Have you ever felt that you have really cool idea, but lacked something to develop it further? It might be lack of knowledge, resources, people, time, money or a mix of these points? Still believe that idea is so cool and need to be made someday buy someone? The Open Bank of Ideas is your safe ticket!
The following document is a FAQ about The Open Bank of Ideas and its honored community.
The Open Bank of Ideas is DRAFT place to openly exchange ideas and resources for any project.
- You can see this as a global brainstorming room, where everybody is always welcome!
- In another way, The Open Bank is an open information space. You can sent your idea to float and develop in here.
- In the same way, The Open Bank can be seen as human ideas preservation place, similar to "Svalbard Global Seed Vault" (github projects are stored there too, so our ideas might be in the next batch!).
- Last way, you can see The Open Bank as international hackathon that never stops,
- And of course, it's a place for crowd-sourced resource and experience exchange.
It can be anything, from small electronic device that will help people do something, to multi-purpose international corporation. DRAFT, because github is mostly good for this task, but NEVER PERFECT. We might decide to move the bank somewhere. Ideally, move it to some sort of blockchain-based, decentralized git, if it'll be more stable than github. Github and gitlab would still receive mirrors of The Open Bank in any case.
When developing your idea, you might stuck at some moment. So you need some type of resource to further develop or grow. You might as well as publishing your idea, publish a help request, give-away proposal if you have something to share, or both. To faster develop the project I would personally publish both info on the project here (see section "Ideas") as well as requests of any tye (section "Resources"). In this case you will need two files (continue to read on that below).
Q: "Can I work on my own project here, (and use this to hunt a team or more ideas)"?
A: YES, this is also welcome in The Open Bank of Ideas. For gathering resources see the "resources" sections.
If you're still thinking "is my idea worth adding to the bank?", go to the FAQ section called "Adding ideas to the bank (AKA RULES)" and add your idea with special tag #unsure. Add your concirns about why it SHOULD and why it SHOULD NOT be made by somebody, and as the next step community will discuss your ideas and project's future. Everybody's ideas are welcome!
NB: In more complex projects, people might decide to actually USE the idea but go a DIFFERENT ROUTE comparing to idea / plan / description. In fact, this will happen most of the time. This is normal, nobody's to blame, it's called pivoting in startup/business environment or forking in github terminology.
- Let the ideas come true (better if your idea will be made by some community, rather then never made by anyone, right?)
- Unstuck the stucked development (help you to get any type of resource you need)
- Give a fascinating, motivating and entertaining out-of the box experience
- Solve the "lack-of-creativity" or "stuck" problem (when you're tired in the process of finding an interesting idea)
- Honor the author of the idea in case if he wants to (NB: similar ideas might already be introduced by other people long time before The Open Bank of Ideas appeared!)
Important to note here: NO STRINGS ATTACHED. It means that your idea can be stored and never happen. Or your idea might be developed without mentioning you as an author. Or the ideas published here might not lead to successful projects. Or won't allow you earn some skills, or money. It might help you find a team, or build your community, as well as it might destroy your team or community. So, by using The Open Bank of Ideas you realized that litetally no strings are attached anywhere. We do have an "open-source codex of honor", some basic rules and moral guidelines (read on that further down below).
- startuper (solo) or a startup team
- developers & scientists
- creative professions: coder, DIY person, artist, painter, book writer, musician or DJ, photographer, videographer
- other individual (you?)
- resource hunters
- company or organization (both for-profit and non-profit)
- business accelerator or business angel community
- startup hub or techno-park
- team of professionals that lacks ideas to work on
A good item for the bank would be:
- A startup idea with basic project description (example: a VR/AR/MR gaming park of a new level)
- Business plan of certain level (ideally, including the most parts) (example: how to make a new type of restaurant)
- Idea of a new methodology that will help with something (example: methodology on how to build an opensource city)
- Description of new method of study (example: how to study chemistry to understand it better and faster)
- New mixed research area that isn't developed enough (example: biology of the brain + IT = neuro-interfaces etc.)
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects (example: new type of AI)
- Computer game idea (example: a quest game about small creatures that are secretly live beneath the planet surface)
- New computer gaming experience idea (ex.: new physical controller type, game with new principle etc.)
- Film idea (anything from indie film to a large hollywood-style blockbuster)
- Electronic device idea or project drawing to create some sort of useful device
- Software ideas, software methodology, code examples etc (main github stuff that's already in here)
- Economics or fin-tech idea (example: new cryptocurrency or token project)
- Transparency, governance or management idea (examples: new decentralized or blockchain project)
- Interconnection, IoT or networking ideas (examples: new network protocol or topology)
- Cypher or encryption idea (example: new quantum-tolerant encryption algorithm)
- Architecture idea or project drawing (example: an open-source program to plan and project smart villages)
- New standard, standard group or standardizing methodology (example: standarts for creating optical links for quantum computers)
- If you're still unsure, go to the FAQ section called "Adding ideas to the bank (AKA RULES)" and add your idea with special marker. Add your concirns about why it SHOULD and why it SHOULD NOT be made by somebody, and as the next step community will discuss your ideas and it's future here. Everybody's ideas are welcome!
