It’s said that no one person knows how to make a pencil–it takes miners and lumberjacks and engineers and machinists and refiners and woodworkers and…well, the list goes on. No one person can outperform a great team, and a great team can add up to more than the sum of its parts, and that’s why people across all kinds of disciplines seek to try out ideas with each other. Hackathons, jams, collaborations, and all sorts of other team-based creative activities are examples of this desire.
But it turns out finding people to collaborate with isn’t so easy. From working with Hawaii’s artistic, tech, and academic communities, I’ve discovered that creators are focused on creating, and are fairly isolated inside and out of their communities, despite having cool ideas that they all would want to work together on.
Guitarists need drummers, web programmers need graphic designers, filmmakers need actors…everyone needs someone they can push their limits with. I want to see if we can use technology to bring like-minded people from different communities together, starting at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The Problem: Cross-disciplinary programs at the UH Manoa are few and far between, leading to isolation between the student bodies of the various departments and colleges. There is also no easy way to bring those disparate communities together, despite their complementing skills. This reduces the opportunity for the kind of serendipity that leads to fun, mutually-enriching collaborations, which could even blossom into new careers or startups.
The Solution: Alloy (the team-builder application) is a social network oriented that connects people to projects based on the “skill graph,” allowing like-minded people with complementing skills to find each other and work on projects together.
Key Features:
Other/Basic Features:
Why Will This Work?
Clay Shirky wrote the book “Cognitive Surplus” in 2010, where he tried to explain the phenomenon of massive user participation and effort into creating content for sites like IcanHazCheezburger. In essence, people in modern society have a lot of spare time and easy access to the tools to create things. Even as adults, many in creative/technical communities seek out opportunities like hackathons and other kinds of jams in order to test crazy ideas that a client would never pay for without proof of concept. My personal experience is that there is a lot of pent up energy that gets released when the right connection is made with the right people and the right idea.
We are planning on working with the sPACE, iLAB (both designed to enable multi-disciplinary projects), and various clubs at UH Manoa in order to get feedback on features they would like and to get support with enrolling students to the application.
Take a look at Clay Shirky’s TED talk on Cognitive Surplus:
Mockup Page Ideas:
Use Case Ideas:
Beyond the Basics: