WikiSolv - A community focused on solving our most pressing problems.

The WikiSolv Story

Have you ever tried to solve a problem, but you didn't know where to start? Have you ever wondered where your talents could best be applied, so that the most people could benefit? Did you ever have a problem that you thought was important, but no one was working on it? Have you ever seen a problem that was being avoided?

We are a community of problem solvers. It is what we do. As a human race, we have an historic opportunity to work together to collaborate and solve our world's most pressing problems. If you look around the web today, you can see wonderful tools and resources for communicating and sharing information, but there isn't a strong community organized around prioritizing and solving our major problems. We created WikiSolv to fill that need. WikiSolv will enable people to identify our most pressing problems and collectively organize efforts to solve them.

The world today has many challenges. Yet, if we can marshall our resources and focus them on the right problems, we can address many of our challenges and improve the living standards for millions and millions, perhaps billions, of people around the world.

The ability to solve rather big problems is also becoming more accessible to more people:

• More people are getting access to computers and communications. Computers are getting cheaper and more prevalent all over the world. The internet is spreading into more and more remote communities. More people are getting Smartphones, which are small computers themselves.
• Computers are becoming faster, and they are becoming faster at a faster rate! As they get faster, computers and applications are helping us get more things done and solve more problems. We can make things better, cheaper and faster.
• Social networks are improving the way we communicate and share knowledge and ideas. As people get used to sharing thoughts, comments, knowledge and ideas with more and more people, we all benefit from the increased communication.
• Good ideas are spreading faster. When you trade ideas with another person, both of you now have two ideas, and you are more likely to be able to build upon that idea together rather than separately.
• Open Source software and hardware is speeding the rate of innovation. As we build hardware and software together, we are building better components which we can then all use. This is helping to focus our skills and resources. We don't have to build multiple, redundant solutions for things when we build them together and share the result. You would think that this might decrease the incentive for creating new things by removing part of the proprietary profit motive, but it isn't. In reality, we are building more things better, cheaper and faster. And, we are advancing the state of the art at a faster rate.

With the above in mind, we should all be excited about working together to solve more and more problems together. We will all be better off.

As we look around the online world, however, we certainly see many wonderful sites and tools and resources. While all of this innovstion is simply happening in a myriad of forms, there may be an opportunity to better focus our efforts. In the midst of a project, when we are swimming in problems, issues, new knowledge and multiple paths forward, it is always useful to convene the team and consider the question, "What problem are we really trying to solve?" By staying anchored to this question, we were usually able to solve the problem faster and with less effort.

By better organizing our accomplishments, we will be able to better "stand on the shoulders of giants" as Sir Isaac Newton said in 1676. We will be able to build on each others ideas and accomplishments and build the pyramid higher. (If you look at the WikiSolv logo above, that is the essence of what it is trying to convey.)

WikiSolv was created to become a tool to help organize and focus our work. It is part a reference tool for gathering information in one place, part a social network for facilitating teamwork, part a question/answer platform. We hope you use WikiSolv to achieve great things together!

Our vision for this site is that it may be used by people from all walks of life. It should be a place where specialists can interact with generalists, where makers of products and services can interact with the people who need them. Eventually this site will also be fully internationalized, so that people from countries with large GDPs can interact with people from countries with smaller GDPs, and where people can share ideas across languages.

So how do you get started?

1. Sign up, if you haven't already. It's free.
2. Scan or search through our tree of Interests. Hopefully, you will find some areaas that are of interest to you. If not, Add your own interest area. Please try to keep the hierarchy of interests in reasonable shape on your own. WikiSolv will also work with you to help keep the hierarchies in order.
3. Follow the Interests that are most relevant to you. Once you Follow an Interest, you will start to see comments from other users related to that Interest area.
4. In similar fashion, find some Problems that you are interested in helping to solve. Follow Problems and Solutions, and you become a member of those teams. Follow the comments and dive in with comments, questions and answers to help solve the problem. Each area also has a Community Content area that everyone can freely edit as a Wiki. Please contribute your content to help the team solve the problem or complete the solution.
5. Contribute ideas for the site as well. Please send any comments for ideas for new site features and functionality to WikiSolv@WikiSolv.com. We appreciate any thoughts and ideas you may have.

We hope you enjoy WikiSolv, and look forward to building a pyramid of accomplishments with you and for us all!

The WikiSolv Team