larger and we get more data.

Ideas becoming sites within the site The site is supposed to be a platform for spreading and finding ideas, but that's not the only thing it's supposed to be. It's also supposed to be a platform for recruiting people who want to make sure good ideas are implemented and coordinating their efforts.

When you click on the short description of an idea you are led to the idea. Here you will find the full description for the idea, but you will find much more than that. You will find: • • • •

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A comment section. Comments can be found bellow the idea-description, although not directly bellow, as there will be some stuff in-between.

A discussion forum. In addition to posting comments it will be possible to post threads for more in-depth discussions that people don't have to read if they don't explicitly click on the headlines.

Rating-buttons. I wrote about this in the previous section.

“Let's make it happen!”. When you click on this button a box pops up where you, if you want, can write a few words (if there already is a project up and running that you want to be a part of you can write about what you have to bring to the table, and if there isn't already an existing project you want to join, you can write about your thoughts and plans). When you click the button you choose how much of your contact information you want to make available (email, cellphone, Facebook, Skype, ++) . There is a non-invasive but yet easyto-find place on the site of the idea where you can click to get an overview of the people who have committed to working on the idea. On this overview you can click to contact these people (if they have allowed for it) and you can see what they have written. Maybe geographical information should be displayed here, so that you can see the people who live nearby you etc.

“I want to follow this idea!”. Clicking this button puts you on an e-mail-list or something of the sort. Alternatively you could get updates when logging into our sites (in a news-feed or something of the sort, an idea we1ll get back to), and would not have to get e-mails. The person who has posted an idea is also the admin of the idea, but they can also make other people admins. The idea of this button is that you don't fully commit yourself to working on the idea, but still could be interested in working on it. By clicking on the button you can make yourself available for getting involved later on if the project

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gets more momentum, or there are small tasks where you have expertise and can help without being actively involved throughout the whole project.

Integration with other sites. The admin of the idea can if he or she wants to post a link to a Facebook-group for the idea (where people can coordinate their efforts further), a Facebook-page for the idea (that people can like in order to give it more attention), a Kickstarter-page (where money is collected for implementing the idea), a Google-plus-page, a Youtube-channel for the idea, a blog for the idea or a personal website, or any such thing. If none such links are posted then none will appear obviously, but the links to such sites that are posted will, if user wishes it, show up in neat boxes that can be clicked on (if the links are placed in the specific fields meant for this obviously, not if they are posted in the idea description itself). These boxes will be large enough to not be ignored and they will be at the same place every time, so people will know where to look for them. There can be exceptions to the rule of these buttons being placed the same place every time. For example (to be honest it's the only example I can think of at the top of my head), if you have gotten far enough with an idea to gather money in order to implement it, you can choose to feature the button leading to a fundraising page (e.g. a Kickstarter-page) in a more prominent position.

Related ideas. When you see a video on Youtube there is a bar to the right that shows other videos you can view. This is where videos on Youtube get a lot of their traffic. We would have the same system, with ideas instead of videos.

Share-buttons. Buttons for sharing the idea on social media, etc.

News and updates. The poster of the idea or anyone who has been made an admin and given the necessary rights can, if they want to, post news and updates that will appear on a specific place on the “site within the site” (like with everything else that's optional, there wont appear an empty news-andupdates-box if there are no posts).

Introductory video. This is purely optional, but if you have made a video that you think does a good job of explaining the idea on Youtube or Vimeo or similar site, you can link to it when posting (or editing) the idea as an introductory video, and it will be placed very prominently on the “site within the site” (above even the idea description if that's your choice).

In-depth description: The user gives a description of the idea that is as long or short as he or she wants. If the user wants to there is also a optional option of adding an in-depth description. If the poster of the idea has an in-depth and maybe technical description of the idea that he or she thinks might be too much for most readers, but still wants to make it available to those who are interested, they add it as an in-depth description in addition to their main description.

FAQ: Like the in-depth description this is totally optional and will be presented as such. Like the id-depth description it is also something that can be added later on if you want to.

Posters thoughts on your participation: In this optional box the poster is encouraged to write a few words about what they think of people joining in on the project. (Does the poster want to work on the project himself/herself? Does he/she accept and/or encourage people to try to implement the idea independently of himself/herself? Is the poster looking for people to join in on the project, and if so, what kinds of people, and what should people who are interested in joining in do? Etc.) This box could appear right above or bellow the buttons people would push on to express interest in working on and/or following the project. Another option could be to construct such a text with help from the posters answers to a list of yes-or-no-questions and/or questions

with alternatives. Or such an automatic text could be made, but the poster of the idea would have the option of editing it and/or adding to it if he or she wants to.

We have to take account that ideas can be different with respect to what is needed to implement them. Some ideas can be implemented by a group of people simply by making the product or software or whatever it is. Others are suggestions of improvements on existing things and are better fit for being carried through by companies that already make those kinds of things. Others again might be more or less political in nature (although they have to be creative and new ideas if they are to be fit for the site, you cannot post “Give food to the hungry” or “Cut taxes”). I think the “Let's make it happen!”-button is appropriate no matter what kind of idea it is. If it is an idea about something that can be made by a group of people then pushing the button could mean that you want to take part in making it. If it isn't an idea like that you could push the button if you e.g. work in a relevant company and can present the idea to the rest of the company or if it's political idea you can lobby towards relevant politicians and administrators promoting the idea.

Sometimes the person who works on the idea only wants to put it out there, but does not want anything to do with it after that. Others might not want anyone to work on it independently and use the site to find people to work on the project along with them.

Some of these people might not want everyone who is willing to join the project, and might want the information about who clicks on the “Let's make this happen!”-button to be less public and have it be more of a “Apply to join in on this project”-button.

Having the site fit for different kinds of ideas and different kinds of needs is a challenge, but it should be very impossible to achieve this by making the person who posts the idea answer a few yes-or-no-questions and take a few choices. Some of the the yes-or-no-questions would have to be mandatory, but there could also be an advanced-section that people don't have to click on when posting an idea if they don't want to.

There's all kinds of specifics we could get into here. For example, Haakon proposed to organize comments not only after ratings, date and length, but also content (do they point out weaknesses, contain criticism, contain praise, contain tips?). We came up with an idea for what I think might be a fairly easy-to-use and easy-to-implement way of doing this that would have several merits, but I'm not sure whether it when all taken into account is a good idea or not, and would obviously want to hear peoples thoughts on it. I wont describe the system in this text as we have much to go through.

An issue concerning “the site within the site” and how it could be dealt with I suppose what we would want to avoid is communicating the notion that clicking on the “Let's make this happen!”-button implies that you necessarily want to work on it along with the poster of the idea and/or other people you meet through our website (unless the poster of the idea explicitly states so when posting the idea). Something we at the very least can do is to communicate and impregnate in the culture of the website that you when clicking on the “Let's make this happen!”-button both have the option of writing both: “I would like to work on this. I know ... and ..., but not ... . Contact me if you want to join.” and:

“I want to implement this idea. I'll be trying to get some friends from the university where I study to join in on the project. If you want to join in, then by all means contact me and tell we what you could contribute, but I imagine letting the area where I study be the center of operations.”

But I have another proposal that I think might be better. It goes like this: You can create a “project” to implement an idea. So on the “site within the site” of an idea you can create a new project or join an existing one. A project becomes a “site within the site within the site”. The person who creates the “project” has admin-rights over it, and it has many of the features presented in the section above (newsletter, comments, discussion-forum, FAQ, description, updates, integration with other sites, ++), but adding these features is optional. You choose settings for your project. You can let people join openly or have them “apply” to join. You can even, if you think it's a good idea, restrict it so that only people from your area or people witch certain skill or expertise can join or apply. Like described in the section above about the site within the site there could be a box where you write your thoughts about others joining in, and you would be encouraged to write about your plans as well obviously, although that would not be a demand.

The “site within the site” would look pretty much as described in the previous section.

