Share your ideas and learn from others

Since 2012, I have a notebook where I put every single idea I have (sometimes just problems I faced of or late night ideas). As a creative process, even the most stupid idea was helping me to have more of them. After regular cleanup I still have more than 160 ideas is this notebook (from really stupid one to “let build an awesome team and make it”).

“Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Ideas are common. Everybody has ideas. Ideas are highly, highly overvalued. Execution is all that matters.” - Casey Neistat

For me, all these ideas have almost no value. It’s an exercise, it’s for fun. Just solutions of problems seen from my point of view. Most of them, in fact, have already some kind of implementations (We’re more than 7 billion on Earth, of course people have experimented the same problem, of course some them have thought about a solution).

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.” - Margaret Heffernan

When I start to learn how to code almost 3 years ago, one of the first things I was amazed was the open source community. That’s why one of my first post was referring to a workshop I made for social entrepreneurs in the SenseCube of Brussels. How developers from all around the world are able to work together.

Immediately I thought about a place to interact with ideas, projects, businesses, cooperatives, … I’m sure that we can build a place like Github/Gitlab for normal people (mean by that no-nerd people) where they can share all their ideas or experiences about their projects. Open Source is a really important factor of growth, even big corporations have started to use it (Google, Facebook, Tesla or even Microsoft).

If a social business, a non-profit association want to improve their positive impacts on the world they don’t have to find resources to growth in other cities/countries. The only thing they need is to share their “source code”, their DNA, to let people around the world reimplement their ideas locally. At the end, the people can even come back to give their feedbacks or show their improvements on the original idea.

The most successful open source projects are the one with a good implementation (the source code) but more important, the best documentation (the “how to implement it”). For the moment, the implementation and the documentation stay mostly inside of the core team, the challenge will be to convince social project, NGO, to share their internal information (all of it or just a part) to the world.

I have started a model of what could be this place that you can check here: OpenIdeas. I have only posted a really small amount of ideas just to show how it could look (also because I have to clean up my notebook and translate ideas in English). These ideas are just examples written only with a couple of lines (that how they are written in my notebook), but I’ve added an actual business to show another example. If you’re interested in that project just signup on the website!