(UPDATE) Putting the Semantic Web to Work: An Idea Factory

Left to Right: Jerry Paffendorf, Andy Fundinger, Alvis Brigis, Melody Chamlee

UPDATE: I expect to be discussing DearIdea.net at BarCampNYC this weekend (Mar 15 or 16, 2008) in hopes of getting some tactical and strategic feedback. Most importantly, I want to see if it passes muster as a viable tool with the architecture I'm proposing. If you're attending BarCampNYC, look me up (e-mail for contact info.)

An enlightened group of intrepid knowledge-seekers gathered tonight in New York for a brainstorming chat over dinner. The topic? An "Idea Factory" to leverage the newfound connectedness of society towards solving problems of all sizes.

Not content to sit around and watch disconnected advances unfold alone and isolated, we discussed how a combination of social networks, semantic markups, peer review, incentives, and "knowledge visualization" could improve the effectiveness of ad-hoc collaborative teams. We'd like to harness the power of the community, which is all the rage today (crowd-powered!)

At our initial brainstorming session, we covered ground related to facilitating open idea exchange, ranking those ideas, and mapping their relationships in a format which would facilitate the sort of ad-hoc collaboration that thrives in the open source community. We saw this both as a means to accelerate the pace of innovation in public spaces as well as a means to begin heading off a coming "patent apocalypse" where the lack of prior art on obvious innovation ends the act of invention by anyone other than the most well-funded of law firms.

We left the meeting with some healthy action items, some points to ponder, and some goals.

I'm thankful to have spent time with such bright minds, and look forward to getting together again soon.

Cheers, mates!

Comments

[Joyce aka Rhiannon Chatnoir]

I for one am quite jealous. :)

Great to see the creative collaborative juices flowing. Let me know how I can help out...always up for a good brainstorm.