My Best 22 Ideas, and a Personal Invitation

The public inventor works in the light.

Transparency facilitates cooperation. I've published my best 22 ideas at GitHub, a platform for shared collaboration. Comments are welcome. The quality of my presentation will improve, but never delay publication to improve quality---release early and often.

 I apologize for those of you who may be unfamiliar with GitHub. You should be able to at least read the ideas above, and you are free to email me, but I would rather you comment publicly at GitHub by opening an issue there so that all can see your comment.

I believe the goals of PIFAH deserve a full explanation, which I have not prepared. However, you can find my personal invitation and a vision statement at the GitHub repo. Here is the README at the GitHub repo:

 Public Invention for All Humanity 

 A Personal Invitation 

The creation of new technology is not the only or best way to help our fellow-beings. Love is more important than lasers, and kindness more important than computers. Still, many of us are better suited to serve humanity in code than in a sermon, or holding a test tube rather than the hand of the dying. If you are one of those persons, I invite you to participate with me in a project I call Public Invention For All Humanity (PIFAH). Throughout 2015, we hope to run a number of projects best described as “inventions” that will be valuable to humanity. This is not particularly original. This is yet another project in the exponentially growing tradition of working for the public good.

What we do hope to use some modern principles:

• We will be completely transparent and open from the first. 
• Everything we produce will be shared to everyone without exception. 
• We will organize our using an Agile methodology, whether our work is software, hardware, research, or education. 

In other words, this will be an free-libre open-source project that welcomes participation from the public and seeks to organize work so that the work so that as many hands can pitch in as possible, and so that as many voices can contribute as possible.

 I am not committed to this project. If I find an existing project that can utilize my talents better, I may drop PIFAH to assist others. I don’t want this to be about me.

But of course that is inevitable, at least at the beginning. There is no point in false humility. I really want to act as the head coach of PIFAH, and I think I can do it well. I have an adequate technological resume, particularly as a computer programmer. More importantly, however, I enjoy leading teams and am good at it. I mentor people well. Finally, I am able and willing to devote myself full-time to this project, at least for a while.

You may wish to examine our project concepts to see if any appeal to you.

-- Robert L. Read, PhD

How to Contribute 

We welcome your participation. You are welcome to email me at <read.robert@gmail.com>. However, as a public project, it is even better for you to comment publicly. You can do this by opening an "issue" here at GitHub. If you want to add to or improve one of the existing documents, you can do this with a "pull request". 

 In general, each project will have a set of "stories". This is a technique developed by the Agile community. We welcome you to take on the execution of a story if that fits your talents. Writing new stories is also very important activity. 

I hope that we will have need for many talents. I am a computer scientist. I greatly admire artists but don't pretend that I can create art. We will always have a need for artists, writers, and educators. We will also need chemists, welders, mechanical engineers, 3D modellers, software engineers, physicists, biologists, mycologists---we exclude no field of endeavor. 

In summary, you can contribute by:

• Suggesting a new project, 
• Working on a story,
• Offering to improve our art or writing, 
• Offering to lead a project, 
• Teaching us something new, or 
• Even suggesting non-PIFAH proejcts that we should contribute to. 

If you are not familiar with GitHub or git, please email me to give you assistance.

Warning 

Some of the projects proposed here involve dangerous chemicals, powerful forces, fire, explosive gases, and biological hazards.

The important thing is to remain safe  at all times and not to proceed with an experiment until you have proper safety equipment and training. In particular, although we encourage young people to participate in PIFAH, they should not participate without adult supervision.

We will attempt to discuss safety precautions within each project. However, because this is a distributed project and each participant may be creating their own experiments and machines, it will not be possible for us to provide safety guidance in all cases. Please proceed carefully at your own risk.
 
PIFAH Personal Invitation by Robert L. Read is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/PIFAH/PIFAH.

Waterfall Assisted-Acquisition Services, Training, and Education

by Dave Zvenyach and Robert L. Read, PhD

18F Consulting cares about our customers. We want to give you not what you need, but what you want. Developing software is difficult; we understand you want a methodology that provides you with plausible deniability. So, today, we are proud to pre-announce our latest offering: “Waterfall Assisted-Acquisition Services, Training, and Education” (WAASTE).

The federal government has spent literally years perfecting this WAASTE methodology. When it
is released, we promise it will support these features:

• No matter how simple the use case, every component will be highly engineered using the most baroque processes currently available. 
• WAASTE ensures a turnaround time comfortable for government: no faster than 2 years for the first set of deliverables. 
• With WAASTE, project managers have no work to do beyond the initial requirements, ensuring maximum vendor ability to slavishly follow your initial thoughts through to a final product.

18F Consulting is committed to delivering WAASTE to you before our money runs out. In the
mean time, any agency interested in WAASTE should spend two years carefully analyzing
exactly how your software will be Blackberry-enabled 5 years from now. Technology changes
quickly, but the ideas of government are eternal and unchanging. WAASTE guarantees lock-in
of the current understanding of technology through this protracted process.

Through our proprietary WAASTE Requirements™ gathering process we guarantee at least
1500 small, isolated, capricious, and incongruous WAASTE Requirements™ presented to you
electronically in a state-of-the-art XML file. For an additional fee we will conduct focus groups to
provide the exculpatory appearance of respect for user input, but of course their input will not
affect the WAASTE Requirements™. Completely free of charge, we will prioritize all WAASTE
Requirements™ based on our feelings at the time.

In recent years, pernicious new fads such as “Test-Driven Development” (TDD) have emerged,
threatening the very core of the WAASTE methodology. 18F Consulting is reacting by
developing our own alternative test restriction system, called Delay-Oriented Assessment
(DOA). Our methodology prevents duplicate effort by assiduously postponing testing until the
last possible moment. DOA permits testing only by entrusted QA experts, untainted by
knowledge of the project or its users.

To be completely WAASTE-ful, we limit communications to tightly defined narrow channels
through detailed memoranda, a process we call MemOnly (patent pending). In-person
interactions create the possibility that teams will deviate from the WAASTE Requirements™.
For maximum WAASTE, you control all communications. You get to specify your project in
excruciating detail. Eventually, your precise vision will be implemented. If the project is deemed
overbudget, past-deadline, and a total failure by end-users and higher-ups with unrealistic
expectations of working software, you can simply exhibit mountains of paperwork and walk
away.

We realize that others might promote “modern” software development practices such as set
forth in the “Agile Manifesto.” We at 18F Consulting are preparing our own comprehensive
response in a Waterfall PowerPoint Presentation, drawn from the outstanding track record of
success in Federal IT procurement. We expect it will be published any year now.

If you would like to make your next major project WAASTE-ful, please fax us a detailed
memorandum.

(Please note, the WAASTE methodology is proprietary to 18F Consulting, notwithstanding 17
U.S.C. § 105 or 18F’s Open Source Policy)

Happy 1st of April!