Any smaller idea for the creating an "single" object (physical or virtual) will also do:
- book (may include or not include main plot points)
- audio track (may include or not genre and track texture)
- painting or drawing (may include or not include pallette and style)
- photographs ideas, photo session ideas, photo editing techniques
- tutorials, how-to's
- social/blog post, topic, or social campaign based on some topic
- UI concepts
- scientific video, video concepts or possible topics
Note: for resource exchange requests, see the specific "resources" sections.
The level of detail of the project can be any (the more developed the better):
- Basic draft of the idea without large description
- Medium-described projects with ideas and details around it
- Fully-blown project with business plan, financial plan, drawings, schematics and simulations
The level of detail of your publication will also clarify your own level of interest in the development and might attract (or distract) other developers. Please take your time to prepare high-quality materials, without grammatical or other errors at your best. If you can't, ask the community or friend to help.
Basically, it's three things:
- Mentioning of your idea/project in according section of The Open Bank of Ideas with link to point #2.
- Markdown file in this repo's according folder. The markdown file itself should include the brief idea, while also ideally include reasoning, author's words, project status, involved persons list, contact details, and what's most important - links to the project's main repo (yes, you'd ideally make your own repo for the project and cross-link it here!) and to the project website, if it exists.
- Brief images and illustrations of your project, that might be required for better understanding of point #2.
Check out the "Project Template.md" or any published project if you want to see how things work in The Open Bank of Ideas.
If you're ready to add your project, move to "How to add your idea" section.
NB: We don't want to make The Bank of Ideas unstructured messy scrapyard with tonns of information (like internet is). So each and every project is suggested having one, brief text markdown description file and may have few images included. All additional information (that well-developed idea or project definitely should have!) needs to be placed in your own repos/websites and cross-linked from markdown file.
The resources for making ideas or projects can work two ways. They can be:
- request ("we need") - used mostly as a single or one-time request,
- give-away proposal ("we have") - used mostly as constact giving away some info or help,
- exchange/both ("we have X" but "we need Y") - used mostly for further project/idea development
For example, if you have a project and developed it to some level, but now you need 1 more person in the team to help you along, and also 1 sponsor plus some physical stuff, you can create a one request file - related to your project - or constant exchange - depending on the planned length and amount of resources you need (for constnant resource flow exchange, choose "exchange"). BUT, if you have several projects and/or unrelated requests (example: you need a coder's help for your project, while you need to find an offline place to make an event about other project), please create separate documents/MD files for that in the repo.
When publishing your exchange request, please do it by using markdown file in the according directory. Directories should be called after the type of the resource. Example of resources for exchange (CAPS=directory names):
- PLACES: Contacts of places where you can do your project or event for free or at affordable price
- PRIZES: Contact data of sponsors who can support your even or make a prizes/prize fund for you
- PEOPLE: Contacts of: volunteers, managers, investors, mentors, business angels, coders, who can help you with some tasks
- ITEMS: Physical requests (videocameras, microphones, light, furniture, musical equipment, 3D printers, etc.)
- FOOD: Help with food/drinks or food service for your event, project or company
- MONEY: If you need financing to develop your idea OR if you want to invest in some type of a project
Resources can be physical, virtual or both. Resources also can be intended for usage offline, online or both. Resources can be used for projects, events, companies, ideas etc.
By publishing your ideas into "The Open Bank of Ideas", you agree to all of the following:
- Agreement on success: you should be ready that your idea can be taken AND made by somebody (in any way or type). This is the main project goal, although it won't be reached too often, because even good ideas are hard to make at the start (in the "lack-of-everything" state). Also, ideas frequently lack a good management and personnel.
- Agreement on (un)mentioning of the autor: you should be okay BOTH to be NOT included as author of resulting project and TO BE included as author of resulting project. The actual person or community may decide him or herself, and, what's more important, the idea might just even appear as outside of The Open Bank of Ideas. This happens all the time and it's TOTALLY NORMAL! Lastly, by using The Open Bank of Ideas, you should realize, that even if you ask for NOT MENTIONING you as an author, you STILL CAN BE mentioned if decided so by the actual developer of the idea or project. So, to sum up: you can politely ask the community to include or not to include you, but it might not work out as you asked in the result. We do, however, recommend each and every project developer to honor the author and follow his guidelines/requests if possible.
