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Last active January 23, 2018 16:57
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Did I Do That?
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did_i_do_that.md

Did I do that?

Problem

Reduplication of work is very common in both the civic tech and open source space.

For lots of reasons (expand).

To address this, in the community it is often proposed to have a list of resources or existing projects. While an obvious solution, it has several fundamental challenges, such as:

  • It is hard for one or a small group of people to know everything that is going on
  • Someone has to maintain this resource or else relevance slowly declines and leads to stagnation
  • Finding the list can be hard, so in order for it have impact it needs to be promoted
  • Dealing with these problems requires alot of time, which usually means money. This is in short supply for volunteer-led groups
  • Most of the time simply forking someone else's code will not get you far enough. You need to connect this person, and talk to them, which is challenging (asymetrical access to information + limited time)

Key Value Metrics

We need a solution, then, that is:

  • not constrained to it's own platform or even a single given platform
  • is lightweight and requires little maintence
  • provides a high bang-for-buck in terms of time invested and number of resources identified
  • places the priority and emphasis on humman interaction and connection, not the code

Solution

  1. Individuals opt in to be tagged according to projects that they have done or areas of domain knowledge.
  2. Someone has a project idea, pitch, or other research question.
  3. This pings relevant individuals (through email/Twitter/SMS/whatever kinds of platform), who then ask themselves "Did I do that?"
    1. Did I try a similar project before?
    2. Have I written or contributed to a project to address that issue?
    3. How did it go? Does it still exist? Is forking it viable?
    4. What lessons did I learn?
  4. If yes, they can provide links and a breif description and have the oppurtunity to exchange contact information with the requester.
  5. These requests and responses could potentially be archived or shared with a wider audience, but part of me perversely wishes for them to be ephermeral and not shared, so that the emphasis is on those particular individuals connecting to hopefully build a relationship to help each other directly.
@mateoclarke
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