Toward a Metaversal Idea Factory
After the metaverse meetup we held recently, Jerry and I and several others have been pondering how to help some of the ideas that were kicking around there take shape. On Saturday, Jerry got together with several interested parties (I couldn’t make it), to discuss some approaches. I’d been talking about an “idea farm,” but what seems to have emerged from Saturday’s jawboning session was the idea of an idea factory, which is described very well by Bill Ward:
. . . An “Idea Factory” to leverage the newfound connectedness of society towards solving problems of all sizes. . . . [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. . . . [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.
I’m all for it. There’s already a Projects space on the 3pedia wiki where people have begun proposing projects and describing what they’re working on. A fully blown-out idea factory, though, would incorporate the various tools of social networking, tagging and all the rest, to facilitate matching people up and cross-pollinating ideas.
Are there, in fact, any fully fledged idea factories out there, metaversal or otherwise? I don’t know of any (though if you do, please add them to 3pedia’s idea factory page). Where the virtual world of Second Life specifically is concerned, the recently launched Second Life Project comes closest, providing a network of developers as well as project management tools.
Another new SL service, SLBounty.com provides a wish market in which Second Life users can post projects they’re looking for, with a bounty for their completion. While this isn’t the same as an idea factory, it is another tool for pushing development in the metaverse.
I’d love to gather some more ideas on how an idea factory for the metaverse could be built out. I have the feeling it’s not a small project. Look for more meetups after South by Southwest is over. In the meantime, if you want to contribute any thinking, post here or go ahead and click over to 3pedia and contribute to the growing collection of thoughts that are germinating there. With enough help, we might be able to actually build something.
Feeds
Hi Mark,
I am a PhD student from the University of Innsbruck and my topic coincides with your intended goal of creating an innovation platform. My research efforts are directed towards linking the concept of open innovation and virtual worlds. To me, and obviously to many more SL is an ideal platform of bringing customers and companies toghether to brainstorm new ideas, create new products with real life potential and test virtual prototypes.
“Leverage-as-a-verb” brings me out in a rash, but otherwise: I suppose, initial thoughts are to have progressive levels of organisation and collaboration, so that at the “vague idea” stage everything is very loose and easy to add to or modify, the priority being to compile as much information as possible and link in with other ideas - a pool of floating idea-bits with metadata - but once something specific starts to take shape, then various elements get “locked down” as part of the project and it starts to grow timelines, tasks, roles, that sort of thing, when people are ready for them.
great idea, Ordinal. I’m adding a Suggested Features section to the Idea Factory page and adding that in.
My concern for this is: who pays for idea generation and for ideas as finished products.
Most (if not all) of this concept is being generated by people already salary-paid or sponsored by the Electric Sheep Company.
It all sounds cool and groovy when you have people in the same company, or sponsored by the same company, using a cool wiki to generate ideas that will benefit that company.
But then why should the rest of us, unsalaried or compensated, generate ideas for that company-sponsored wiki? Why do we work for free? I just want to explore that a bit.
For someone like Ordinal, who is already by day employed by another RL company doing computer stuff I take it, it’s a mere matter of interest and altruism to partake in a community project like “let’s get Twitter and SL working together”. She’s willing to beaver away on that for free for hours — days — without anything more than a lousy tip jar, as she gives it away for free. The love of knowledge and exploration and completion of coding tasks must give her satisfaction.
So…what’s happening then is ESC is basically crowdsourcing, the way LL crowdsources out the wazoo, but then..what is crowsourcing, exactly? Crowdsourcing is supposed to have micropayments, no? Or…not?
So after all the ideas and correctives and cool tekkie wiki tiki woo stuff happens, there’s a collectively-produced widget or product. Who owns it? Does the person or company sponsoring the wiki, the blogs, the whole gestalt, buying the beer — do they get it to resell or give away to enhance their image?
Some people will be content just to generate ideas and hope that companies with paid staff and a business plan to generate revenue will find ways to devote their sometimes scarce R&D resources to it. Others might think, well, heck, if I’m a programmer and I have all these cool ideas, why do I sit on the Internet crowdsourcing for these other guys, why don’t I start my own company?
I’m just not getting this stuff so I hope you can explain it better.
Hey, seriously, this is a dream coming true. Mark, it’s probably time for another 3pointD Think Tank with a focus on the Idea Factory and 3pointD/3pedia usability. This is definitely one of those times that I wish I could see the other people on 3pointD right now, like in a virtual world. Damn the current web.
