Before I begin working I typically write out the concepts, structure, and features on paper to determine the requirements of a project. This is a good habit to have, but it takes away from my time to make a concept into something tangible.

The objective is not to eliminate planning from the development process. There should not even be a need for me to stress how important planning-before-doing is. What I want to do is become proficient at forming detailed, organized plans in extremely short periods of time. I do not want to have to do pre-plan-planning. I want to improve how I communicate the technical parts in a functional structure of a feature without having to really think hard about it. I want to share in concise terms anyone can understand, yet preserve the underlying technicalities.

Why it will be important for me to become a more organized thinker

I am entering a situation in my life where I may be able to finally work with other people who love creating things. I want to work with as many of them as I possibly can. If I want to succeed in this it is critical for me to become extremely efficient with how I spend my time. Otherwise, what I have been preparing for all these years since high school may fall apart if  I fail to organize my efforts correctly.

In the past, many things prevented me from having the opportunity of working with others in my field. For example, colleges are a great place to find people who want to work on projects. It has come to my attention it may be very difficult for me to enroll in a good college, given the fact they rely so heavily on numbers to define what I am capable of. This brings me to the next subject: why do we rely on credentials so much?

It may be smart to stop thinking others are not good enough.

Ingenuity and unconventional thinking probably play into the process way more than we would like to acknowledge. A label or good reputation can go an extremely long way. At face value you may feel this is good, but it is actually a huge problem. After all, what better way to filter people out and find the talented people quickly over the average person?

Recent cases suggest the possibility of average people containing grey-matter

I saw an video recently that was very vindicating to my ideals. A few test projects have been run to see how useful average people could be in complicated projects. One good example involved a crowd-sourced effort to solve a complex mathematical problem. The problem involved a board game which had all the same rules, only with many extra dimensions added. This was the difficult part. As you can see in the aforementioned link, the problem was made public on the blog of a reputable mathematician, and in about 30 days the problem was solved by random people who found it online and decided to contribute. There are many other cases noted in the video proving how normal people can out-perform people with PhD’s, so I think this one example is notable enough.

Two-hundred-thousand heads are better than one.

The people with PhD’s should understand their work well enough to make their process understandable to the average person. Distributing small parts of a time consuming task to interested individuals can speed things up greatly, and some things still can not be done well enough by computers.

Those olde ways

Our history has been stained with greed. So much progress has been held back or made dependant by petty behaviorisms linked to our primates. We are not apes, anymore. You may argue that there is still a need to monetize our civilization because lots of ‘crazy things’ will happen if we remove it. “How could people adjust to a world where they no longer needed to work anymore? Everything would collapse because nothing would ever get done.”  This is true, and so I propose we consider a restructuring of the system for people interested in improving things.

My proposal to help streamline innovation

Zeitgeist addendum is admirable, but very idealistic, which is actually makes it extremely unrealistic, sadly. I think it is very important though that we do focus more on improving things for the sake of improving things.

Monetization is removed from the system—research and development-wise, but the labor industry would have to continue as it always has for the aforementioned reasons. We must take into account how many people will try to take advantage of their situations, if something like zeitgeist were to actually happen.

It would be great if people did not have to worry about supporting themselves while committing to a project they find worthy. There are many other things hindering innovation, but I feel money plays the largest part in screwing it up.

While they are working on projects, researchers should be able to be worry free of finances, within reason. Only when a researcher exits a project, should they need to deal with monetization. They could be given an appropriate amount of money to regroup on a vacation or something; or find another project to work on; or join the old fashioned labor force. This will give people the option to innovate with nothing holding them back, or continue chugging along like we all have since the 1800s.

Important projects will not require money to begin, providing they can present a strong case as to why it would help society or improve something. After researchers prove they are joining the cause for the long haul, or have put in an extended amount of time they should be taken care of financially for their contributions.

The concept of this restructuring is much like venture capitalism, but it removes a lot of the nonsense involved with getting the idea off the ground—with a working team.

The idea could probably use a bit of cleaning up

I’d love to hear what you think about ways this could be improved, or what is wrong with it. I think society is already going in this direction, and the rise of results only work environments, and services like Meetlie aiding the open office hours movement are a great place to start.

Someday I hope we can get past this money hording lifestyle / idealism, and just learn to enjoy living a comfortable life, without the need for extravagance, and commit ourselves to improving as many things as we can—just because we can.