What other information would help you consider this proposal? This is a work in progress and will be revised unexpectedly and often.
Our lives are emmersed in all kinds of invisible hierarchies. New ones are constantly being added.
Do you understand how your data moves around the internet? Who has access to it? What pathway did your email address or your phone number traverse to create each incoming packet of junk or robo call?
What groups are you in and what is happening? Who agrees with you? How did they find you? Who is in your group and who do they know who might want to meet you?
Lots of invisible activity affects our everyday life. And yet, almost all of us only see the merest tip. Our appreciation, awarenesss and ability to manage these invisible forces is nearly zero. The tools that exist for viewing hierarchies are crude, barely developed and challenging to deploy. This failure is immense.
I propose to develop a strongly featured and easy to use toolkit for making these invisible hierarchies visible. For this I am seeking a sponsoring fund of $10K to learn two languages and build a minimum viable product as proof of concept. After that I wish to seek funding for the toolkit's full development.
A Mac OS X app called Seriously already exists as a fully functional proof of this concept. I propose to rewrite it for the web and begin to deploy it here in the Meta Project, within catalist and elsewhere.