My idea made the Google 10^100 shortlist!

A year ago, when Google asked for “Big Ideas” to improve the lives of as many people as possible, so they could spend 10 million dollars on good works to celebrate their 10th Birthday, I was seriously impressed. This was one serious philanthrohack! Competitions like this almost always create more value than just spending money on stuff, and now Google has shown that over 150,000 people will compete just to win some kudos, help a lot of people, and see their idea brought to life – without even a promise of cash or contracts to the people with the winning ideas.

I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!

My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)

As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!

Three things you might be wondering at this point:

Surely this isn’t a new idea?

It’s certainly not a new idea in 2009. There a lot of similar projects underway right now. One of my friends was telling me about his at the Digital NZ hackfest just the other day. A recent silicon valley demo contest even featured a SaaS version of the idea, Citysourced, targeted at American Cities, and it was noted as one of the few potentially world-changing products among the 50 launches. It probably wasn’t a new idea when I submitted it for this 10^100 contest a year ago, although I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it back then, and I also doubt it was a new idea when I submitted it for an informal blog post based competition 6 months before that (ironically, I was trying to win a ticket to Google I/O, and missed out!). Way back when I first thought of it, circa 2005, it may have been vaguely original, but there was little point in implementing such a project back then because cellphones with GPS didn’t actually exist at that stage, so it ended up on the backburner with the other 5-10 “big ideas” I usually have fighting to get out of my pile-o-notes and into some sort of coherent project plan.

Should I vote for Seth’s idea?

Well, the idea behind the competition is to help as many people as possible. So pick the idea theme you think will do that. However, here’s why it might be worth picking my one: Cellphones with cameras** will likely be more or less ubiquitous in 5-15 years, we all share an environment that has it’s occasional problems, and people who want to know about those problems (and pretty soon, autonomous systems will want to know too), and the usual ways in which information about these problems is transmitted, routed, stored, organised and displayed is really inefficient and fragmented compared to what could be enabled with todays technology, so a good implementation of this idea would eventually help everyone on the planet. So the real question is, could a project sponsored by Google in the next year or so create a significantly better outcome than would be achieved by leaving it to other players in this space***? And how does the importance of getting this done right, sooner rather than later, stack up against the other 15 big ideas? I may post a follow up considering one or both of these questions, but this post is getting long enough already.

Why isn’t Seth’s (or anyone else’s) name mentioned in this list?

I was initially a bit disappointed about that, but I think they quite rightly want people to focus on the ideas rather than the people who submitted them. I was also initially disappointed that they didn’t link the submission titles to copies of the complete submissions, but I guess the point is to get as many people as possible to read all 16 ideas and then vote, and linking to a bunch of extra information would not have helped! On the other hand, after the voting process is over and the “final five” are found, I hope Google will provide more information about the individual submissions and submitters.

In conclusion, go vote!

PS: I made my final submission in a bit of a hurry, typing it direct into Google’s webform, and wouldn’t you know it, when I went to recover the text I’d entered using Lazarus I discovered I didn’t have it installed in the browser I was using! Hopefully Google will send me a copy of my submission even if it doesn’t make it into the final 5 – I’d like to blog it for posterity.

PPS: If you actually managed to read this far, why not sign up for my RSS feed?

* I’m working on a blog post that explains the other idea, which I still think is well worth doing.
** GPS helps, but isn’t essential, phones can do a reasonable job of nailing down location using signal triangulation.
*** Of course, some of them would probably be invited to answer Google’s RFP, and an ideal solution would probably allow for open and distributed interop between both new and existing players in this space.