At least that's what the main site of the site for an idea would look like, where the idea-description and everything I described in the section “Ideas becoming sites within the site” would be. But there would be another layer to “the site within the site” that would be less focused on describing the idea and so on, and more focused on the implementation. Here all the different “projects” created for implementing the idea would be featured, and from here you could also click to view the sites of individual projects, create your own project and so on.

The person who posts the idea would choose the settings for creating projects. The options could be: •

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Choosing to implement the idea himself or herself and not allowing others to create separate projects. If so it would be the project belonging to the poster of the idea that was linked to all the functions described in the section “Ideas becoming sites within the site”.

Choosing to implement the idea himself or herself and letting others create separate projects, but linking his or her own project to the different functionalities on the front-page of the idea as they are described in the section “Ideas becoming sites within the site”.

Not deciding to implement the idea himself or herself. This would make it possible for the poster of the idea to select a project another person adds to be added to different functionalities on the front-page of the idea as they are described in the section “Ideas becoming sites within the site”. The uploader could also give people who post projects they like full or limited admin-rights.

The poster of the idea could also, if he or she wants to, make it so that the first person to add a project is able to add functionality connected to their project on the front-page of the idea, and either have it so that it's permanent, or so that they if more people add projects can choose which project to “feature”.

I haven't thought that much about this yet, so I'm sure there is room for improvement and elaboration.

It's important that this doesn't seem confusing to people when they visit an idea. This shouldn't be a problem.

Firstly, since all that stuff about different projects and so is on a different “layer”, not on the front-page of the idea. There could of course be some information about how many projects there are on the idea or something like that discretely placed somewhere on the front-page so that people who wondered about that information easily could find it, but it wouldn't be presented in such a way that right upon visiting the front-page of an idea would be confronted by not knowing how the systems with projects and so on works.

Secondly, if deciding to join in while still on the front-page of the site by clicking on the “Let's make it happen!”-button, alternatives will then pop up. You will then getting the option of adding yourself to or applying projects that already are up (depending on their settings for having new people joining the team) and/or adding your own project. There should also be an option for making your willingness and/or intention to help out with implementing the idea without joining a specific project, just as described in the section under the headline“Ideas becoming sites within the site” when the concept of projects had not been introduced yet. When doing this Come to think of it, maybe this could be what you do automatically when clicking on the “Let's do this”-button, so that the function of this button was the same on all ideas.

Or maybe not. I'll have to do some thinking and some talking. This is the kind of questions that becomes easier to answer as one gets to the stage where things are planned more specifically, but I'm sure we can find a fairly elegant way to do it all.

Challenges As mentioned earlier ideas are categorized by what they are (products, inventions, programs, businesses, etc) and by what they are supposed to improve upon. Since this last hierarchy covers solving problems it might seem to some that what I am to describe is unnecessary, but I think it will have several important uses.

Examples of challenges can be: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Make food on airplanes taste better Help agriculture in developing countries become more productive Defeat cancer Defeat breast cancer Defeat global warming Make space travel cheaper Develop a good cure of acne Improve education Educate the world Make education entertaining Make solar energy cheaper Make storage of electric energy cheaper Free North Korea or move its leadership in a democratic direction Make the world more peaceful Advance the field of Artificial Intelligence Advance 3D-printing Reduce corruption Make canned food that tastes as good, but has less salt Make construction more effective Make the world safer from terrorism

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Make video-production-software that easily lets beginners make fully professional videos Help new musicians that produce good music be found Reduce child mortality Make Internet usage more secure Make operating systems more stable Help everyone gain access to clean drinking water Make healthcare more effective

Like ideas a challenge becomes a site within the site. Here, on the site of a challenge, there is a ranked list of the ideas that are proposed as solutions to the the challenge.

Maybe people should be able to vote ideas up and down here kind of like on Reddit.

I'm not sure.

People can also complain about an idea not properly addressing the challenge in question, and relevant people could then respond to this, and these claims could be taken into account by the system in some automatic way that keeps the challenge-sites from being total anarchies and yet don't require too much work. This will not be an intrusive part of the functionality, just wanted to mention that it is be there.

It would be possible to post an idea as a response to a challenge, and it would also be possible to post links or IDs to existing ideas (ideas posted by yourself or ideas posted by others) as responses to a challenge.

When making a challenge you would, just like with an idea, place it in categories.

Unlike an idea it would be not be categorized by what it is, but only by what areas solving the challenge would improve upon (the first category-hierarchy I mentioned when going through how ideas would be categorized). When posting a new a idea challenges it might address are automatically proposed based on categorization and keywords, and all you have to add your idea to the challenge is to check a checkbox.

Some subcategories in the category-hierarchy also put you automatically as an idea that addresses a challenge, although which categories that would be would have to be chosen manually in some way.

Maybe there should be a function for adding a short explanation for why an idea belongs under a challenge when posting an idea as a response to a challenge and when linking already posted ideas to challenges, in cases where this isn't initially obvious to anyone. And maybe it shouldn't. I'm really just thinking outloud.

So what is the point of having challenges?

Well, the goal is to organize all the proposed solutions for solving or dealing with a problem or reaching a more or less specific goal. To get all or at least a great deal of all the relevant ideas in one place.

Secondly, I think looking at the site of a challenge can be an engaging way of browsing ideas (and thus also an opportunity the spread your ideas to more people).

Thirdly I think seeing the challenge will get many people to look for solutions to issues they otherwise wouldn't have been thinking creatively about.

Challenges can be created by users, but can also be deleted and edited my moderators.

Unless there are special circumstances, like an institution or somebody who offers a prize sets up a challenge (prizes is something we will get back to) a challenge will not be viewed as the property of the person who originally posted it in the same way that

ideas are. The idea is that we, the people who make the site, make some challenges to begin with, but that people also can add their own challenges. For example, if someone who is involved in a specific business or specific field is aware of an important issue where solutions are needed, they can post a challenge.

The point of moderators being able to edit most challenges is that the challenges can be made to fit well within the system (whereas categories and other challenges are concerned), as well as making sure that they look well (as I imagine it a challenge will be well-illustrated with at least one large, high-quality picture or photoshopcompilation) and that their texts are well-written (not all challenges have to have text, but as I imagine it it will be possible to write a short explanatory/introductory text for a challenge).

Users As you might imagine this page would have users. You would generally not need to be a user in order to look at an idea, leave a comment or click many of the buttons (although I suppose one could let the poster of an idea decide many of those kinds of questions in the advanced-section).

It should be an option to log in with the help of Facebook or a Google-account, so that people don't have to make a new username and password and confirm via e-mail – which can stop many from taking the time to become a user. If you were logged in via Facebook you should not be forced to use your Facebook-profile as identity, but should be able to choose between using your Facebook-identity and a self-chosen username.

People who have user accounts also have profiles. I think we can find good ways to make the system in such a way that having to approve a profile does not inconvenience the user when signing up. Instead they can be inconvenienced in small chunks. Like when they click on a button that involves them in a project or post an idea themselves they are asked to post contact information and choose how much of it they want to display and where, when they first add a favorite they are asked if they want their favorite ideas to be displayed on their profile, etc. At least that's one way of doing it. I haven't thought that much about it yet. And if we choose to do it like that, it would still be possible to visit your own profile and/or settings on your own accord and fill in these things before being asked to.

The point of having profiles that can be viewed by other users is that the profile (if the profile-owner chooses it) can: • • • • •

Display the ideas that the user has favorited Display the ideas that the user has posted (or the specific ideas that the user has posted that they choose to display) Display (again; if the user chooses to) the projects that the user has committed to and/or have subscribed to updates from Display the challenges posted by the user (yet again; if the user chooses to) Allow people to send the user messages (allowing for this could also be mandatory)

Users would, analogously to videos on Youtube, be able to see a list of their ideas and get all kinds of statistics about how many people who have looked at their ideas, rated their ideas, etc. Maybe we also should make it possible to subscribe to users like on

Youtube, and thus get updated when they release new ideas and also, if one chooses to, new favorites. Maybe it should be possible to subscribe to challenges as well, and thus get updated when new ideas are added to a challenge.

