As a person working with technology in creative ways, I have ideas.
Ideas have a hard life: At any point from their inception to their implementation, they can turn out to be impractical, unnecessary, or equivalent to something already well established. Worse yet: they can be just abandoned for lack of time to pursue them, which is instead spent on other ideas or projects that look more promising at that time.
Often, all it would take for an idea to be pursued further is input from other interested parties; with a number of people connected, an idea can become a fruitful project that would otherwise linger as low-priority ideas with several individuals.
Moreover, if ideas get buried that have matured over time, the research effort that went in it is lost along with it.
I'm therefore starting to publish ideas or proto-projects of mine in this idea incubator. While the term is not new (Cowgirl Jules describes it for personal use), I'd roughtly describe my collection as follows:
Ideas in the incubator can be anything from rough concepts to drafts of projects. As opposed to a project, they are not being actively pursued as a whole, but merely waiting for input to arrive. Doing experiments or reasearch on the idea is not grounds for the idea being kicked out of the idea incubator into the lifecycle of a project, but setting up timeframes or a team to work on it is. (The web page in the idea incubator will persist, but contain a note that the idea has "hatched" and is now a separately managed project).
Putting an idea into the incubator aims at having a similar effect as a pensieve: You get an idea out of interferring with your everyday work (putting links there instead of keeping web browser tabs open), but also preserve it with enough description to take it up again in an orderly fashion.
I keep my idea incubator public, and want to encourage others to do the same, for various reasons:
Gaining traction: Others working on similar ideas might find an idea; their feedback can give back momentum to the idea, and might even result in the implementation as a (join?) project.
Avoiding duplicate work: Even if I eventually give up on an idea, the public idea incubator is a place where others on the same track can quickly access the information I have amassed. No matter whether they follow my conclusions and give up on the idea or see the flaw in my reasoning and take the right turn where I abandoned, it can be hoped that duplicate reasearch effort was saved.
Providing a dereferencable URI to an idea: Things are hard to find on the
internet. (Good luck finding people attempting to model an issue tracker in
RDF. Searching for "issue tracker" rdf or similar gives you a bunch of
issue trackers of projects involving RDF). When things (or ideas, for that
matter) have URIs, they can be described in a unique way, especially (but not
only) with the help of semantic technologies.
Public archival of an idea incubator might be relevant as a source of prior art when a later implementor of the idea faces patent issues.
The public idea incubator as I am now running mine on http://christian.amsuess.com/idea-incubator/ is not without issues, as outlined here:
I strongly support the idea of the world wide web in its original web of people's publications sense: If you want to publish something, make a web page for it, write what you want to say there, and if you talk about something that has a URL, place a link.
That works fine in general, especially with the rise of blogs. (Not everybody might have a web site where he can create a new page, but everyone can write something like a blog post).
For the idea incubator to work well, backlinks should be provided, ie. if someone writes a blog post about an idea, it should show up in the incubator. Several schemes for that exist (compared on wikipedia), I'm just not sure what to best implement, and have not implemented anything here yet.
For small comments, comment forms under blog posts are widespread. I prefer not to have those on my web page for security reasons (both technical and legal), but would gladly collect URIs of comments people post about ideas in a form which the visitor's user agent can dereference and show. I am not aware of an established mechanism that allows such a thing in a decentralized way, though. (I'm envisioning a form like "If you want to post a comment and don't have an account in a service that provides web comments, click here to create a throwaway account on service X". That line should go into an idea incubator article.)
To the new reader, the current state of an idea is relevant; to someone watching it, additions are. I'm not sure how satisfy both needs in an accessible way on a website without keeping an explicit change log.
Moreover, when others take up an idea and extend it, they might put their extensions into their public idea incubator. When those ideas converge, they may might migrate it to a shared (eg. wiki) URI. Such merges are likely to be harder to track.
The concept of the public idea incubator is part of my personal idea incubator. This is pushing the boundaries of the description given above (which is part of the reason why I was careful not to call it a definition), but I still consider this an experiment.
I'll happily link other people's ideas on idea incubators here, and if it turns out the whole concept works, will move this out of the incubator.
--chrysn 2015-03-08
This page is part of chrysn's public personal idea incubator; go up for its other entries, or read about the idea of having an idea incubator for more information on what this is.