So I've recently been working a lot on one core question: Given that there are so many awesome movements already, how can we strengthen them by interconnecting them? After all, the main "issue" I'm currently seeing is discoverability, i.e. that there are so many projects which continuously replicate what others have done before; projects with very similar messages, but mostly separate communities, infrastructures and identities. It's way too easy to get stuck in certain bubbles.
You can find a broad overview of my endeavors at https://hermesloom.org/overview (many of my ideas revolve around creating digital infrastructure for economic empowerment and democratizing philanthropy), but what's relevant for this post is what I published at https://ultimatecollaboration.org/.
What I want to build is not a new movement, but instead a sort of "meta movement", i.e. one that aggregates details about all other movements, initiatives, grassroots projects etc. in the world and serves the user exactly what they want to see. One of my main ideas is a newsletter aggregator, i.e. a service which receives all the newsletters from all the projects that embody what I called "holistic regenerative transformation" (HRT) on Ultimate Collaboration, then an LLM would turn the contents of each newsletter into structured data, focusing especially on physical events (i.e. extracting the exact place and date for each event). Then each user can set up what they want to receive (e.g. "all events in Berlin around social entrepreneurship" or "all events that are relevant for my studies in X", etc.), of course also expressed in natural language and interpreted through an LLM to do the semantic matching to the event descriptions. Eventually, this should have a big impact to solve the issue of discoverability of many amazing small and large changemaking projects, so that people don't have to dig through endless websites and newsletters anymore, but instead get all the suggestions for events to visit in a highly concise, actionable way.
At https://ultimatecollaboration.org/#proposed-improvements-for-this-page, I already collected ideas for a broader vision of this "Synergypedia", but as mentioned, I think the most effective first step would be crowdsourcing newsletter signups and then developing an LLM-based system which reads out each newsletter and turns its contents into structured data, especially events which the respective organization announces. Additionally, it would probably need to read out websites, but also that should be pretty easy nowadays with tools like Firecrawl.
This entire system should be fully open source, GPL-licensed, self-hostable and of course generally free of charge. The server costs should be minor and I'm continuously building connections to the global philanthropy scene, so that funding should not be an issue. My dream is to build an entire community around this of LLM experts, programmers and the users themselves who continuously make sure that this new service contains as many of the world's HRT-related initiatives as possible, in every language, both global and national, but especially also hyper-local projects.
Now my issue is, and that's why I'm reaching out to you and writing this post: I don't know where to start. In my job I'm a CTO, i.e. the technical director of my startup, so I absolutely love managing large software projects and I do have substantial programming knowledge, but from the very start, I want to create this project together with other enthusiastic people. Also, right now I simply don't have more time than maybe a couple of hours per week, and as I'm not an actual LLM expert myself, I'm not entirely sure how to tackle this challenge of turning messy newsletters into a structured format; though I have the strong gut feeling that nowadays, all the puzzle pieces to realize this already exist, we just need to assemble them.
So I need help with communicating this idea well, including its context (i.e. why this even makes sense), but in a way which makes people engaged and take co-ownership in this themselves instead of being passive/non-participatory and thinking that it would be only "my" project. And in any case, I'd love to work together more with people who also want to use their programming skills for interconnecting the common good and who also see developing modular, interoperable, federated open source software as their calling.
Of course, if you or someone you know wants to take on that idea completely, I'd be honored to give it away! Obviously I don't claim ownership of this project idea; I simply want it to exist, so that we can all use it to get propelled in our developments and to look beyond our usual bubbles.
And if you feel that that might be relevant, feel free to contact me at [email protected]!
Yours in unity
Julian
Some examples would be useful.