Opportunity / Problem Statements Repository for Collective Flourishing

Inspired by the climate biotechnology problem statement repository from @homeworld.bsky.social, and various conversations with folks working in the broad Collective Flourishing space, here is a proposal for a similar repository of opportunity / problem statements.

Contents

What, briefly, is an opportunity statements repository

Benefits; Why?

What, specifically

Challenges with current proposal

Examples

Example stubs

Next steps

What, briefly

An opportunity statements repository is a list of opportunities in an area of Collective Flourishing that contain granular descriptions of the opportunities, link to other related opportunities, contains some examples of the opportunity / problem, along with proposed qualitative and quantitative measures to assess their impact, and suggestions of positive and negative impacts this intervention might have.

Why?

A list of well-defined opportunity statements can help

clarify the challenges

catalyse others to perform new work on the opportunities

inspire teams with existing solutions to realise they could try applying them to this opportunity

act as a reference point / shared model to

better assess and compare solutions against each other

find partial and negative results i.e. previous prototype solutions and failed solutions can be associated with / reference a specific opportunity statement

current and planned projects can reference a specific opportunity statement thus they can act as an attractor to bring interested parties together

Negative results (failed attempts) are obviously valuable to help others avoid repeating a costly exploration of a dead-end and giving others the stepping stone to try a different approach.

What, specifically

Here's a proposed pattern for each opportunity statements:

1. Clearly define what the opportunities / problem(s) are qualitatively

Also link to any related sub-opportunities, dependent opportunities, and sibling-opportunities

2. Give examples of it

3. Attempt to quantify one or more metrics of how it effects collective flourishing, including scale, and impact as well as other potential impacts such as emergence of other behaviours at the individual to system scale.

4. Different states the system, groups or individuals might shift into (positive and negative)

5. And again qualitatively reporting and or quantitatively measuring the effects those states have on collective flourishing: scale, impact, emergence etc.

Should historical opportunities be included? Yes.

These opportunity statements should not be limited to unsolved situations, but should include the many examples of opportunities where humanity has individually or collectively “resolved” a sense-making / collective flourishing opportunity, e.g. CFC-ozone depletion (mostly), overfishing (in some areas).

Alternative patterns

Alternative patterns could be used if they provide a better fit, e.g. Homeworld Collective's:

1. Motivating Factor

2. Specific Bottleneck

3. Actionable Goals

Challenges with this proposal

1. Deduplication

Matt Hastings from Ideaonomy highlighted the problem of duplicate statements. This is particularly important for this area where there are so many different fields interacting, using different domain specific words or definitions of the same words.

Examples

Here are some rough first drafts of potential opportunity statements. Remember that these are just my thoughts, now imagine we have a whole set of Wikipedia pages (or some other wiki if these fall outside of Wikipedia) where we collectively refine the different opportunity statements.

Vendor lock-in (opportunity for ATProto)

ATProto preamble

For @atprotocol.dev I'm imagining going back 4 years to see the opportunities ATProto was aiming to solve from that perspective in time.

I've included my current understanding of ATProto to let you decide if I’m on the right page with the technology's capability or not:

ATProto frees peoples' identities & data from effectively being permanently owned by a single corporation(s). It keeps the benefits of network effects whilst being fundamentally designed to defeat monopolies like Meta / Google / Twitter / LinkedIn / TikTok / Google etc. And it does so without burdening users with self hosting - which a demonstrably tiny fraction of people actually perform.

If the above is broadly true, then there are many opportunities here we could try to articulate. If the above is missing something significant then I need help to in my understanding of ATProto's potential negative and positive impacts, if so please accommodate my ignorance and help me learn by messaging @ajamesphillips.com thanks!... And or skip to the WikiSim examples below.

Vendor lock-in opportunity statement

1. Users of most modern digital platforms can not move their data off that platform. They create content, find other people, establish relationships. But they can only use the services provided by that platform. Switching to another platform means effectively starting again and losing everything. People do not want to do this, so they stay on a platform. The platform has become a “natural monopoly”.