- Agreement of being polite person: upon publication of your idea, you realize that somebody might find it good or stupid, good-for-profit (even if it's idea of opensource software) or good as opensource project (even if your project is described as a closed-source software or project). So you agree of not being rude, not blame anyone for changing the direction of your idea or project, for doing something wrong (or correct). Moral and etiquette is your best friends in here, as we gather for development and improvement, not for hatespeech discussion and ruining ideas.
- Transparency agreement: the idea of "The Open Bank of Ideas" is sharing, exchanging, improving and caring. Please do understand that transparency is a requirement in here and if you want somebody to make or improve your project, you need to share 200% of your ideas, materials etc. etc. For example, you might want to include a link to your own github repository with more details on your project, link to website, as well as register a social network accounts for news etc.
- Moral & Etique: your idea should be GOOD in general terms of Moral and Etique. We will NOT elaborate on what is Moral and Etique here explicitly and ON PURPOSE. Please do read on this topic in any other preferred source and develop your morality yourself! As an easy to understand example, we will have a zero tolerance on projects related to creating a weapons of any kind, crimes against humanity, hidden surveillance projects, projects that will highly probably lead to runied world, destroyed climate, bad ecology, or animal-harm projects. If you're unsure about your project, please share it with tags #unsure and #moderation-required, and we will try to find resources to research on the topic and find it as "general good" or "general bad". Please do understand that if your idea will fall into "general bad" category, it might be banned from The Open Bank of Ideas, sorry for that.
One project can maximally be consisted of two parts:
- Project idea description markdown file (additional "external" files on the project can be linked)
- Resource exchange description markdown file If your project have both files, please cross-link them so people can find them easily.
- Clone this repository
git clone sxiii/bank-of-ideas. - Add your idea to the section (folder) that you think it should belong, as a markdown file, with the following name scheme:
[ ideas/folder/project-name-superbrief-description.md ]. For example, if you would like to add a description about your idea of making a neuro-helmet as a neuro-interface for doctors, please make file similar to[ ideas/neuro/neurointerface-for-doctors.md ]. Add images if needed as files[ ideas/neuro/neurointerface-for-doctors-illustration-1.png ]. Larger files should be hosted externally and just linked in the file. - If your idea has a resource exchange proposal, don't forget to add that as a separate markdown file. Filename should match your main project MD file, but the folder for the exchange proposal will be different. In general, it'll be
[ resources/request-type/project-name.md ]. For similar example above, if you need doctors to help you to develop your device, it will be:[ resources/people/neurointerface-for-doctors.md ]. This mean you want to exchange "resource" by type "people" under your project "neurointerface for doctors". Dont't forget to cross-link file #2 and #1. - Create a pull request with short info on your project.
- Brief / super short description about your project. Ideally, in 3 phrases.
- "Medium" / normal idea description, without too much details. Usually this is from half page of text up to 2 pages of text.
- Images (one, two or several) can be included here too as markdown allows. The format is
! [ img name ] ( img url )without spaces. - External links. The format is
[ link name ] ( link url )without spaces:
- resource file cross-link
- idea / project repository link
- idea / project website link
- github issue discussion link
- any additional link that's relevant
- Author of the idea and preference or non-preference of mentioning of the author.
- Proposed license scheme for the project.
- Brief / super short description about your project (if you have main idea file, just copy-paste brief from there).
- If you have main project markdown file, don't include full description, but include a cross-link to it here.
- Request type (one of the following: places, prizes, people, items, food, money)
- Your exchange terms descrition and proposal (note: they should not be 100% final, just for reference!)
- External links. The format is
[ link name ] ( link url )without spaces:
- related idea / project repository link
- related idea / project website link
- github issue discussion link
- any additional link that's relevant
It's an easy and understandable syntax for writing a documents, briefs and other papers. Read more
The idea behind the Open Bank of Ideas movement is basically an open-source movement. So we have a "opensource code of honor" and we do appreciate the idea MORE, the MORE it is open. But as the Open Bank of Ideas cannot limit any kinds of licenses, here we do have all three "levels" of licensing:
- PREFERRED LICENSE: Any copyleft, open-source and viral license. Examples: GPL, CC Share-alike. "Viral" means that to legally develop a forked opensource project you MUST have THE SAME LICENSE (hense viral) and link the upstream source code or idea.
- OKAY LICENSE: Any open-source, permissive, weak copyleft, public domain or less/un-viral license. This may be useful for semi-open-semi-proprietary projects that would have to include some proprietary parts. Examples: MIT, BSD, WTFPL, Apache, Mozilla, CC aka "Some Rights Reserved", etc. Basically, any "open-source"-typed license will do.
- POSSIBLE, BUT NOT RECOMMENDED: Any other license, proprietary or whatever.
