Ideas Laundry List (Part 1)

These past couple years, I’ve thought of a lot of business/website/activity ideas. Most of them are rubbish. A few I really like, but I have no time to properly pursue. A couple (such as this website) I’ve actually gone ahead and done, to varying degrees of success. I have enough ideas that I’ve actually started using a self-hosted installation of SugarCRM’s community edition to track them from conception to feasibility analysis to realization (or lack thereof). My list is getting quite long, so I’d like to put a few of these seeds out into the world. After all, they’re doing no good archived in my projects file!

1. OurVoorhees – A social network of sorts that we designed with our hometown in mind, directly linking businesses, schools, local government, and residents in order to create an open, constructive dialogue. Site functions would have ranged from community updates, to deals and promotions, to neighbourhood-based classified ads. We got as far as the development stage on this, before getting mired down by our inability to find a competent designer. Ironically, I know enough now to make this site a reality, but I have no desire to work in the suburbs, and several tools have come along that collectively fulfill many of OurVoorhees’s roles.
2. HUMUN – A distributed SMS volunteerism system. I forget what the acronym stood for, but the idea here was to use SMS texting to quickly coordinate and deploy volunteers. Interested people would sign up on a website, giving their location, phone number, available hours, nonprofits of interest, etc. When in need of help for a project, event staffing, or the like, a nonprofit could put out a call on the HUMUN network. A text message would go out to the relevant site subscribers giving the essential information, and they could RSVP via text. The hope with HUMUN was to make volunteering an organic process, lowering the barrier to entry and maximizing individuals’ effectiveness. I didn’t (and still don’t) have the technical knowledge or the time for this one. It would also be costly, with no sustainable revenue source.
3. Service Tracking & Accountability System – (Never gave it an official name.) I envisioned this as an answer to administrative bureaucracy and inaction at the local, organizational, or university level. (Especially at the university level.) Essentially, an entity-specific website would allow constituents/customers/students to submit issue tickets for problems that the entity in question is responsible for addressing. This might be a pothole for a small town government, a poor product description for an organization, or a facilities issue for a university. The site would email the ticket information to the relevant person(s) within the entity while publicly featuring the issue on the site, giving both entity employees and users the opportunity to comment on the issue and its resolution status. Over time, entity-wide and department-wide statistics would give potential users the opportunity to evaluate the entity’s responsiveness before choosing to engage it (by moving to the town, doing business with the company, or attending the university). Hopefully, such publicity might have shamed bureaucracy into improving! I still might work on this one, one day.