Starting work today on my big side project, code-named HIT for Holistic Impact Tracker (there will be a friendlier, more promotable name as that becomes necessary, suggestions welcome). The idea is to track small behavior changes that simultaneously benefit ones own health and happiness, the environment, ones own financial well being, and people in need. For example, suppose you decide to bike to work one day, take the money you didnt pay for gas, save half of it and give half of it to charity. That one set of small actions just hit all those areas together, in a very small way. However, do that once a week for a year and it starts to add up. Get ten friends to do it, even more so. Tracking and providing feedback and encouragement in many forms, from communities of like-minded people to game-like features and rewards to charts and graphs, is something thats been proven to help with behaviors where the immediate benefit is small but where sustained small changes have a big impact. Ive been thinking about this for a long time, and the most recent nudge in this direction came from attending Google IO, which made me feel inspired and also a little sad. Inspired in the massive amount of brain power building incredible tools that get exponentially better every year. A little sad at the massive mind-share of creativity and engineering devoted to encouraging consumption and self-obsession. Silicon Valley jokes aside, it kills me to see brilliant college students graduating into a culture where revolutionizing means making it easier to find a restaurant or play a game. Im excited about the way this project tackles that head on, and promises to be a lot of fun both in the aspects that will be easy and those that will be challenging. Easy-fun in the sense that I have a lot of experience doing tracking apps at a very large scale already and know the whole underlying stack of organization and technology required, top to bottom. Challenging-fun in that Ill take it as an excuse to learn new technologies that I need to learn anyway, for example iOS and Android programming at which Im a total beginner right now. The entire thing will be open source, and Ill make it a goal to make steady contributions of code to those open source projects that this project benefits from. The other thing that makes this feel so easy compared to startups Ive done in the past is, Im not worried about so many of the worries one normally has, because I only care that this happens, not that I own it. Is someone doing this already? Probably, and, awesome, Ill partner with them or help them. Will someone steal this idea? Please do if you can make it happen better that way. Will I make money from this? Not directly, but I have no doubt that the experience and contacts Ill develop from this will bring a lot of benefit to the company I work for in my day job, and make me more successful in the long run. Anyone whod like to help in any way, you are very welcome and appreciated! I may do a kickstarter or something similar down the road, but for right now marginal expenses are essentially zero so I wont bother. Im fully aware of how grandiose this sounds so apologies in advance, but I think Ill say it anyway: I want to change the prevailing mindset of the technologically connected from, how can this technology help me live more comfortably in my privileged bubble? to how can this technology help me align whats good for me with whats good for the world? This is not in any way about asceticism or feeling guilty for the good you have in your life, its about living a full rich fun life by making the smart changes that align your own happiness and well being with that of the world. Done right this could make a huge difference to global health and happiness, global warming, global poverty. Wish me luck!
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:18:35 +0000
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