One of the things I think wold be cool eventually, when 3pedia is adequately seeded, is that projects and reports on their progress start showing up on 3pointD proper. So for you 3pedia literally becomes your idea harvest, and you report on the community here as well as what happens in the wider web and world.
If not us, who? If not now, when? Long live 3pointD. I can’t wait to start working with people through the site!
@Jerry: I’m all for it. I probably won’t move on any Think Tanks until post-SXSW, but I’m checking 3pedia all the time — there’s actually some small action there!
@Prok: Everything contributed to 3pedia is under the GNU license, which means no one, certainly not me nor the Sheep, owns the ideas there.
What you say is true: Some people will contribute free ideas, others will take them and run with them on their own. Both scenarios are fine. The world shouldn’t work just one way.
Actually, I should note that products described in the articles on 3pedia (Red Light District, for example) are obviously the property of the company that made them. But the ideas in the Projects area are meant to be free, open-source ideas for anyone to run with. I’ll add a line to that effect.
I am very psyched about this open-source Idea Factory initiative. Thanks Mark for hosting it here on 3pointd/3pedia! Let’s make this happen!
My action item from Saturday’s session was to encourage 100 one-paragraph open-source metaverse innovation contributions to the 3-pedia prior to the next Metaverse Meetup, which is scheduled for March 28th. So please everyone, if you’ve got some non-proprietary metaverse ideas up your sleeve, post them to the 3pedia so they can run wild and reproduce with other cool ideas! We can and will reach 100, and more, I suspect. So far, I can vouch for some 35 ideas to-be-posted. With your help, we can generate a deluge of concepts that, once assembled, will be filter-able by the tools that Bill and Andy are whipping up. (What they envision sounds awesome and very promising.)
As the metaverse opens up vast possibility space we can together actually build something, as Mark puts it, and make sense of the potential variations in a way that no individual possibly could.
The Ideathon is on! Submit your idea to be part of the initial Metaverse 100 on 3pedia and be a part of the wide open future!
at Ordinal Malaprop — Can’t wait for the Stage 2 creation that you refer to. I look forward to contributing some thoughts, particularly game-based structures, that could help ease the process. My current fave is a Glass Bead Game meets NCAA Tournament concept. :)
> My current fave is a Glass Bead Game meets NCAA Tournament concept. :)
God, I guess I really have to read the Glass Bead Game, don’t I. I’m reading JPod by Coupland right now (Christian devoured it in a day), which I highly recommend to all you Gen X/Y video game/virtual world/metaverse peoples out there.
Which leads me to an idea for 3pointD/3pedia that may sound kind of funny, but I would find very useful: The 3pointD Book of the Month, with conversations and reviews on the blog, and maybe inviting the authors inworld.
Mark vs. Oprah. And I can’t wait to see authors pinning the badge up on their site: “An Official 3pointD Selection!” ;)
No, you don’t have to suffer through any Hesse. I just need to get back in touch with this guy: http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/ He apparently has an entire glass bead game system already worked out that can be applied even to things like NCAA tournaments, if I understand it correctly (which I’m not sure I do).
Love the 3pointD book club idea. But I think I’ll have to make a 3pointD page in 3pedia and add it to “suggestions” there, for the moment.
Has anyone begun to think about the IP aspect of our 3-D Internet dreams?
There are patents currently out there begin infringed upon. By having an open and inter-company idea-sharing forum, anyone with really strong, unique and useful ideas will be doing themselves a diservice by sharing them- from a business perspective.
Like it or not, capitalism is a big part of the Internet, and patents are and will increasingly draw clear the landscape. This will certainly be true in our 3-D Internet.
Besides competition is fun, and raises all of our games. I think its too early to be sharing broad ideas. Lets all go full boat with our ideas and see what really works and what just sounds like it should!
Hi:
I’m the designer of the playable variants on the “Glass Bead Game” known as the HipBone Games, which Mark referred to above. Just checking in.
