No Platforms!

When thinking about what I would like to work on to speed up our good-for-climate-technology I often came to the idea of some sort of platform. What if all of us who were interested in climate mitigation and adaption were in one place? What if a site showed all the funded competitions and calls for ideas from big organisations? What if we could easily find others and the all the projects anyone anywhere is working on? What if all the problems these projects were facing were openly communicated so that people from different fields could contribute breakthrough ideas?

At first this seems a good idea, but with a bit more thought it looks like a bad one.

For one it’s quite obvious but no enormous, all encompasing climate network yet exists. That probably means people have tried but been unsuccessful. Some platform like products do exist: Ovio, Omdena, SustainableFriends (seems inactive). I don’t want to knock these, I think its good someone is trying to build them and good if people contribute to them and use them to find projects. But they don’t seem to take off and I don’t believe its because of poor execution.

Another question is what’s the benefit of having this on one platform? Google does a good job of helping us find what we’re searching for, the existing platforms do a good job of letting us follow what interests us and being updated, non-climate specific platforms like the Pioneer tournament are helping find and motivate ambitious people with big ideas.

What would a single platform for all things climate add to that? It wouldn’t beat them at what they do best and it wouldn’t be able to provide those uncontrollable events that all come together to create breakthroughs.

Another attaction to the platform for X idea is that it is easy. I see platforms, I use them and I can imagine being able to build one. It’s also less scary for someone like me aiming to fix climate change because I don’t actually need to fix anything. I just build a network of clever people and they’ll solve the millions of issues that humanity needs to deal with. Yet, ease doesn’t seem a particularly good reason to do something nor a strong indication that the product will be a great one.

So for anyone like me looking for work they can do to accelerate our progress to a better future, I think you should probably skip the platform for X idea and go for something bigger.