Main site [Olav is working with Photoshop and InDesign on a draft that will be added later on] Privacy By default the site records the ideas and challenges you visit and maybe also other things (like which ideas that have appeared as related ideas but you have not clicked on, etc). A list of ideas you earlier have watched is available for you only, so that it's easier to look up ideas you remember from earlier. When looking at this list you can delete single ideas from your history, and all traces will then be removed permanently.

When viewing the list, as well as when editing your general settings, you can also uncheck the box that says that history will be recorded in order to adjust the site better to you, and from then on the site will not record which ideas you have looked at and so on. You can also click on a button to delete all history permanently or all history within some timespan.

Having users history will have many advantages. For example it can be used to deduce what subjects and issues the user is interested in, and use this information to adjust the site better to the user. And when visiting ideas that he or she has visited earlier new stuff can be marked as new (e.g. if an in-depth description or new FAQs have been added).

Adjusting the site to the user Parts of how the site will adjust to the user was mentioned in the previous segment. It should be added that the main page is adjusted for logged in users. A block of ideas ideas suggested especially for you might appear. I'm not totally sure how this should be done, but the main page when not logged in would be adjusted to people who are visiting for the first time (or have been there before, but aren't very acquainted with the site yet). When logged into the site then it could be an option to make it more like a feed or something like that. There could be updates on response to your activity (replies to your ideas and comments on your posts, ++), updates on ideas and challenges you are following and, not to forget, recommended ideas and challenges (ideas and challenges that are new to you and the site recommends you to take a look at). These recommendations could (I'm not sure whether or not it's the best way to do it) be presented as “news” (“New top idea in challenge [name of challenge]”, “3 new popular ideas in category [name of category]”, “This popular idea needs a team member from your area who can [name of skill]”, etc).

Of course, it should be made very easy, also for logged in users, to look for ideas in different categories, search for ideas, browse challenges and also easily access all the other core functions of the site. Nothing should come in the way of that.

I'm sure there is several ways all this can be done in a good way. Facebook and Youtube have found good ways of feeding users content that is adjusted to the way their site works and what the users want, and so should we. This way of feeding content should not be invasive to users who only come once and in a while. It should be easy to choose whether or not you want e-mail updates every time someone

responds to your ideas or comment or your posts, or if you want to the site to gather up notifications before they send you an e-mail, or send an e-mail every day or every week something happens, or if you don't want e-mails at all. It should also be possible to get regular e-mail updates on recommended ideas and that kind of stuff. Maybe it would be best if these e-mails were to be turned off by default, so that you would actively choose to receive them rather than the other way around (at the moment I'm not sure though).

On our site, the ideas find you!

As I imagine it now, users, either when logging in for the first time or when visiting their profile for the first time, or something like that, are encouraged to give information about different kinds of expertise that they have (by going through some kind of matrix-system of check-boxes). As I see it this would not be mandatory, but we would shortly tell them why we encourage them to do so.

In order to avoid making the user look through unnecessary check-boxes it might be a good idea to first have to consider check-boxes for wide areas, such as computer programming. Then, if you click on this box, more specific check-boxes will be added (different programming languages, object-oriented programming, databases, GUI, etc). Another option is to not be specific, but simply ask people to answer (with the help of check-boxes) the question of which wide areas (computer science, web development, making apps, animation, video editing, physics, mathematics, design, etc) they have expertise in. I'm not sure which of these options is the best, or if there perhaps is a third option that's better. I haven't given the question that much thought yet.

When you post an idea you are asked a number of questions. I would agree with people who might say that this number shouldn't be to high, but one of the questions that I think is necessary to include is “Is this an idea that possibly could be implemented by a group of people?”. If the answer to this is yes, then they are given the option of specifying what what skills are needed to implement the idea (the checkboxes that will appear are the exact same as we just described here that the users will be presented with). If you don't want to specify this when posting the idea you don't have to. You can always come back and add it if you feel it's needed at a later point in time.

The point of users and posters of ideas filling out this is that we can know which people are needed for which ideas/projects. Let's say that an idea has a good rating, and has had some people stating their interest in helping to implement the idea, but it lacks someone with a special skill. Let's say that this idea is in a category that you are interested in and that you have the special skill they are missing. If so the idea would be a good candidate for being proposed in some way or another by the site as an idea you could take a look at.

Avoiding duplicate ideas We have several tools we can use to automatically make some estimate of whether or not two ideas are the same: • •

The title of the idea Keywords used in the short version of the idea description (the one that's about the length of a Twitter-post)

• • •

Tags The skill-sets that the poster of the idea marks as needed to implement the idea And last, but certainly not least: The different categories that the idea is placed in

After a while, when we get more and more specific examples of ideas that are the same and ideas that are not, we can find ways optimize for detection of duplicate ideas.

When you post an idea, before you actually post it, you will be given a list of the ideas that already are posted and the system regards as having a high probability of being the same idea as yours. Users could also, at least if duplicate ideas becomes a problem, be encouraged to search actively on the site, seeing if the idea already is there, before posting it themselves.

It might also be a good idea to have two buttons on the site of an idea (“the sites within the site”). One of these buttons would be for reporting an idea as already having been carried out and the other one would be for reporting that an idea already is posted on the site. These would not be huge, prominent buttons, but rather small to medium-sized buttons at the bottom of the page.

Our system would of course take into account whether or not people have marked the idea as already realized or already posted. People who click these buttons would get a box where they are encouraged to give links and/or information (in the case of claiming that the idea already has been realized) or link or ID to the the other idea (in the case of claiming that the idea already has been posted elsewhere on the site). The person who has posted the idea would be notified of all these claims, and could be able to respond with a yes-or-no answer to whether or not he/she agrees to the claims as well as an optional written explanation of why he/she thinks of the other idea as significantly different from the idea he/she has posted. These counterclaims will also be noted by the system, so that they can used in algorithms and so on.

It's important to take into account that many people will consider ideas that actually are very different for being the same. Facebook and Friendster were not the same ideas. Ideas that have lots of things inn common, maybe most things in common, can still have “small” differences that make all the difference.

If enough people click one of these buttons (we can find and improve upon the algorithm for finding out what “enough people” is when compared to other relevant variables) the idea could be marked. Kind of like on Wikipedia:

The users responds to these claims could then be made public, and people could click on buttons that make formal responses to these as well (by writing explanations of their views or by clicking on buttons only). After some experience the system could find good ways of detecting ideas that are the same with certainty, and with regards to which came first, what the posters of the ideas say and which has gotten the best rankings and has the most followers, one of the ideas will get a low ranking and continue to be marked, while the other one will get an increase in ranking that makes up for what it has lost to the other idea-post. None of the ideas will be completely deleter unless the poster wants them to be. If the poster of the “loosing” idea allows it,

and there is no controversy that the ideas are the same, users that have clicked “I want to follow this idea” and “Let's do this!”-buttons can be transferred from one of the ideas (the “loosing” one) to the other along with any projects. If the loosing idea came first this will of course be made public in some way, but not in an intruding way.

We must make sure that people who posted their idea first feel unfairly treated at almost any cost.

Why I think we should integrate prizes into the site Before writing about how I think prizes can be integrated into the site, and why I think we could and should, I want to write a bit about why we should even care about prizes.

Prizes have a better track-record whereas leading to technological progress is concerned than most people are aware of, and have the potential to do much, much more. Prices have many advantages as a model for innovation, and could become a key tool for governments, benefactors, non-profits and corporations.

