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Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.
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The Idea
A bugtracker like trac is my most valued production tool. My idea is to create an open bug tracker for everything, a ka the whole world. If there is a hole in the tax system, somebody can file a bug. If there is a weird road construction that produces accidents, file a bug. Drug addicts hanging around at the corner? Etc...
It would probably work a bit like Wikipedia, except that it would be an encyclopedia of problems in the world, and it would have some more features (bug tracking, community building).
The motivation is that people could find together to solve some of the problems (community).
My first motivation is that I am curious as to what will happen. Will we see hot centers of problems on the Google Map? Will people really start to change something? What are the most common problems?
There would also be voting on the importance of problems (I think many bug trackers have this feature).
Another thing it could do is just provide people with a bug tracker. So far they seem to be used mainly by software developers, and I think other professions would benefit as well. The system would allow people to have closed system to monitor (ie they could create private projects, not everything needs to be public). It would also allow them to allow teams to work on bugs. Since peoples opinions might differ, perhaps it would have to be possible to submit bugs several times (ie team A wants to solve it in another way than team B).
Possible problems: legal risk, what if people start flaming businesses who would sue against the bad reputation?
Also, there are already some pages where people can vent their anger and dissatisfaction, I think. So differentiation might be a challenge.
I thought of this idea when I was...
Using trac, an open source bug tracker.
Comments Posted
Bug tracking only really works if someone has to fix the bugs that are listed. If people just get to post about their pet peeve, you might have an amusing/depressing list of things that are wrong in the world, but nothing will really change. Where's the motivation for anyone to actually go to work on the problems that are listed on the site? Do you know a lot of people who really want to work on improving the world but they're sitting home doing nothing because they can't find a problem to work on? This could be a great site, but I think you need more than just a list of problems people have entered.
And just for reference, a lot of groups other than developers use bug tracking software. CRM (customer relationship managment) tools are essentially the same thing used by sales and marketing types. Lots of professions like doctors, laywers, etc. use issue-tracking software. Even phone centers use logs that are their equivalent of bug tracking.
Interesting idea.
I think you would need to introduce it in some small market so you could reach some level of critical mass in that area (e.g. a narrow geography, or a the tech community).
You would need a a large, active wikipedia like community to rate and categorize and tag and eventually close issues.
One challenge with bug tracking is avoiding duplicate issues. Even on small software projects, with small teams, dupes turn up. And that's presumably from a trained staff that knows how to search for similar issue before entering new ones. This could easily be your biggest problem. Different people will use different words to describe what they see as a problem. A niche market and a strong community (as above) with good tools for tagging and searching for dupes will be key.
Marc
It is a cool idea, but I think micco & mlimotte are both right and those are 2 big ol' holes...
wow this would be an ideal way for social/environmental etc.. action groups to focus their energies on things people care about. Not like they aren't already but there would be documented proof of the issues.
How would you handle/evaluate duplication of "bugs" and would consolidation of multiple like "bugs" imply that the problem was more severe. So If I log a bug about the pothole on my street and my neighbour logs it as well separately...who cleans up the data? Who evaluates whether 100 bugs are actually the same issue and thus is much more important that 100 separate issues?
I LOVE THIS IDEA BTW?
I do like this idea even though is sounds bizarre at first. It would be nice to have tag clouds or something similar to know what the how bugs are. Link this up to google earth - then inventors, companies, governments can produce/spend/invest in solving important wide-spread problems.
The issue of who cleans up the bugs is of course an important one. Clearly it must be possible to open a bug several times, because people might have differing opinions. There could be different mechanisms - either who opens the bug may close it, or there could be votes etc. It would still be possible to point to duplicates of a bug.
Since there would probably be votes on severity of bugs, it might resolve itself: if one party closes the bug and another leaves it open, there is still the severity vote. If the bug that is still open is not very severe anymore, it doesn't matter much.
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