This is an old project idea I had, and it basically consists in people sharing expertise, especially in complex situations, in the form of projects that had a whole structure already broken down and all required skills and how to get those skills.
We are not only an individual but also a brand, and the profile should reflect that, it focuses on this two aspects.
As an individual aspect, we want to control objective, measurable, aspects of our life, such as health indicators, wealth indicators, assets and certificates. Most of this, if not all, depreciate over time, but usually as a response to external influences. The goal of the tool is to allow flexible creation of this measurable assets and how they change over time.
- Aspects and Indicators
As a starting asset for exercising the idea, think about a wealth indicator, such as one particular bank account balance, or even your wallet. This indicator depreciates over time because of how money works, so inflation as one example, removes value from the currency, also, established commitments you have will amplify this depreciation (i.e. your utility provider charges you periodically) and sometimes appreciate it (income) and sometimes unexpected events force a withdraw that is an instantaneous depreciation.
Your bank account balance is then part of a more broad and abstract aspect, which is your wealth. But since wealth is not directly measurable, but rather the combination of measurable aspects, the system should be able to provide for such composition of indicators. This is specially important with the Health aspect, being such a complex aspect, looking at individual indicators is probably not useful, and maybe harmful (since you can take wrong decisions). Also, the depreciation will probably have to allow for two types 1) estimate and 2) measured, since you are not plugged to a machine so your indicators can be measured all the time, and even the most advanced dynamic model of human biology is not 100% acurate (and may be too costly to implement).
The feeling one have looking at his Individual Profile is that of a character in The Sims, or looking at a nation indicators in Civilization, with the indicators being listed and the trend being presented (how much appreciation or depreciation that indicator is presenting).
- Calendar
Time is your most valuable asset, every action costs time, so the Calendar is a visualization of one of your Individual Aspects. But since Time is so important it should receive special treatment and is presented in the form of a Calendar as it can be used for planning and management of projects (curiously, time depreciates at a constant rate, at least if your are not in a very strong gravitational field or close to light speed).
- Skills
Once I talk about work this would be more understood, but in simple words, you need to know stuff to do stuff. So, once you fork a project from another person, you need to learn some stuff before doing some of the work that project requires. This can also be seing as and indicator, so my C++ skill is enhanced when I train it and when I use it to do work, I can take objective measures of it by assessing my knowledge (certificates can be used as a quantized approach, or levels) but I can also mostly work on my estimates (working and training appreciates your estimative, not the measured indicator).
- Work
There you go, this is initially your TODO list. It's all activities you got to do to improve your aspects. Your calories are too low, you've got to eat. This is the idea for the future of the tool, initially, is basically a todo list with benefits, and the benefits are 1) activities may change your estimated indicators for good or bad; 2) they are related to each other in a project package; 3) they can list contractors and learning resources;
Also, is important to see the project more like a dual entity, being one the template for new projects, and two the instance of a this template in a specific context. As an example think about a project for a baby room, even though you can use a particular template listing all activities, you want to change it according to your mood and spacial constraints. Part of this comes from forking the project, but the most successful projects would be those that are flexible enough that don't need to be forked.
The inter-subjective you, that which others see in parts and that may differ in oppinion. This is where you share knowledge, this is where you make yourself valuable to the community. So, the same way the individual works on a project, as time moves on, he can create new projects and advertise them on it's brand profile. So, even though I'm Julio, the individual, I'm also Julio, the brand, that which people interact with and may want to follow or not the advices provided through the projects.
- Public Indicators
As a way of promoting myself, I decide what is interesting to be shared publicly, allowing for people to see how successful are the approaches I'm taking.
- Public Activities
Once I shared an indicator, all activities I took that interacted with that indicator are now on my Timeline, so that people can see how I've managed that indicator.
- Project Marketplace
This is in itself broken down in two, the workshop and the marketplace. The first is where the Project is created, breaking it down in activities, establishing the indicators involved in this activities and how they interact, and also time constraints and time relations of such activities. The marketplace is where you share your project with the world, and I believe this has three major requirements 1) the ability to clone and fork a project; 2) the ability to control versions; 3) the ability to relate projects, to link them.
