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.