[fri_sch]

I have recently thought about applying workflows and ideas of the open source and software world to real world issues. I was imagining a web platform to locate, describe, discuss and eventually solve issues together. While one of my "example" issues is climate change, I wouldn't dedicate the platform only to this issue but make it a generic tool.

I have written down some of my thoughts about this and if someone is interested I would be willing to share them and discuss this topic.

While doing some research, I also stumbled upon some ideas by David Ernst ([1] and [2]). I think he was heading into the same direction some years ago and he is now running a platform for "liquid democracy" in the US [3].

[1] http://dsernst.com/2016/02/24/open-think-tank/ [2] https://github.com/utopia/building [3] https://liquid.us

[davidjnelson]

This sounds really interesting. What does the “solve” stage look like for various issues?

[fri_sch]

Generally this could include collection, verification and implementation of solution proposals.

If a proposed solution is accepted by the community its progress can be tracked. I think it is important to have some kind of status and goal, ideally in numbers, to encourage people to participate. For many issues we currently don't receive positive feedback, even when we are actually making progress (often on a small scale) and I think this is a real problem.

For the matter of climate change this could be setting personal goals like reducing your own CO2 footprint.

Or community efforts on a local/regional scale. For example collecting signatures to support a green energy project.

Or financial investments in the renewable energy sector or donations to NGOs, etc.

Users of the platform could get a estimate of what impact various measures would have (in this case for example mass of CO2 or raise in global temperature, etc.) and could see who actively works on a solution.

[davidjnelson]

That sounds awesome. I made a github org to get people together who want to hack on this type of thing: https://github.com/climate-technologists/discussion