Brian Chirls emailed me about this wondering if I had any thoughts on what to submit. Right now I’m interested in so many different topics that narrowing down to one might be hard. But as it stands now, these are the ideas on the table.
Potential Ideas:
Peer to peer distribution of local organic food. A carton of apples comes to your door and you take the number of apples you need and then carry the carton to the next stop your computer tells you needs the carton. Then they take what they need and pass it on to the next house. Helping with distribution by carrying the box of apples helps you have more points in the system. The number of apples you took for yourself uses up your points. You can eat for free if you have a bike and want to pick up packages and take them to their destinations. You can avoid ever needing to carry or distribute anything if you simply buy your points. Or you could do a combination of both. It would be a good way to make friends anyway. A cute girl needs three apples, you bet your sweet button your picking up three apples and bringing them to her house. Worst case scenario her boyfriend comes to the door and you get a few points for having delivered the apples. I know, what about creeps. Well creeps will get bad reviews and will have no digital trust so you won’t approve them bringing the apples because you won’t want them to know where you live.
Neighborhood dinning collectives. Another similar spin off idea to the above peer to peer distribution of food. This one works by having a dinning hall that everyone who is a member pitches in to cover it’s monthly rent and monthly food delivery bills. Instead of paying you can work hours preparing food. A head chef is in charge. A network of these collective dinning halls could do a similar peer to peer distribution of food and help deal with surplus of left over materials that won’t get used.
Socially backed virtual currencies. Normal money and credit cards are a clumsy way of paying exchanging value in the internet age. What we need instead is a way to record your good deeds and build a digital karma that makes you more attractive to getting good deeds done to you. Free food, free places to stay, free education etc.. Freely give and freely get and have a social networking digital trail that makes you feel that everything you give is leading up to you getting stuff in the future. Also if someone needs your help you can see that they help a lot of other people and that you should do it. And there can even be more weight given to help towards those that help a lot. For example, a musician who has made music they’ve given away for free to millions of people and all of their lives are enhanced needs a place to crash. Well, you just helped Radio Head and now you’re ratings and digital karma just shot way up. Then a free loader comes along who never does anything good or helps anyone and you could help them but if you yourself are a bit exhausted, the value of helping them isn’t as great because they don’t help others so you aren’t as inspired to help them, but you might anyway. And they might learn that if they want to freely get, they are going to start having to find a way to freely give and provide something of valuable to their peers. This might sound a little like capitalism but keep in mind, it can be things that normally you wouldn’t charge for. Also the problem with money is that you simply need to hold onto it and you have all this value. In this environment I’m describing you have to always do good valuable things in order to be rated high and have help that comes to you be considered more valuable to the one giving help. It’s complex I know.
Distributed Semantic Social Network. Turn the entire web into one social network that is both machine and human readable so anyone can build social tools. Instead of the worlds social networking being hosted at facebook.com or MySpace you’d have a standard social identity language that any person or company can host on any server. Then simple queries like arincrumley.com/age.rdf would server up answers like giving a number. So reviews, ratings, listening history, watching history, photos, videos, bookmarks, search history and anything else you want to be public information could be broadcasted from your universal online identity. This could turn the entire world wide web into one large social network. Also the discovery of media and search results could be way more based on social information and less on digital information. INstead of searching google or looking at amazon recommended books or netflix recommended movies, you can have a steady supply based on your social networks and digital groups and published ratings and websites you’ve recently liked and music you’ve recently listened to. So a movie with a bunch of music you’ve been listening to or a documentary about a topic you’ve been bookmarking lately can be thrown into your radar.
Subscription model to compensate creators. Create a universal license that creators can put on their content that defines the royalties they need if someone financially exploits their work. Then let any company create a subscription service using peer to peer technology or any other distribution mechanism for content and charge a monthly fee and use voluntarily provided listening and viewing history to find how to divide the money based on the splits in the standardized licenses.
Communal pods on tracks to replace cars in cities. Instead of cabs, huge trucks and SUV’s blasting pollution all over a city you could have electric tracks and very lightweight energy efficient vehicles that are on a network. That way you don’t need any drivers. Just get in and type your destination. Or call one via SMS and the next available pod will appear, scupe you up and zip you to your near by destination. Then you could tie these inner city pods into High Speed Rail between cities and you could even have cargo pods to deliver food and products to stores instead of having huge trucks killing our planet.
Publishing carbon footprint data on packaging and receipts. Get some organizations that can estimate the carbon dioxide footprint of a candy bar and then print the number of pounds of C02 that your creating. Then integrate this information into a stores database of products and prices. So as you check out and pay for what ever you bought, part of your receipt can tell you the number of pounds of carbon dioxide totalled up in all of the products you just bought. Then you could even use online services to total that information up and find out what you can do to balance your foot print down to zero. Maybe you then pay for 10 trees to be planted and get your self to a zero carbon footprint and then get a tax break. But more importantly you could get digital badges to put on your social networks to let people know that you are maintaining a zero carbon footprint for you as an individual. Or to brag that you as a company are maintaining a zero carbon footprint.
Digital Microcinema Network. Become a member of a digital microcinema in your near by neighborhood and pay 10 dollars a month and have voting power over what films screen. Get notifications when the movies you wanted are screening and have rating and reviewing tools be built into the movie theater along with live chatting and commenting over the movie on a separate screen on the back of the chair in front of you. This way their would be theatrical proceeds that could be divided up and sent back to the creators of the work. Also it wouldn’t matter how long a film was. It also wouldn’t matter if it was a digital live event like a sports game or what have you. This idea ties into the universal license idea for media content that allows any distribution of that content provided you pay the royalty back. And if you screen public domain material or simply do a live event that is open to the public in the space to non-members then obviously no one has to be paid. Anything. But if it’s a film in which ownership is important then the published owner of that content will get x percent of that months proceeds sent to them. I guess the idea is sort of like a netflix for movie theaters. It would work best when every 5 blocks in major cities you have one of these and it’s very community based and is connected with places to get food and drink.
Those are just a few of the ideas I’ve thought about for a while. So help me out here, which one should I make in a video for DAVOS?
Here is a video from last year in which Bill Gates actually says some kind of cool things:
