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* Help Wanted, Inquire Within *

I have designed a machine to give creative thinkers structured tools for collaborative development. It takes raw ideas and turns them into solutions.

The idea has three main parts:

1. A recipe for solutions

2. The technologies it employs

3. A strategy for getting it implemented.

Recipe for Solutions

A solution is a recipe, a step by step procedure for solving a specific problem. Ideas are the input, solutions the output, a finished product.

Here is my recipe for solutions:

A. Brainstorm, throwing out ideas.

B. Design general solution.

C. Break general solution down into tasks.

D. Break tasks into steps, then steps into smaller steps until they can be broken down no further.

E. Solve steps in parallel, seeking the best possible solution at every turn.

Technical Specifications

The Innovation Machine employs four groups of technologies:

1. The Internet, search engines, sorting programs, heuristics.

2. Huge data bases, cheap data storage, data mining, archiving and compaction programs.

3. Digital signatures, encryption programs.

4. Moderated forums, logic and fact verification programs, solution and process management software.

All these technologies are widely used today. What’s important is how we assemble them.

An Implementation

Ideas come in via email. Like ideas are grouped into forum topics - people working on the same type of problem, people offering the same type of solution…

Existing programs can be easily modified for this purpose. If Google can search three billion web pages and come up with an ordered list within milliseconds, it can do the same with far fewer emails.

Summarization programs cut out the chaff, simplify ideas and put them into standard formats. Translation programs translate so language is not a problem. Transcription programs even transcribe spoken words for people who cannot type. Going the other direction, programs read idea summaries to the blind. Spelling is corrected - whatever is necessary to make an idea more easily understandable.

The goal is to devise succinct plans to accomplish specific tasks in the best possible manner. The solution space should be spare as possible, with everything extraneous or irrelevant eliminated.

All emails are archived exactly as sent for an indeterminate period of time. This is necessary because ideas can be easily stolen on the Internet. With all original emails time stamped and viewable, there can be no dispute as to who came up with an idea first. This insures a greater degree of protection than any method short of obtaining a patent, a process so costly and time consuming it inordinately favors the litigious and wealthy.

Very large forums already exist, Yahoo’s for example. The cost of data storage has come down drastically while the technology keeps on improving, putting larger and larger amounts of data on smaller and smaller media. Compaction and archiving programs further condense the data.

Digital signatures and encryption programs guarantee the integrity of email, both in transit and after being archived – proving when an email was sent and received, and by whom. VeriSign, BelSign, and Thawte are three companies which supply digital signatures and encryption.

Because a step may already have been worked out, our program searches for like steps in pre-existing solutions. Topics are self-organizing. They can operate like other forums, the usual back and forth sharing of ideas, or they can use tools provided by the forum. BPM (Business Process Management ) has existed for decades. This spreads its advantages to anyone with a problem that needs solving.

Logic and Fact Verification Engines are critical components. Lies can spread so easily over the Internet, the perception exists it cannot be trusted. People make outlandish claims. They employ spurious logic to prove their points. But then we have no simple way for checking the validity of statements we read in newspapers, or hear on radio, TV, or from another person. It’s actually much easier to verify truth or falsehood on the Internet. One has the Internet right there for research.

For instance, if some salesman tells me the dishwasher he’s trying to sell me is "rated number one in the world", I cannot copy and paste his words directly into Google. But given two minutes on the Internet and I'd know if he were lying. Heuristic programs could do this immensely quicker and far more accurately.

On the Internet as well as in the world at large, people give all sorts of reasons why their product is the best, their position correct, their way is right. They play on emotion, coerce, and harangue. They string together disparate facts, then declare their points made. Logic and fact verification programs would sort this out quickly

Creating an Internet Institution

I call this final part political but it’s really about competition. You or I can think up better ways to accomplish many things. This does not matter if our independent solutions are not allowed to compete equally with solutions coming from large powerful institutions.

We must create and legitimize a central Internet institution, a combination of P2P and hierarchical organization. To see how this might be accomplished, please visit the link below.

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I’ve been working on this idea since I left IBM in 1999. I believe that a relatively small group of people could quickly create this, but we must start soon.

If interested, please join me at our site:

http://www.itsharing.org/

Equally important, if anyone you know might be interested, please tell them about this.

Existing topics:

Organizational meeting:

http://www.itsharing.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9

Breakdown of tasks:

http://www.itsharing.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8

A plausible scenario for getting the idea accepted within American society:

http://www.itsharing.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11

Longer article explaining the idea:

http://www.itsharing.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4

My resume can be viewed at:

http://thefuturevision.virtualave.net/resume.htm

Note:

I’m having problems getting the <a href=> tag working here. I’m not sure if it’s the syntax, my browser, or the site. If you can’t get to http://www.itsharing.org/ by copying and pasting the URL, please add a note here, or email me at alanlsilverman@yahoo.com. Also, if you see any typos or have suggestions to improve this, please let me know.

Thank you,

Alan Silverman

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.--- Margaret Mead

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