In the following video I have clipped together excerpts from a talk that illustrates the power of prizes. I was originally going to put the stories in the video in writing, but decided to make a video for you instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHKEAPVb-uQ I want to add another story that isn't included in the video through a quote from an interview in Wired with Peter Diamandis, the same guy as the one in the video: When the BP oil spill was going on and on, James Cameron, who’s on our board of trustees, said, “We need to do something about the spill.” We looked at the opportunities and saw that the cleanup technology hadn’t changed since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. So we established the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge with a minimum goal of doubling the rate of cleanup. Out of more than 350 entrants, seven teams doubled the cleanup rate. The winner quadrupled it. The fascinating thing is that one team that doubled the rate was a bunch of guys who met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor. They were upset about the spill and wanted to do something about it. They came in with a fresh point of view and were able to change the game.

As made clear in the video, which I hope you will take the time to see before reading this, prizes have some amazing success-stories, and the innovation-model of offering a prize offers some incredible advantages: • •

If marketed right, you don't have to find the people who can solve the challenge. People will find you instead.

If you offer a prize and nobody wins it, you don't have to pay up the prizemoney. So even though prizes can foster amazing innovation, you can offer a prize taking almost no risk. If somebody wins it, then the winning team, the world, and you, have won. If nobody wins, then you don't have to pay anything.

Though, to be honest; that last part about not having to pay anything if nobody wins the prize, isn't entirely accurate. It costs money to market the prize, and if your competition is based on teams registering themselves in order to join the competition,

you might also spend money on following the teams and providing them with services (it can be a viable option to charge the teams a reasonable prize for joining the competition, but can have some disadvantages).

If people were well-aware of the possibility of competing for a prize, and there was a place were you could get an overview over all the prizes that are out there and find prizes that were relevant for your skills and area of interest, then marketing and launching a prize could be a lot easier and more effective.

However, there is no such place that I'm aware of. We have The X Prize Foundation, which offers a lot of interesting prizes. It's easy to get an overview of their prizes, but also other institutions offer prizes, and maybe more institutions and individuals would if there was a well-used platform where one easily could get an overview of all prizes.

I think we are no less equipped than anyone to make such a platform, and I think such a platform would fit perfect as an ad-on to the rest of the platform described in this document.

How we can integrate prizes into the site To now I have mentioned how it should be possible to post ideas and challenges (as well as proposing new categories). I also think it should be possible to publish prizes.

Like for ideas and challenges you would be creating a “site within the site” when creating a prize.

It would not be our objective to have people launch prizes directly from our site, although maybe that could be made possible. Prizes that already are up and running could also be posted on our site – they would not be meant to be managed from there.

But they would be posted on our site so that they could be added to our sites overview of prizes.

When posting a prize people would be asked a yes-or-no-question: “Are you an official representative of the person or institution that is offering this prize?”

If the answer is no they would still be able publish the prize on our site, and they would be able to do many things with the “site within the site”, but they would not be allowed to do certain things that are restricted to people who have been verified as official representatives of the institutions or individuals who are offering the prize.

Somewhere discrete on the “site within the site” there is a sign that says that the site isn't published or edited by official representatives of the prize and that official representatives can gain control over the site by “clicking here”.

If the answer is yes they are given several ways of verifying that they actually are an official representative of the site (giving contact information so that we can contact them, posting a link to the challenge on one of the websites we know belong to them, sending us a message from one of their social media platforms, etc). The prize is made public on our website as soon as its posted, and they can at once do everything that is to be done, but the stuff that you have to be verified in order to post is not made public until you're verified. When you're verified (or maybe as soon you “apply” for verification, I'm not sure what the best solution would be) the settings you have chosen for whether or not other users can add different things will be applied.

On the “site within the site” there will be a box showing basic information about the prize. What will the prize be awarded for? Who is awarding the prize? What and how much do you win? Is there only first price, or is there also a second place, third place,

etc? Does the prize have an end date? Do you have to register as a team to participate, and if you do, what are the requirements for signing up, if any, and how many teams have already signed up, if that's publicly known? What is the website of the prize?

Although they would not necessarily look the same, I'm thinking something similar to the boxes that you find on Wikipedia (for countries, people, companies, etc, etc).

Of course, a prize that is published on the site would have more features than just this box showing basic information. Here's what I, in addition to the box I just mentioned, propose you should find on the “site within the site” for a prize: Banner or large button leading to the official website of the prize. Or, if there isn't an official website for the prize, a link to the part of the website of the institution/individual who offers the prize that offers the prize.

List of links leading to media coverage of the prize. Hopefully we could be able to include a picture and headline with each of these links, like when you post a link on Facebook. Also we could consider including a feature for adding dates to these links, so that the newest ones come first. If we don't have information about the dates we could either let the one that was added to our site latest come on top, or the one that's clicked on most often, or the links that link to the most prestigious sites, or let a combination of things decide.

Videos promoting the prize. We could have a spot on “the site within the site” that in some way presents videos, either official or well-made unofficial, that promote and inform about the prize. These could of course be embedded from Youtube and Vimeo.

Descriptive text about the prize. If you are to write a text at all, you have to write a short text that will appear somewhere high up and prominent on the “site within the site”. If you write a short text you can also choose to add a longer text that people can read if they click on the “Read more...”-link under the short text.

Newsletter. This button could either lead to some newsletter-service provided by our site, or a link to a place where you can subscribe to a newsletter provided by them.

Unless it's the latter it cannot be provided unless you're an official representative for the institution or individual offering the prize.

Updates. It will, if you are an official representative of the people offering the prize, be possible to post updates, news if you will, on the “site within the site”. This functionality could be combined in some way with the newsletter (when posting an update you could choose to have it be a newsletter too, and the other way around as well).

Comment section and discussion forum. Official representatives of the prize could of course choose the settings (do comments have to be approved before showed, do you have to be signed in in order to post, etc). They could of course also choose to remove these features altogether.

Introductory video. If there is an official video (or an unofficial video chosen by official representatives of the prize) that does a good job of explaining and/or promoting the prize it can be chosen as an introductory video, and be placed very prominently on the “site within the site” (above even the idea description if they want it to).

Optional content. If you are an official representative for the prize you could, if you wanted to, put in entirely optional content (with code and all) and put choose between lots of options for different boxes that can be placed different places on “the site within the site”.

Related challenges: A challenge and a prize could be linked. Thus related prizes could show up on a challenge-page that is about achieving the goal the prize is awarded for or something similar, and related challenges could show up on a prizesite. If an approved representative of the prize is admin of the prize he or she can of course choose if this box is to appear or not, and which challenges are to be accepted as linked to the prize.

Prizes would be placed in the same hierarchy as ideas and challenges are to be placed according to what the prize is supposed to improve upon. Like ideas and challenges a prize could be placed in more than one category at once. Like challenges, but unlike ideas, it would be possible, but not mandatory, to place a prize in the categoryhierarchy that is used to specify what an idea is (as a prize won't necessarily specify by what means the challenge must be reached).

Name for the site We have acquired the domains IdeasMadePublic.com and ShareYourIdeas.com.

Personally I like the latter one better. These were not the best names we could think of, but the best names we have thought of so far that aren't already taken. A lot of the names we have thought of are already taken, either by someone who is using it, or someone who simply has bought the domain. If you have suggestions for names for the website we would be glad to hear them, better with too many suggestions than too few, but before you suggest them, check if they are taken on godaddy.com or a similar site (simply trying to visit the site from your web browser wont do, because many sites are owned by someone even though they are not in use in any way).

What about people stealing your ideas?

I disagree a lot with this kind of thinking, and although I wont go through all of the reasons why, I will explain some of them.

Sure, if you were about to apply for a patent, then I would not expect you to post the idea on this site. However I believe a far more common dilemma than choosing between trying to get a patent and posting your idea on our website is the choice between posting the idea on our website or doing nothing.

Personally I have lots of ideas that I think are good but don't want to implement myself. Some of them I cannot implement yet, and I want to see them happen quickly.

Others I might never be able to implement. Some I might be able to implement if I really dedicate myself to it, but I have other things that I would rather do and prioritize.

