Into The Great PD

Vision

100% of the designs for sustainable production of food housing, healthcare and education for every human and animal are available in the Public Domain

Mission

Mobilize a diverse team to produce long term solutions for planetary crises

Strategy

The mobilized team will execute three strategic initiatives to deliver the vision

• Public Domain Collaboration Engine (P1)
• AutoGenerator (P2)
• Public Domain Story (P3)

Public Domain Collaboration Engine

A tool for crowd-sourced solution development for the Public Domain

Create an open sourced software tool to accelerate long-term public-domain collaboration on sustainability solutions between multi-disciplinary designers. Optimize the tool to support using outcome-driven design techniques and auto-generative tools.

Build a repository and index of the data and designs (E.g. CAD designs, data & processes) which can be used to prototype, manufacture to scale, and maintain the sustainable solutions required to support the basic needs of humans and animals on this planet, such as food, water, and clean energy.

Design an engaging user interface allowing users to find, use, and enhance those designs. Enable a diverse range of contributors to design iterative solution improvements, or simply log improvement suggestions for an experienced designer to resolve.

Catalogue existing problem statements, desired outcomes, and public domain solutions, and seed the engine with existing solutions.

Partner with companies, schools, and non-profits with aligned goals to select focus areas, motivate and educate collaborators to accelerate the advancements to the public domain solutions.

Create a set of compelling visualization tools to help users understand the necessity and the benefit of collaborative public domain works. Use interactive data visualizations to illustrate how small contributions, such as a simple idea for a design enhancement can deliver rapid, scalable progress when coordinated among diverse collaborators.

AutoGenerator

A tool as example and illustration of the collaboration engine

Create an autogenerator styled after the one of the protagonists of the story. The autogenerator has increasingly valuable generator methods, similar to the Make Anything Bot (MEB) in the book. Paired with an autodecesionmaker (ADM), the MEB makes better ideas. The autogenerator and the visualizatins produced by it illustrate the extensible power of autogenerated data based on a restricted set of domain specific language. The use of an outcome framework to aid the decision making illustrates the power of outcome driven design, for a range of methods from simple to complex. As a bi-product of the efforts to build the autogenerator and write the story, the team will create and publish tools which were used to write the story and build the autogenerator.

The AG is just getting started here on Observable

Public Domain Story

A story as example and illustration of the collaboration engine

Create a story to illustrate the power of outcome driven auto-generation, and to persuade readers to support and contribute to the PDR. Collaborate with friends, colleagues, and AI tools to storyboard, write and illustrate. Use the Outcome framework to describe the intent, and to support a series of decisions required to write the book. Record the decisions and reasoning, following the pattern described by Edgar Allen Poe in The Philosophy of Compostion. Use Observable to create data visualizations for the book.

The PDS is just getting started here on Observable. The completion of this story is not urgent since progress on the AutoGenerator and on the Public Domain Collaboration Engine will inform the characters, plotline, and illustrations.

Outcomes for PDCE

• Increase # solutions in the Public Domain
• Increase quality of solutions in the Public Domain
• Increase # of planetary problems solved
• Increase User Experience delight of using PD resources
• Increase # collaborators
• Increase # influencers
• Increase # and $ of contributors

Outcomes for Autogenerator

• Increase MAU from zero to 1K
• Increase number of categories of idea Parts from zero to optimal number (8?)
• Increase number of users contributing idea parts from zero to 100
• Increase number of ideas autogenerated
• Increase quality of ideas autogenerated
• Increase number of decisions made
• Increase quality of decisions made
• Increase the visualizations from zero to ten
• Increase the UX Delight from zero to strongly delightful

Outcomes for PDS

• Increase # of readers
• Increase # of readers who join the PDCE project
• Increase # of collaborators to the optimal number
• Increase # of inspirational concepts to some optimal number
• Increase # of bibliographical refences to some optimal number

FAQ

Q: Why bring these strategic together rather than focus only on the core topic of the Public Domain Collaboration Engine?

A: The three mutually supportive initiatives serve to:

• demonstrate the outcome driven design process which can be applied in each of the three initiatives, and which is a core method of how users will collaborate in the PDCE
• demonstrate the power of Observable to create highly enjoyable and influential data driven visualizations
• demonstrate how quickly we can train new (high school age and above) collaborators to execute iteratively on the project and deliver valuable outcomes at each step.

Q: Why use Observable?

A: The Observable team says it best: Why Observable

Additionally,

• The philosophy of using visualization and interactivity to teach, combined with the open collaboration capabilities make this tool a perfect match for this project. There is a community of active developers with the right mindset to help us push our project forward. Furthermore, learning this tool will be valuable in my day job, and valuable to the young developers working on the code.

Open Questions

• should we expand the vision to include physical things like tools and resources which could be put into the global public domain?
• Will we form an actual non-profit org or join another one?

To Do

• write the qualities of the collaborators that I am looking for
• ask for assistance via linkedIn