we need a mission statement

[oresmus]

Actually we might need more than one -- for OPSN itself, for hypothetical products related to it, and for this repo.

But I'll start with this repo's mission, which is something like:

Create a free, open-source working prototype of OPSN. The goals include:

• create it as soon as possible, consistent with it being simple, clear, good code
• get people to use it (which means it has to do something useful to them and be easy to use); for more discussion of this see issue #4
• make sure that using it (not only reading its code) effectively communicates the basic ideas of OPSN (as described in those blog posts linked from the README).

I think this means that the implementation needs certain features... but I'll discuss those in a separate issue.

Anyway, that is our mission as I see it (except I've probably forgotten certain points which I also think are important). The shortest way to express it might be something like "demonstrate OPSN". A more ambitious one might be "get everyone to contribute to the graph of all ideas" (understood as an OPSN graph). There are other possibilities in old emails I'll add here at some point.

Feel free to discuss various kinds and levels of missions here. If necessary we'll create separate issues (for discussing good statements about different missions, since we do have more than one).

[jmichelz]

I'm more interested in the bigger picture mission statement.

Here's some from your blog: http://oresmus.github.io/blog/2015/09/21/social-net-for-ideas.html "Allow you to see into the global brain" "Allow you to see into the mind of a whole group or its most interesting participants" "Bring the benefits of small-group discussion to any scale."

Here's another from the "profound effects" section: "One overall effect is that the amount of information coming from each person is vastly more than one person could transmit by speech or their own writing". That reminds me of Elon Musk's talk about human input/output limitations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrGPuUQsDjo

Google's mission statement is actually applicable here: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I don't see how Google is actually organizing information, but this project is aiming to.