Please bear in mind that licensing scheme for the idea or project will be followed-up by the Open Bank of Ideas community only if you already have your own repository with clearly stated license in there. If you don't have the project yet or it's only in the state of planning, any person in the world can take your idea, make the project and license it according to his or her willing.
- Discussion around projects & ideas (general discussions!) are welcome here in "Github Issues".
- One issue / discussion per project.
- Project markdown file should include the link to general discussion, and general discussion should link to the project markdown descripton (cross-linking).
- If you want to discuss project or idea "in details" or start working on it, please find author's attached repository for the project and discuss in-detail there. If project repo does not exist, create it AND THEN LINK this new repo in two places: first, the project markdown ".md" documentation file (read "THE PROCESS" section), second, in the project discussion in issues (if it exist).
- Resource requests should have separate issues for discussions.
First rule of thumb for authours: please check that your project does not exist in the way you want/see it before publishing. Very often, the authors of the project or idea don't know that somebody already implemented it in a good or better way. Please do your own research on existence of your idea at least in two different languages and at least in two search engines. The more you research, the better.
Although, nothing bad will happen even if you publish the project and later community find 10 or 100 implementations of it. Your project will be marked as "already implemented", and will be saved under this category (for the future reference) unless you provide evidence of serious differences or reasons why your project should be published separetely.
Also, if you're unsure about similarity to other projects, please do publish it with tags #unsure and #moderation-required, the Open Bank of Ideas community will jump and help you with further research.
- Need some resources to help your idea or project? Add tags that fits: #help-wanted #need-coder #need-marketing #need-designer #need-hr #need-manager #need-cofounder #need-investor #need-scientist #need-research #need-office #need-tester #need-community #need-seo #need-hosting #need-website #need-repo #need-translation etc.
- if you have both idea & resource exchange files published on same project, please ADD THE SAME TAGS TO BOTH.
- if you're unsure about level of your project: #unsure and #moderation-required
- still working on project's description draft? Add: #draft (remove #draft after you finish with description and basics)
- other tags might be added in the future
It totally depends on you, your time and your goals with the project.
- Passive way. You might want to just preserve your idea for the future or for somebody to work on it someday. In this case, you don't need to do anything further, maybe to subscribe to this repository ("watch" button on the top-right) and that's all.
- Medium way. If you want to develop the project by yourself from time to time, you might want to start a discussion ("issue" with description of problems you met upon developing your idea or project. After that, you might add tags, for example, "#need-developer" and "#need-investor" and subscribe to this repo ("watch" button on the top-right).
- Active way. If active involvement and development are your priority, you might need to do a lot of work both inside and outside of scope of your project. As there can't be general advices for inside ideas or projects as all are unique, we can recommend doing some outside PR work: create community for your project in all social networks. Start a blog or two, write articles about results of your project development. Update github, blogs, websites, social networks as frequent as you can. Create engagement, add a "we're hireing!" page on a project website (even if you don't have money to pay for development at this point).
Results (in idea development) may vary due to quality of your project, your involvement, current conditions on the market, weather, quality of life of your developers and 100500 other criteria. But if you've added your idea to The Open Bank, nobody can say anymore that "you hadn't left anything for your descendants". Just give them a link to The Bank!
- At this exact stage, my goal is to gather first 20+ ideas.
- In sync, I also want to have all main documents (as this one) translated to at least 4 or 5 languages (english, russian, norwegian, spanish, deutsch).
- After first two steps are reached, new milestones might be added here.
- In later future time, The Open Bank community will gather online presense by making a publications about it everywhere on mass-media as well as taking parts in video interviews and podcasts. This way, we're hoping to get the first "external" participants, help exchangers, sponsors, etc.
- In more distant future, this could become something like global decentralized ideas & resources exchange community.
Sure! There are two main ways of doing it.
Direct ways to support author of The Open Bank of Ideas (@sxiii):
- Share the link to The Open Bank of Ideas or to it's sub-projects (with short description)
- Draw informational and advertisement graphics for ideas of The Open Bank and share it everywhere
- Make educational video about The Open Bank of Ideas or mention it in your other video (or both!)
- Record a podcast with me or someone you want, discussing The Open Bank of Ideas
- Send an email campaign with information about The Open Bank to your customers or community
- Do a post about The Bank somewhere in cryptoblog, social network or wherever you like
- Donate any amount of any cryprocurrency or any fiat money to author (contact me on github @sxiii or telegram @fakesnowden)
- Help people add their ideas to The Bank
Indirect (but still very important!) ways of supporting The Open Bank:
- Support any opensource project in any way you like (read options above) - it does not have to be listed in The Bank
- Share your appreciation to opensource movement any way you like
- Help new people with opensource software or anything you feel they need help for!
Cross collaboration is our power. Let's go develop and gather resources together!