What's my point of mentioning all that? Well, my point is that for me implementing the ideas on my own isn't an option in many cases. And even trying to implement a big chunk of them could lead me to exhaust myself. So often the alternative I choose is to do nothing about my ideas. I think this is the most common choice for most people when they have a good idea. Compared to doing nothing sharing the idea on a site such as ours is a much better alternative. It's better for the world since it increases the chance of the idea being implemented, but even ignoring all that, it's better for the person who posts the idea. After all, an idea includes information about the date it was published. You can prove to everyone that you came up with the idea before it was realized, and if someone implements the idea because they got it from you they most likely wont make that a secret either. Thus you end up with a lot more credit then you get by having a great idea and doing nothing.

In many cases, even from a self-serving perspective, people should want people to steal their ideas.

The truth is that it isn't always attractive, even to a person who has no moral scruples in regards to this, to “steal” an idea. Implementing an idea can be a lot of work, and it can be risky as well. When someone already has posted on an idea on a website you might find that others already are working on the project, and you know that if you develop it independently of the site you might be accused of having taken it from there without the poster of the idea approving for this (of course, it might also be that someone has come up with the idea independently of the site).

The market is way more than sufficiently big enough for a site like this to prosper and change the world even if we count out all the ideas people have that they are afraid of other people taking. However, for people who, often unnecessarily in my opinion, worry about others implementing their ideas independently of them and/or without their permission, we could have special settings that it's possible to choose when posting an idea who wish to avoid this.

As mentioned under the headline “An issue concerning “the site within the site” and how it could be dealt with”, one could, on the site of an idea, start a project to implement the idea. But, as mentioned, the poster of the idea could choose to implement the idea himself or herself, and he or she could also choose to not let other people form independent projects (maybe another alternative in the settings could be to make it possible for others to set up independent projects, but only after gaining permission).

Maybe there even could be some kind of more protected ideas, where one is required to be logged in in order to read the idea, and where one has to acknowledge that a log is kept of who visits the site of the idea to read, and that this log can be made public by the poster of the idea, before being led to the site of the idea (also with the option of automatically acknowledging this for those kinds of ideas in the future).

These ideas could be marked in some way, so that you know they are restricted in this way before clicking on them (and to people who aren't logged in, or are logged in and have chosen to not display those kinds of ideas, they will not appear at all). Or instead of or in addition to being marked they could appear in specific sections when browsing ideas.

Ideas that are restricted in this way would get a lower ranking, and the poster of the idea would be made aware of this.

If you want to implement the idea yourself, and want to use the site to get people to join the team, but don't want others to implement the idea independently of you, and only want members from your geographical area, then it could be made possible to make it so that the idea only appears when browsing from specific geographical areas, or even so that it only can be viewed from specific geographical areas. If this is your choice you could of course also write in another language than english and mark the idea as having been written in this specific language. As long as ideas written in nonEnglish don't bother readers who prefer English this shouldn't be a problem If you want to be especially protective you could make the idea private, and make it so that it only is viewable by password and/or invite.

I have to stress that I think many people will be glad to share their ideas with everyone. This is a big part of the point of the site. But at the same time it would be positive if we were able to make it so that people who want to use other aspects of the site, but don't want their ideas to be shared with everyone, also can use the site.

Making the site user-friendly I have some thoughts about how this can be achieved. Maybe I'll add them to this document later on, but for now I'll just leave it at that.

And one more thing...

When creating a project in order to implement an idea the sites makes use of the geographical location of the home of the person who creates the project and the people who join in. The same is true for the ideas posted by people who wish to implement their own idea, but want people to join in. Our algorithms would specifically suggest people who live in the same area to take a look at the idea.

It would also be possible for people who are admins of ideas and projects to tell our site to prioritize people from specific areas when suggesting the idea. (There are several ways for the site to suggest ideas to people, but I wont go through these again.)

It could also be possible for a user to subscribe, either with the help of e-mail, or just via updates that appear directly on our site, to new ideas from their area (“their area� could mean the country they live in, or the city they live in, or whatever else they choose). It should also be made possible to subscribe in more specific ways than that.

For example you could subscribe to all new ideas that are from your area or have projects in your area that are within your areas of interest. Or all new ideas that are

from your area or have projects in your area that are within your areas of interest and have a certain minimum rating.

This is a good example of something that could be added on to the function of the site.

Once the central structures and functions of the site are up more functionality can be added on.

Part 2: Marketing Making the transition from beta into “officially released” into a media-friendly event In order for something to get in the news it's often not enough for it to be interesting and important. It also has to be “news”. Unless there is tremendous growth, which itself can be newsworthy, the website is not news anymore if the website was published three months ago. When it has just been published however, it could, if we do things right, be deemed newsworthy by the media.

However, when having the website in the news it would be nice to already have some ideas on the site, hopefully even some good ones. This would also make the site more convincing to journalists considering to make a story. In addition to this it would be a pain to have to wait with publishing the site until the media campaign is ready.

So let's first set up a beta-site. That way we get to gather up ideas, challenges and users before we officially launch the site – so it isn't initially empty when lots of people visit it due to our intensive media campaign, and we get to publish everything we make as soon as its usable, and we get to test out how our stuff works.

When in beta there should be a very visible “Beta” on every logo on the site, or in some other way made clear that it is a beta version. When we feel the site is or just is about to be “finished” we can set a definite launch date for when the site will stop being beta.

Marketing when in beta I'm not proposing that we don't market the site when in beta, but rather that we market it as a beta site (“hey, come and take a look at something that might become big!”), and not to national media in various countries and international media, but rather: • • • • • •

In social media Websites and media that cover specific niches and have readers who would be especially interested in a site like this (e.g. singularityhub.com, kurzweilai.net, gizmodo.com, and many more) Forums that cover relevant niches Online communities that form around things that are relevant to us Universities Other places that I can't think of at the top of my head

Marketing with the help of videos The way I see it making videos and uploading them to Youtube and Vimeo can be a powerful tool. I'll start with explaining the videos, and it will gradually become clear why and how they can be used in the overall marketing strategy.

Video #1 I can really see this video before me, and it looks pretty great. What I envision is a “mini-documentary” (4-6 minutes or so) that:

•

•

•

•

Tells the story of how this grew from an idea to an actual website. The story of how I had a vision, and a group of people who shared this vision got together and said “lets do this!”, etc. It will get across how we were a group consisting mostly of students from Trondheim (given that this turns out to be the case, obviously).

Tells the story of how we made a huge effort to make the website as good as possible, and to make it as useful and impactful as possible. This will be packaged as a part of the story of how we made the website, but it will to just as big a degree be information about what the site can be used for and why it should be interesting for whoever is watching, and why such a website, if widely adopted, would be important for the world.

More or less discretely convey that this is a risky project and that it has been so from the beginning. For example, if one of the people interviewed said something similar to “My first reaction was: This is a great idea, it could change the world. But how can we know that if we put all this work and effort into building this great platform people will start using it?”.

Conveys the importance of what we are trying to achieve, as well as our belief that individuals can change the world for the better and solve big problems (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were all started in garages, etc), and conveys our belief that there are great solutions and fantastic opportunities out there.

This “mini-documentary” would not have a story-teller, but rather do the story-telling with snippets of interviews conducted with me and others who have been central in implementing the project.

Take a look at this “mini-documentary” about the building of Watson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1c7s7-3fXIhq As you can see, although it's all interviews, they spend little time showing the talking faces of the people they are interviewing, but spend most of the tape showing video and animations that illustrate what the people being interviewed are saying. There's music and a choice of clips that goes along with the mood of the different parts of the video. There is a dramatic (dramaturgisk) buildup of the story that helps keep the viewers interest, ++.

Notice especially the part from 4:30 and outwards, with the music and choice of words and clips. I hope we can capture something similar at the end of our video.

Here is some of what what I hope we can communicate in this segment (although in a much better formulated manner): “It took a lot of hard work to make this site, but in the end, whether or not this succeeds depends on the users. Will the media choose to tell people about it? Will people come to this site and post ideas and look at the ideas other have posted? Will they tell their friends?”

