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…us actually talk to that omnipresent ‘they’ in our daily conversations? ‘They’ as in, ‘they ought to do something about that building before the roof falls in’; or ‘they really should make it easier to see where our tax money is going’; or even ‘they are driving me crazy with this phone system!’.

Sometimes it can: find a commentable online profile of a company and post a complaint or suggestion, and odds are that sooner or later someone high up at that company is going to read it.

What if, though, you don’t know yet who the ‘they’ are? What if you know something about a specialized subject area and can see clear needs that not everyone knows about, but its not clear who or how those needs will be met?

Needs are also opportunities.

A need for a nurse at a hospital for a better way to manage patient information, is an opportunity for an IT firm somewhere. That nurse has no resources to pay the IT firm, and even the hospital may not have the resources to sponsor custom software development for the exact needs they have. However: if some long-term thinking VC’s (Venture Capitalists) and eager young programmers understood the need clearly and precisely, maybe they would create out of the box software that would solve the problem nicely and cost effectively.

Even if the need doesn’t have a clear cash flow opportunity – say the need to deliver more books to developing countries – sometimes there may be a nonprofit with a mission that could align itself with that need, or a philanthropist looking for a genuine cause to donate some dollars to.

The purpose of this section is to document concrete needs identified by people in different fields. Speculative ideas are ok too. Its a little like http://shouldexist.org, in which people submit ideas of things that ’should exist’ in the world. Maybe a lot the same. But one difference is, that some postings here may be produced by interviews with people who might not otherwise post to a blog like this.

In the spirit of the blogosphere, not all posts will be made directly to this blog. Some will be made to more subject specific sites and just linked to from here. If you write something along these lines for another site, feel free to post a link here.

Coming soon: Clearinghouse for recycled building materials aimed at contractors and architects ; ‘Books Please!’ on the need for more books, regular physical books, into the hands of more people in more languages ; A Micropayment Implementation ; IT and Recycling ; IT and the Grid ; Credit Ratings for Contractors ; and lessons learned from ShouldExist.org

Posted some thoughts on my personal blog at

http://goldavelez.com/blog/2009/10/30/the-ultimate-organizer-will-it-be-a-web-app/

about the ideal organizer (smart, quick, easy, fast, private, snappy…). As someone much smarter said a long time ago, using your computer should feel like playing the violin – assuming, that is, that you know how to play the violin. But it should come to feel natural, like an extension of the body and mind. For humans, this means millisecond level feedback.

WordPress is not a bad CMS.  Fairly simple, well documented, has the requisite features like version control, trackback, authentication, and a nice set of user contributed themes and plugins.  Its pretty damn good.

But.  The basic CMS assumption that ‘the content originates here’ is flawed.  In today’s world, sometimes there may be another authoritative source of the content I wish to aggregate on my blog.  Even if I wrote it, for some reason I may have wanted to write it first on blogspot, or facebook, or linkedin, or some other site – but still have it appear on my central blog site.  What would be even better would be the ability to edit it on my primary site and have the edits propagate back to the other locations, if permitted.

WordPress, Drupal, other leading CMS’s do have the ability to pull in feeds and insert content from other sources, but they manage those feeds differently from ‘normal’ posts, as if they were an afterthought or add-on.

I’d like to see a CMS that has a single central content management system, which has additional fields for each bit of content:

- original/authoritative source
- rules/actions for edits
- rules/actions for updates from external sources

This would make it easier to manage content from multiple sources and in one place manage the rules for propagating that content.  An API should be exposed to request updates to the content, which other similar CMS’s could tap into.

While I’m at it, this ideal CMS would store a copy of all content in flat text files.  This would make searching faster and easier (not having to spider and then extract the essential content) and would allow use of all the existing text file tools!  (Like, Perl scripts   The name and path of the text file would indicate which bit of content it corresponds to, and the rules could be set to allow direct text file edits, or not.  Direct edits could be propagated back into the system.  This would make it much easier to bulk edit large amounts of content, not for theming, but for content accuracy, as is sometimes necessary.

Perhaps this could all be accomplished with some sort of WordPress-CodeIgniter hybrid?  Would be a shame to start something from scratch and lose all the cool themes people have made.  Well – will have to wait til another day.

Modernizing the site and porting to WordPress, stay tuned for updates. If you just want to contact Golda Velez use the form at http://webglimpse.net/contact.php