A dependent opportunity is that of “ensh*tification” <if this opportunity statement was already created we'd link to that here>.

2. Examples: just look anywhere: Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Google (YouTube), TikTok, LinkedIn etc etc.

3. Quantified opportunity: all of these are at the scale of billions of people due to the current user bases of large platform, the direct impacts are outlined below.

How likely is it for someone to move to another platform if they could keep all their current functionality and gain some unspecified better thing? <e.g. We currently assess this using a 4 point scale from 1 “Definitely not”, “Probably not”, “Probably yes”, to 4 “Definitely yes.”, the average score is 1.05, n=1234 over 3 platforms X, Y and Z>

How easy (time & cost) is it? <e.g. 3 hours + 10 minutes per year of content on the platform, minimal cost, n=1003, assessed 3 platforms X, Y and Z>

What degradation of service occurs if they currently move? e.g. the number of people they can no longer easily communicate with, the features they no longer have access to, their own data that they can not easily explore, share and re-use. <e.g. we currently assess this using a 4 point scale from 1 “No impact”, “Minimal”, “Significant” to 4 "Total degradation”, the average score is 3.8, n=1204, assessed 3 platforms X, Y and Z>

4. A positive shift in the system would be to allow users to easily and quickly change their data and identity provider, whilst retaining connections and ability to view and share content with others.

5. An additional benefit from the ability to freely move to another data store and identify provider would be that it provides an incentive to existing platforms to improve the service and not degrade it (ensh*tification).

Reproducible Public Policy Logic (opportunity for WikiSim.org)

1. Data, calculations and reasoning supporting most public policy announcements, and critique is not clearly shown nor easily reproducible (ref).

Sibling-opportunity: In online public debates (social media) where data, logic, maths and reason is attempted to be used or is referred to support a particular policy or view point it almost always has significant errors (ref).

Sub-opportunity: when it is attempted and done without error it is not easily reproducible (ref).

2. Examples: just look anywhere, police, dentistry, NHS waiting times, economic plans, environmental degradation, etc etc.

3. Quantified opportunities:

the scale of unreproducible, bad, or missing math is proportional to views. Some platforms like YouTube make this easier to approximate, others like mainstream news outlets do not. <e.g. we could collate N examples, and then quantify the average unreproducible, bad, missing maths example is viewed by 120,000 people.>

impact is still harder to assess, <e.g. we might find 0 examples showed their workings but were correct, N of those with errors had prominent corrections by their authors but when these were added is disclosed by the platforms or authors, and the other M examples, M1 had a top comment which highlighted the opportunity, M2 in the top 3, M3 in the top 10. And P examples had no attempt at actual workings or referencing work with public policy logic>

4. A positive shift would see:

commentary in mainstream and social media starting to show the data, and calculations supporting their narratives.

emergence of a transition from hopelessness and paralysis to hope and productive actions could and are taken.

5. N% people showed an increase in hope and willingness to act after viewing content which they trusted to discredit absent or bad maths which was otherwise claiming to undermine solutions that were working in practice.

Some opportunity stubs

Clarifying definitions up front

1. ...to-do

2. Examples

This JAMA discussion had a significant focus on lockdowns and at 48 minutes into the 56 minute discussion, the two debaters give two different definitions of lockdown.

3. Quantified opportunities:

Good productivity use of time. The JAMA video has 50,000 views. If we assume that because they were never discussing the same thing then the conversation was a fraction of its effectiveness it could have been, that single video represents an ~8.5 human years of potential productive use of time.

Defining problems, and de-duplicating (opportunity for Ideaonomy.ai)

1. How to get a diverse group of actors and stakeholders to map out an opportunity space: define the different opportunities as they see them and de-duplicate opportunities when they are written using different definitions and in different technical terms / language.

2. ...to-do

Next steps

Get feedback on this plan @ajamesphillips.com

Invite people to edit the plan directly

Start collating draft opportunity statements in this document on WikiSim

*edit*

You can see and edit the latest version of this doc on WikiSim. -- why is this proposal on WikiSim? Proposals and narratives relating to how we could organise and collectively flourishing are valid for WikiSim.