Once projects exist, we now have two interesting networks emerging, one that establishes the relation between people and projects and another that explores the connection between projects themselves.
Since people are consuming or cloning a project to their own profile so that he can take those activities and enhance their indicators, we know have many ways to measure the success of a particular project in achieving its intended goal. It's possible to someone looking for ways to improve its health to find a new Diet strategy (all included, with activities to buy or plant items, to cook them, to store them, best time to eat it, learning material and so on) and then look for all people using such a Diet Project and see their indicators, look at their review of such a Project and once you also clone and participate in it, you now have a stronger connection with those people, but interestingly, not with their individuals, but with their Brand.
It's not acurate to say that projects are hierarchical structures, because that is a simplification of how complex is their arrangement, and the tree aspect of hierarchies forces an activity to be used always in the same context. In truth, what exists is a non-cyclic directed graph of projects, where activities may as well be taken in different contexts and can even be seen themselves as entire projects. This allows Projects to be consisted themselves of other Projects, to be followed and preceeded by other Projects, to be related to others (like an optional successor/predecessor) and even to be a new version of another Project.
Here is where it can shine, since most is already done in some context, we can integrate with such sources and use them. But more than that, it's possible to understand and adapt some concepts of our lives to this system incrementally.
This is one example that I think should be the first. Given integrations with Banks and other wealth management entities, measuring this indicators is achievable and can be done in very short periods, almost in real time. If the integration is a two way communication, and the assets may be moved through it, then it's possible to establish a provisioning system that allocate funds in separate accounts for different purposes, allowing for a better matching of expectations (the estimates) and reality (the measured). As an example, imagine my phone bill where I have a fixed monthly cost, I can move funds to a savings acount every day, and then use that acount to pay for the bill once it's the due date. This is an extreme example (and the costs may not make it worth), but similarities exist when the value is larger, for example, in the US, for the property taxes usually is established a escrow fund that is monthly incremented, but taxes are paid twice an year from this fund. This allows for the fund to safely invest the money (with short term investments) and generate some small profits.
Once the system gets other indicators, the tool becomes increadibly powerful to understand your current financial situation and therefore make informed decisions on how to operate it.
Not only the day by day, but all handyman type of work and all the house enhancement projects. Want a better organization of your stuff to enhance the time it's taking for you to get ready to work? Wants a better diet routine that is complete (i.e includes tools required, time table for buying and so on)?
Also, the house is an asset that promotes someones Wealth, and there are also integrations on this, since Redfin and other services have estimates for the real state market, which can be taken as a measure of the house price indicator.
Yeap, all of them have a good set of measurable indicators that can be used and some are pretty easy to get (weight, BMI, different measures of chest, legs, arms circunferences). Also, projects are usually generic enough that don't require much flexibility.
I thought about the DAT protocol for this, which is a peer to peer distribution protocol. The interesting part is that it allows for people to seed this files and share them as it was with BitTorrent. So, if I can have access to the index, or some sort of DNS for DAT, it's possible that people would seed their Projects and when I clone (or maybe even get interested in) one, I start seeding it too. This allows for low footprint on servers about storing projects.
The idea is to have very little server side on this, minimizing therefore any heavy cost in keeping such a system. DAT is one way of achieving so, IPFS is another. Finally, PWAs (https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/) also allow for having an initial source (the web) but the possibility to strongly operate offline locally (the progressive aspect of a PWA).
The individual page is not heavily connected, as the purpose is for you to understand yourself. It's possible that indicators have offline ways of estimating depreciation and appreciation, reducing the need for bandwidth (and even being online). The Projects may be designed to not require a heavy server side aspect, they can operate on the DAT, IPFS protocols, for distribution and individual usage, but may need a synchronization mechanism that is mediated by a server (e.g. if an activity of my project is to be done by someone else in the system, once that person finishes it, I need to know it), but even this could be designed to operate on a blockchain approach, as the state is recorded as a transaction in the blockchain (examples in Ethereum Smart Contracts). The Brand page seems to be the one that mostly requires a centralized server, making easier to sync status with individuals and have a single consistent view of the indicators and timelines.