PROBLEM / 004WHAT IS WORTH SOLVING?
There is no effective public infrastructure for discovering and developing problems worth solving.
Problems are scattered across organisations, industries and communities, with no shared system for surfacing, researching and progressing them.
WORKING RECORD
- Current direction
- Problem Index
- Observed problem
- Potentially valuable problems remain fragmented across private documents, local conversations and disconnected institutional processes.
- Who experiences it
- Communities and organisations with unresolved needs, as well as researchers, builders and funders looking for consequential work.
- Current solution
- Internal backlogs, reports, grant calls, challenge programs, community forums and personal networks.
- Why it is inadequate
- Problem records are difficult to discover, compare, update and connect to the evidence or applied work that develops around them.
- Economic opportunity
- Establish shared public infrastructure where problems can become durable, discoverable records and attract investigation over time.
- Evidence
- operator observationProblem observations are commonly stored and discussed inside systems that do not preserve a public path from evidence to intervention.
- Open questions
- What minimum structure makes a public problem record useful?
- How should evidence quality and uncertainty be represented?
- How can records remain open to contribution without becoming uncurated lists?
Working observation
A problem index should do more than collect statements. Each record needs enough structure to gather evidence, expose uncertainty and connect the work that follows.
The Problem Index is the current direction for testing public infrastructure in which records can be revised, related, branched and revisited.
UPDATES
Public working record opened from an initial operator observation.