Like the example-video from 4:30 and outwards focuses on the buildup towards the big jeopardy-match we will focus on the buildup towards the launch of the site.

The last picture in our video, as in all of our videos, will be some animation showing our logo (the address to our site will be a part of our logo).

Video #2 This video will in many ways have the same “style” as the one bellow, so take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Si6Jg8-dshq For those of you who don't understand Scandinavian languages, here is the UK version (although pretty awesome it's not quite as good in my opinion): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snKbU5r0pBohq What I envision is not a copy of this video, but a video with similar music, similar filming and acting, and some of the same humor.

Just to make clear though: Our video would not be ironic. We would not present aspects of the site that are bad as good, but I do envision wild exaggeration.

Although meant to be entertaining and catchy, our video would also get across information about what the site is and what it's useful for, and our mission.

I'm not going into specifics of how I envision specific scenes and so on in this document, suffice to say it would not be a direct copy of the ad above, as advertising for a website is pretty different visually from advertising for the bus. But the video looks extremely cool in my head.

We would need to use some kind of studio (real or home-made) where it's possible to film with a black or green-screen background (as well as a camera, editing software and some other things that we already have). We would also need a big fan.

It would probably be a good idea, not only for the sake of this specific video, to make an effort to recruit someone to our team who works with video or studies it (or is a talented amateur).

Video(s) #3 We have already gone through the two videos that I think are most important with regards to our marketing campaign, but I envision a third video as well (this third video could potentially be more than one). The objective here would be to make one or more videos that (1) are inspiring, (2) communicate what our site is about, (3) celebrate innovation and innovators.

Here are two videos that have some of the same feel and message: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDiUVS_-4_Qhq I would not want the aspects of the last video that some might consider cheesy. I don't envision making “copies” of any of these videos, but I envision making videos that celebrate innovation, either through a voice of our own to footage, as in the first one, or quotes from speeches and talks and so on combined with footage, as in the latter one. If the latter option is what we choose I have several quotes in mind.

I also envision short videos, e.g. a video showing very short excerpts from different TED-talks that present different interesting ideas and inventions that can solve problems and open new possibilities, and end the video by saying “What´s your idea?” while showing the logo of our website, which, as mentioned, also is our websites address.

Compared to Video#1 and Video#2 videos like these are relatively easy and fast to make I think.

Video #4 This video would have the same style as this one (made by me): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1NJ9Vv-Y6Qhq The video above focuses on many things, among them how technology to solve many of the problems we are worried about, the amazing potential of nanotechnology, etc. I don't envision our video being about all that, but more solely focusing on how individuals can change the future and do big things through innovation. Like 4:054:51 in the video above maybe, but more of that. Maybe also some focus on how innovation in the past has made the world better, but not a huge focus on the potential of yet uninvented technologies, and not lots of slides where the goal in itself is to convince people that the world is getting better.

I also think our video should be considerably shorter than the one above – in part because that means it takes less time to make it.

Video #5 This video would shortly explain the site: What the point of it is. How to use it. Its most important functions. Why it can be a useful and powerful tool. What it is about.

This video would also work as a sort of commercial, and at the end it would try to inspire people and evoke some emotion, but it's main goal would be to enable people to understand the site. It would be a short video. I would propose calling it “[domainname] in 60 seconds” or “[domain-name] in 90 seconds” or something like that. I would propose that it is put in a visible spot on the front page, so that people who want to understand how the page can be used and what it is about can learn it quickly in an engaging, visually appealing, inspiring and effortless way.

So that's some of the videos I envision making. Video #3 and #4 might not be crucial, but in my view #1, #2 and #5 are (especially #1 and #5).

Why use videos?

Firstly: Video is the most powerful medium we have to communicate our message.

Secondly: Not only do we if a video is good enough have the hope of it going viral by itself, but we can also use the videos in press releases, etc. We can release them into the public domain, and let every online-newspaper-”TV-channel”, such as VGTV (and similar systems in other countries), know that they easily can download them and use them as they like. I think it can be more tempting to write a story about us when it can be combined with an engaging video or two.

I think Video#1 can present in a really good way to journalists both factually and emotionally why we and our site are good news stories (I'm not going to list all the reasons why, but I consider conveying that this project is interesting, important and news-worthy to journalists as one of the main functions of Video#1.)

Video#1 and Video#2 could be sent along with press releases, e-mails to media, etc.

Not only do I think this will make it easier to make good news-stories on the internet about us (since video can be included), but I think it will make it easier to make journalists care to see if this is worth making a story of than if we just send them a lot of text, and I think the videos could be fairly convincing to journalists once they decide to take a look.

Supporters An important concept to understand here is “the line of super-credibility”. Here is a short video that explains what is meant by that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1qMrENLDqA We should have a goal of launching above the line of super-credibility, and in reaching this goal it could be an advantage to have supporters.

What does a supporter do? Not much, really.

What is a supporter? A supporter is a well-known person who endorses our site. This well-known person would approve of us calling him or her a supporter, and he or she would make at least one public endorsement of our site (on their public Facebookpage, their website, Youtube-channel, twitter-page, or several places like these at once – but at least one). Preferably they would make such statements right before our public launch – 1-3 days before or so. They could of course “advertise” for the page before that also, if they want to, but they would then be encouraged to make clear that the site still is in beta. They would be strongly encouraged to include at least one quote that could look good in a newspaper in their public endorsement (which, as mentioned, doesn't have to be very formal, it could be as little as a tweet). E.g. “[domain-name] could revolutionize innovation” or “[domain-name] could become the place where thousands upon thousands of ideas that otherwise would amount not have amounted to anything get noticed and realized” or “[domain-name] could become TED times a hundred thousand” or something like that. These were examplequotes were not that well thought out really, but I'm sure our supporters could come up with something good.

So what would be the benefit of having supporters as described above?

•

• •

Having supporters who are famous and respected will contribute to getting us above “the line of super-credibility”. People know that young previously unknown people sometimes can make world-changing stuff (they know the stories of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc), but it will be easier to be taken seriously and being paid attention to when people who have fame and authority in the field of science and innovation provides the the site with great endorsements.

Having supporters will make it easier to get media attention.

Supporters making statements etc will in itself give us attention. Some of them have many followers on Twitter etc, and the followers of some of them might be especially likely to find our website interesting.

•

Having good quotes from supporters included in article will be a triple win. It shows the support of the supporter, it provides a quote that in itself gives the website positive attention, and it will look a lot more credible when we don't say it ourselves.

So what people should we try to seek out as supporters?

Well, I'm not sure, but we could start by declaring a a few groups (some people belong to several of them): More or less famous people with credentials within science, engineering or innovation who are relatively uncontroversial and well-liked : • • • • •

Neil deGrasse Tyson (known for many things, you might recognize him from the “Watch Out We Got A Badass Over Here”-meme) Peter Diamandis Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) Bill Gates ++

More or less famous people with credentials within science, engineering or innovation who are controversial but well-liked among some: • •

Ray Kurzweil ++

People who are famous and have had a big role in earlier well-known IT successstories: • • • • • •

Bill Gates Steve Wozniak The Google founders Mark Zuckerberg Jimmy Wales ++

People who are opiniators and have significant media-outlets at their disposal: • • •

Arianna Huffington Hank and John Green (vlogbrothers) ++

At the moment I don't think all the people listed here are smart to include as supporters. Actually I'm not even sure if all the categories are categories we should be looking at. So this was more me thinking a bit out-loud (and I'll be doing some more thinking on the subject). Once someone is a supporter we can of course choose which quotes from which people we choose to feature in press releases, etc.

Contacting “all” Norwegian media

I have experience from an earlier project in implementing an ambitious media strategy, and making some mistakes, but still achieving fairly good results. This time the overall media strategy is much more ambitious, but also much better, and it will help a lot to be more than one person.