Way back at the Avatars 97 meet I apparently told the audience of a session on “Ancient Rituals for a New Medium”:
“The twin poles of any human experience are mastery and mystery: I shall address the ways in which mastery of ritual and mythic formalities in game design can project the player into mystery — into, that is, a state in which the usual concerns of the waking mind are sidestepped, and a deeper, more immersive and more creatively rewarding consciousness emerges. Time and the timeless…”
http://www.ccon.org/conf97/program/prbook.html
That’s the wider context in which I’m interested in transposing Glass Bead Game thinking into virtual three-space. Let’s talk…
Prokofy and cliff4d:
I think the Idea Factory project is wonderful for one main reason- that it allows anyone, from your grandmother to your 9 year old nephew, to post their metaverse idea and if it is good, be able to watch that idea come to fruition.
Some people are not well-connected or possess the right technical skills or desire to make a career via the metaverse, but they do have some creative and innovative ideas! So if you’re out to profit on an idea, then what’s stopping you? This sort of metaverse brainstorming is not hindering anyone from continuing with their plans, rather enabling a community to form around the goal of promoting the evolution of the metaverse.
Therefore, if ultimately what you’re after is watching your idea bloom (and getting some props along the way), then this sort of open-source idea generation should be a liberating, not intimidating.
It’s like the United Nations- a crazy idea at first, then it happened, and now it has the potential to be something really amazing if we all just give up a little sovereignty.
@ cliff4d — Good point. Absolutely, IP is central to this discussion. Personally, I come down on the side of open-sourcing metaversal innovation as a defensive precaution against the Big Boyz.
Bill Ward summarized a shared sentiment re: open-source meatverse innovation 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.”
I share in that opinion and think that in the event of such an IPocalypse, wouldn’t it be better if all innovation was left wide open so that the masses could build and profit from a foundation of more-or-less obvious first-tier metaverse development? While there are many strong, unique and useful metaversal ideas that should remain proprietary, there are a great many great redundant ideas as well. For example, back during my TV days I developed a show pitch called Requiem, an emotionally powerful program that focused on individuals creating memory parks or life plots in SL. When Cory Ondrejka posted about such a concept, the comment thread revealed that several folks had thought up the idea. This is just one example of bazillions of convergent metaverse ideas that should belong to the public, not to individuals. As Marisa points out, people of all demographics and capabilities should be allowed to participate in metaversal innovation. And the people that choose to build the ideas should profit from their efforts. But the gross concept redundancy needs to get nipped in the bud sooner than later.
Fundamentally, the metaverse allows for the accelerated communication of the ideas/simulations in each of our heads. Patenting many of these ideas as absurd as patenting everyone’s DNA, more so.
IMO, the metaverse is likely to bring existing IP law to the tipping point once big companies sue over obvious emergent technologies. In order for the space to evolve quickly, unimpeded, an open-source approach is going to be necessary.
@ Prok - I think a main purpose of a metaverse idea market is to prevent huge companies from patenting obvious ideas like teleporting avatars between worlds.
@ Charles - I can’t wait to digest the concepts/games on your site and then continue to discuss the metaversal possibilities. Nice work, based on what I’ve gleened so far.
Mark, re: “no one, certainly not me nor the Sheep, owns the ideas there.” Well, but can’t anybody take the ideas precisely because they are free, or parts of ideas, and put them together with other stuff and patent them? I imagine that the ideas that people put up there will NOT be the proprietary for-pay ideas they need to sell — their best ideas?
Marisa, I don’t know where to start re: your comments about the UN, but it is not anything like that, and giving up a little sovereignty doesn’t yield the goods you imagine because not only are there key countries, including the US that own’t do that, but there are those that only feign to do that and then take advantage of the others. It’s a nasty world out there.
People of all walks of life definitely need to participate in metaverse-making. It’s in fact characteristic of all the metaverse stuff now that it’s mainly coders and graphic artists having all the discussions and making it a “professional developers’ discussion”. So I am definitely going to be watching this very closely and seeing if it really is intuitive and easy to use and if you can really add correctives based on field experience, which is usually the place at which most “wiki” stuff breaks down.
cliff4d re: “There are patents currently out there begin infringed upon. By having an open and inter-company idea-sharing forum, anyone with really strong, unique and useful ideas will be doing themselves a diservice by sharing them- from a business perspective.”
Well, that’s what I was just saying! Not only is it a question of “who pays” but “who gets”. It depends on whether the Metaverse is such a hugely complex and difficult project that only by harnessing companies as well as free-floating non-paid minds can you build it. I’m not persuaded that it is, or that proprietary interests — like Linden Lab’s are now — aren’t what will carry it forward.
