Things are broken. Everywhere, there are broken things. There are beautiful things in the mix, but so much is broken or built on broken foundations.
I’ve never really been one to accept a broken foundation of how the world works. Now is the time to reinvent the wheel, and it always was, no matter the lies you’ve been told.
wheels i’ve reinvented
Web search is pretty broken. I’m reinventing that wheel via Clew, a fiercely-independent search engine designed to emphasize the voices of individuals and bury big media and corporations. This is a wheel that will need to be reinvented many, many times before we get it right.
NaNoWriMo has been messing up for years, and this year I finally had enough. I’m taking the great things about the challenge and dropping what doesn’t work at Writing Month, an open source, community-developed site for tracking writing goals as part of a community. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s much more ground to cover.
The social web is broken. I’m doing my (small) part with Polymaths.social, a small community for people like me who are passionate about many subjects, and am doing my research on how to do things right. I plan to release any findings, particularly around online community moderation.
don’t ignore standards
Just because you’re reinventing the wheel doesn’t mean you ignore how wheels work and interact with their surroundings. When coding my search engine, I use existing web standards to collect the information I need, then use my own reinvention to decide how to collate and rank that information.
If there’s no quality existing standard, it might be time to make your own. But don’t ignore standards that exist solely for the sake of reinventing the wheel.
wheels needing reinventing
Some wheels I see that I think could use some new takes but which I don’t have the time/energy to do myself:
- Web browsers - probably the most significant. The browser market is essentially a monopoly right now. And Firefox is pretty much the only alternative option, somewhat of a monopoly in itself. We need to have many independent browser projects going on, not just an alternative.
- Higher education - this is probably too big a project for any one person, but I think there’s a lot of ground that needs new work and reevaluating in the world’s current higher education system.
- Task management - there are a lot of task management systems out there, but I think there’s still definitely room for more. I’m personally beginning to settle on a hybrid analog/digital task management system I’m designing myself.
There’s much more out there, but those are some significant ones I’m thinking of right now.
Have more ideas on wheels needing reinventing? Or perhaps you’ve got a project in this vein of your own going on? I’d love to hear about it! My email is below.