Much of this is fairly straight-forward I suppose: • • •

Contact all relevant media (news-papers, radio-shows, TV-shows, etc) with a well-formulated e-mail (that contains basic info, a press release, videos, press photos, contact info, etc).

Call the people in charge of relevant parts of the mediums by phone. Maybe also specific journalists that we know have written “similar” stories in the past.

Contact NTB (similar to the international Reuters I think) and ask them to make a story on us, and if they wont, pay them to do so (this is a part of their service).

Also, we could reach out to all local media in areas where we have developers from.

They will be sent the same package as the rest of national media in Norway, but the text of the press release and the e-mail will be altered. It will focus especially on the person who is from the area, as this will be the angle of the story (this is how it can be made relevant to local media). This outreach to local media can be standardized, but people can of course give their own quotes and also make special edits to the press release themselves if they want to. Contact info to people from the specific area as well as press-friendly photos of them is included, and the e-mail would hopefully be sent from these people themselves.

If any developers feel uncomfortable about doing this we'll simply skip their area (unless there are other developers from the same area who don't feel uncomfortable about it).

An advantage when contacting Norwegian media is that this can be presented as someone Norwegian doing something big in the world (or at least trying). I think this angle can be of much help, and it is of course an angle that fits very well with Video#1, which they will be sent.

Contacting “all” of the worlds media The strategy here is similar to the Norwegian strategy. We would send a wellformulated e-mail (that contains basic info, a press release, videos, press photos, contact info, etc) to all the relevant media we can find (which should be quite a lot, so this will be some work, and it all has to be sent within a short amount of time).

Reaching out to media is not restricted to getting people to make stories about us. It also includes inviting oneself to appearances on TV, radio, podcasts, etc. We should also send an application to hold a TED-talk at some point.

Having the website spread itself organically One hope would of course be that people tell their friends about the site. Hopefully we could find a non-invasive ways of convincing people to tell others about our website.

Luckily there is another mechanism for having people spread our site as well. When users post an idea they also make a “site within the site” for the idea (as mentioned earlier). Hopefully this site will work as a good presentation for the idea. If you were to present the idea to someone else you might as well send them a link to the “site within the site” on our site. Thus, anyone they send the link to will also visit our page.

Thus, many people would not only would look at the idea, but also take a look around to see what kind if page this is.

Maybe it would be a good idea to upon posting the idea giving the user a text similar to the following: “Your idea has been successfully posted. You can edit the idea or add more to it at a later time if you wish. Your idea can now be found by people visiting our site. If you want as many people as possible to see your idea you can also link to it on your website, blog or social media-site, or send it to people you think will find it interesting.”

Another very important mechanism that can help us spread the site organically is Google. If the rest of the strategy is executed successfully there will be a lot of links leading to our site, including many links from high-ranked sites, which is important for becoming a high-ranked site ourselves (and thus being placed higher up in Google searches). Beyond that we should develop a comprehensive strategy for making the site in such a way that it appears high up on Google-searches. A lot of the things that help in getting rankings on Google are things that make sense to do anyway.

Note that we don't simply want our main site to appear when googling on the subject of ideas, but we want specific ideas, categories, prizes and challenges to appear when googling for something that makes them relevant. If successful this could give us a lot of hits and introduce a lot of people to our site. The challenges alone would cover a lot of different much-searched-for topics.

Does anything like this site already exist?

No, not to my knowledge.

I think me getting the idea for this project in the first place was related to having ideas myself that I wanted to have seen by the right people and realized, and wishing there was a site like the one described here, but not finding one when googling for it. Later, when having thought out more of the idea, and deciding to really realize this project, I googled some more, and after not having found anything I thought to myself: “Even

if someone has made a site with the same goals and functionality, if I can't even find it by googling it, a new site like the one I envision, done properly, is still needed”.

Much later, after having presented the idea to lots of people, none of which knew about anything like the site explained in this document, Olav, who also is working on this project, came across ideaswatch.com. This is a site that has some of the core features of the idea described here. It is a website where you post ideas, and there is a “primitive” version of the “site within the site” described here, with a discussion forum, a like button and a version of our “Let's make it happen”-button (they call it “I wanna do this!”).

Here are some important core functions of our site that they don't have though: Matching in regards to skill. It does not try to match people and ideas with regards to skills and interests.

Geography. The site does not have any features connecting ideas and people from the same area.

Challenges. We hope that challenges can help organize all or a great deal of the proposals for dealing with different challenges. This site doesn't have such a thing or such a vision.

Categories. They don't have subcategories and they only categorize in terms of what the idea is (not in terms of what the idea is supposed to improve All you can add when posting an idea is a upon). And they only have four categories that I can find: Online ideas, title, normal text and tags. When it's posted mobile ideas, service ideas and social this is the box that appears. My idea was business ideas. These are called featured pending in five days and then rejected categories, but as far as I can see there because they thought it was the same concept as quora.com (it wasn't). Even if they got the are no other categories (and there are obviously quite a lot of ideas that don't same number of visitors and ideas that our site hopes to get, which they wont due to many fit within those four).

There are also several other functions reasons, it would not be able to come close that their site lacks. Like related ideas, withstanding it. It's not made for scale. And even if they did reach the same scale as we prizes, most of our proposals for features for “sites within the site”, user hope to reach it would still not provide the same service to its users and the world. feed, etc.

Here is the video statistics for the video that ideaswatch.com features as the very first thing you see when you visit their page and aren't logged in. The video has been been up for about a year. As you can see the amount of views isn't high, and it increases linearly. No signs of exponential or geometric increase in visitors here.

The people behind the site are now working on other projects. They seem like cool people, and I have respect for them and what they have done. And their site works in the sense that ideas are being posted and people are are joining in on ideas, hoping to help implement them. But it seems that whereas their work on ideaswatch.com is concerned, they did not have the concept and strategy needed to change how the world innovates. We do.

Let's say that the car isn't invented yet, but you have the idea, and envision it all in your head. You look to see if someone else has done similar, but find nothing. But upon having started working on the project with some friends one of you finds that someone has invented something similar to your car. However it lacks many crucial aspects of the functionality you have envisioned, it has so big lacks in marketing that almost nobody is aware of it, the people who invented it aren't working on it anymore, and last but not least: It only has three wheels! Does this make you stop implementing your idea? Of course not! First of all, you don't want people to drive cars with three wheels and lacking functionality, and secondly, to the world a product that nobody uses is almost the same as the product not existing at all. Has Facebook not changed the world since we already had Friendster? Of course they did. Did Facebook take the place of Friendster? Of course not! They took a place that earlier was empty because nobody were able to fill it or even realized that it needed to be filled.

To sum it up: Ideaswatch.come lacks important functionality and even some of the core functionalities of our site, but that doesn't even matter, because almost nobody knows about it, even though it's been up since the end of 2010. So even if the service their site is offering matches the service our site would be offering, which it doesn't, the world would still be lacking these services, since people did not know about it.

It's important that you also realize the following: This site does not even have the same mission or goal as our site. Their core mission it seems, is to help people get together to start up businesses around good ideas. This is our goal and mission also to no less degree that it is theirs, and our concept for doing this is radically better, but our goal goes beyond that as well. We also wish to organize peoples good ideas in a

way such that they can be found by the people who are looking for specific ideas within that specific field and/or concerning that very issue. Also, one of our goals is to gather and organize all the proposed ideas put forward to deal with specific problems or achieve specific goals.

This is one of the reasons why I don't only regard our sites, but also the ideas behind our sites, as being very different.

This is also what I would say if I upon launch were asked by media if anything like this exists already: “No, some small sites have parts of our functionality, but as far as we know, and we have looked, nothing like this has ever been tried before.�

Any more ideas?

This applies in general for the site also, but I want to make clear that in regards to media strategy we are interested and on the lookout for more ideas.

Part 3: Implementing our plans We are now in the planning stage We decided to start with this project pretty recently so we haven't started coding yet.