Prok, re your patent concerns: A company could take one of those ideas and combine it with something they own and make money from it, but they still wouldn’t be able to patent the part they took from 3pedia — if it could be shown that that’s in fact where they got it. At least, that’s my (admittedly crude) understanding of things.
@Prok: To my knowledge, only one person at the table was employed by ESC in any capacity. So I think we independents outnumber the Sheep involved on the project by a substantial majority (4 to 2 for the folks mentioned Saturday.) My motives are twofold: First, I want a way to play with the kids that innovate and by doing so gain some sort of sense of accomplishment. Two, I want credibility and visibility in the space - as we all do to an extent. Commercial development, while entirely probable, is not my particular goal here. Ideas I wish to develop commercially obviously don’t get thrown into this space. Nay, this space is for stuff you “wish” you could have today, and hope that like minded folk will come around and work on it with you.
@Charles: The concept of the universality in the Glass Bead Game (which Alvis inspired me to think about last week,) may be in some capacity realized in the idea of a “network map” approach to interconnected (semantically active? is that another hive-inducing buzzword?) data processing on idea/project repositories in an open source capacity. I think one could approach Sourceforge with a network map (perhaps they already do,) and begin to see what projects are most active, and the interdependencies of each. I’d like to see that done for open collaborative project pitches. IMHO, I think it would go far to help attention-deprived collaborative souls like myself find places to input energy in the hope of realizing a community goal. In short, we’re all smart people, most of us seem to have a community interest, and we are all generally averse to tightly organized teams - so perhaps this will serve as a meta-layer, independent of a governing body, that presents to the viewer an information cosmos aggregated from the constituent ideas and their “fit” into a flexible context. The context can be chosen by the observer. Once the viewer is aware of the threads linking multiple related concepts, they may chose to target areas of higher correlation in the hope of contributing energy indirectly to the related projects.
Something about like that. I know it sounds an awful lot like hand-waving talk, but I’m starting to see the convergence of data processing/data mining with computers as an enabler for that “top down” view. I don’t think this would be practical without the advent of cheap storage and computing capacity, and I don’t think it would be practical (but perhaps possible,) without a lot of the content management software available for us to use. So I’m really looking at using tools to accomplish something new in a community space (although I’m sure the tools are already used in this way in non-community spaces.)
Anyway, Andy Fundinger was working on the first repository, and I’m supposed to come up with some sort of relevant ontology or borrowed namespace to mark up the ideas with to facilitate this network map/analysis approach to community interests. I’m planning to use software available today (and I don’t have a list, but I know there are more learned people in that space who could authoritatively lay out a relevant toolset,) but that’s in the pipeline.
And finally, another aspect of community involvement is that it gives everyone an opportunity to move outside of their normal specialties to enjoy new experiences, or to learn new skills. Those new tools feed back to their day jobs, to their individual pursuits, and to others through mentoring. So you can look at this space as a bit of a social “amplifier.” Perhaps not in a utopian way, but for the motivated, learning new things is unavoidable. And again, we’re probably one of many groups, formally or informally, that are playing in this space. It is a logical progression of networked community. ;)
So bring it on!
Is this blog the IDEA FACTORY?
If it is, I have one. It is simple. I couldn’t come up with a catchy name so I am calling it, Automatic Interviewer Robot That Automatically Uploads Footage and Other Content (text, pdf etc) to Sites That Are Looking For It.
ex. An avator walks up to a robot looking vending machine thing, and the machine starts asking questions. The questions by the way are picked from an emormous user created bin that is archived on someone’s server, somewhere. Each question is reactive to the previous answer which avoids choppy randomness. This Robot thing not only generates and distributes content, but it categorizes answers by interests and perhaps opinion. The coolest part of this application is that the robot will ask the user to open their webcam so it can take footage and drop it on the youtube. Its easy.
I think it should resemble the fortune teller from the movie BIG.
Idea Factory.
@Jimbob: I love it, that’s excellent. Feel free to drop it on 3pedia.com, or I’ll try to when I get the chance.
Where? Projects? Do I just post it and describe it as if it already exists? Do people change or develope it as I post it? Funny, I actually called myself a futurist once.
Any pointers?
@Jimbob: That’s awesome, thanks so much for your contributions, that’s just what I want to see happen on 3pointD.