We don't even have a technical plan yet, or any diagrams or stuff like that.

Coordination At this stage we are looking for people who are interested in being a part of our project. At the end of talks and meetings where the project is presented I'll hand out forms for attendees to fill. These will be used to make an overview of people who are interested where we can see what expertise they have and to what degree they want to be involved.

Hopefully we could gather a group of people, some of which know how a lot of this stuff should be done, in order to make a technical plan for the site should be made (including diagrams, etc). This would enable us to cut the projects into chunks that people or groups of people can implement without having a full overview of the whole project at any time. If it seems practical we could even have some people doing small chunks of the project without being a part of the process from start to end if they don't want to.

At the same time it's important to have at least one person, preferably a group of people, who have an overview of the whole thing, who puts things together and is in contact with everyone who is working on different parts of the project.

At least that's what I've thought to now. I'm interested in hearing others peoples thoughts on how the project could be coordinated.

It's important that we identify which chunks of the project that have to be done first.

The sooner we have a system we can build upon, and the sooner we have something that is up and running, the better. A few aspects of the site, like prizes, could even be added on after the launch.

I propose that we set as a goal to do the official launch in the summer of 2014, if not earlier. People tend to underestimate the time things take, but this should be a comfortable timeframe I think. If the official launch is in the summer of 2014 the beta version should be up long before that. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a burndown-chart, like in Scrum.

Potential for profits

I think there might there might be potential for profits. I would strongly dislike to fill the site with ads for things that have any relevance for the site. I could personally live with placing ads for products that have some relevance, and that I would promote anyway, like Lynda.com, if the ads were placed discretely (like e.g. banners at the very bottom of the site that you don't see if you don' scroll down). But I want to hear what others think as well.

When seeing a Youtube-video there is a bar to the right showing "related videos".

Often the topmost of these videos is a "featured video". "Featured videos" also sometimes appear to the right when doing searches. What's meant by being featured is that somebody has paid through Google AdSense to feature it. They put a maximum limit for how much they are willing to pay per click and how much they are willing to pay in total over a certain time period. You only end up paying for the clicks that Youtube is able to provide at your self-chosen maximum-price or bellow. You can choose what you want the Youtube algorithms to optimize for (number of views, number of people who view the whole thing, etc). The video has to be somewhat relevant in order to appear on the related videos bar and so on. Google has a similar advertising-system for searches, which also is managed through Google AdSense I think. This kind of advertising is cost-effective for advertisers and earns Google a lot of money.

We could do something similar to what Youtube does with our site. People could advertise for ideas, projects, challenges and prizes. I won't go into details about this

advertising system now. Partly because implementing it shouldn't be our first priority.

First of all it's not something the rest of the site is built upon and secondly it might be just as good to wait with launching our ad-system until after the launch of the site.

I think this site has potential for making a good profit. Some people who might be interested in using our ad-system would be people who simply posted an idea or a challenge, and want people to see it.

Another group could be businesses. Here there could also be special arrangements.

Let's say that e.g. a company has a technical problem that they want solutions to. If so they could set up a challenge, and they could e.g. offer a sum of money that is awarded to the best idea, and then market the challenge so that people come to visit it.

Or something like that.

It would be possible to be very specific with your targeting. For example it could be made possible to pay exclusively for clicks from people who e.g. live in Stockholm and know programming or design.

My main concern is making sure that this site is made and that it's made well. If many talented people with competence within areas that are important for the site would be motivated to participate by the prospect of making money then this is something we could take into account.

If I were to simplify my motivations for wanting to make this site I would say it was to change the world for the better in a significant way. That's one of the reasons why I personally really would have liked this to be a non-profit. Not a non-profit in the sense of not making money, but a non-profit in the sense that the revenue is spent on maintaining and improving the site, as well as charity if more is left after that.

It is my opinion that charity, if done right, can have an enormous positive impact on the world. Charitable donations that effectively contribute to technological progress are gifts to humanity that last indefinitely. There are several revolutions underway within technology that can do humanity a lot of good, that I think its reasonable to believe can have as big as an impact as the revolution we have witnessed so far in information technology. I think there are important subfields within these fields that don't get anything near the attention one should expect, and could be made to move faster with strategic donations. But this is a claim that takes a long time to argue for, and it really isn't necessary, because Olav has come up with an idea that I think is better than what I originally had in mind: Revenue could be spent on supporting good ideas that are posted on the site. We could look through ideas on the site manually (with the help of the sites ranking system obviously) and support financially ideas/projects that we think are very good and where we believe funding is likely to make the difference between success and failure. It would be made public which ideas we support financially. Ideas that have financial potential could get loans instead of donations that don't have to paid back if the project fails. When projects succeed with help from our funds and make it big it will give us good PR: Not only did our website provide the platform that helped realize the idea, but all of or parts of the funding. I like the approach of supporting ideas on the site both because I think it can be an effective way of making investments on behalf of the future of humanity that really pay off and because it fits in with the image of what the site is about.

Nothing about how the potential revenue of the site is spent is yet written in stone.

A possible compromise could be to give the money to the people who have participated in the project after how much they have contributed until we reach some upper limit is reached upon which we use the rest as described above.

I think being non-profit or semi-non-profit will make it easier to gain support. If this is made clear in press-releases, Video#1, etc I think people will sympathize with us to a bigger degree and be more inclined to support us. I also think people will spend more money on buying ads from us if they know the money are used in a way that benefits humanity.

NTNU in Trondheim in Norway Currently all people involved in the project study at NTNU in Trondheim, but as mentioned we are at a very early stage. As I see it now NTNU will be our main arena for finding more people who are interested in joining us. We would also love to have people who study IT HiST to join us, and might target people from there directly.

We are also interested in people who aren't students. Anyone under the age of 140 who has something to bring to the table are very welcome to join in :) We are also interested in having people who don't have expertise in IT join in. We are especially interested in getting team-members who know design and/or animation and/or filmmaking. Do you know Photoshop? Or Illustrator? Or any softwareprogram used for 2D or 3D animation? Or any video-editing or video-effect software?

Or anything else that you think might be of help? We would love to hear from you! In order to make the best product and marketing campaign possible we are very dependent upon people with those kinds of skills.

The reason I'm writing this text in English is so it can be possible also for nonNorwegians living in other parts of the world to join our project.

Keeping records of who does what There will be kept records of who does what. I would probably have remembered anyway, but records will be kept. When launching the project it will be made public who did what. No contribution, large or small, will be left out.

Do you want to be a part of this?

I hope you liked the idea described in this document, and I hope you realize that unless enough dedicated people get together to make this site it wont be made. As mentioned it should be possible to contribute to parts of the project without being involved from start to end. No contribution, large or small, will be forgotten. At the same time it's really important for us to get people on the team who can help drive the project and who have experience in web development, or at least have taken more relevant subjects than we do. Most of the ones that currently are involved are 2nd-graders (probably because I'm in 2nd grade, and thus most of the people I know are as well). We'll learn more as time goes by, and I know that at

least I intend to learn a lot of my own just to be able to realize this project, but getting in people with more experience than we currently have would definitely be of help.

What are the pros of joining this project? Well there's a lot of them, so this is not a complete list, but here are some: • • • • •

You will take part in something that could become really big.

You get experience (both technical and in terms of realizing a project). I would assume that this could be just as effective an investment in our education as much of our actual education.

You get to make something for the real world while still in college.

This could look really good on your CV. You could make a contribution the world of which the upper limits are not known (especially not when taking into account all the things this site can help create indirectly and so on).

Updates will be posted on http://websiteforsharingideas.blogspot.no from time to time. We also have a Facebook-group. If you want to take part in the project I'll add you.

This document will be updated and I will also make a short version (which not only will have less text, but also less content).

Feel very free to contact me: E-mail: tor.barstad[at]hotmail.com Mob: +47 95 82 26 52 Facebook: www.facebook.com/tor.barstad