We are pleased to announce that we’ve released our latest pet project, called IdeaSource.
It’s a very basic MVP (stressing the minimum part) of a cross-platform app to enable crowdsourcing of ideas, that we used internally as a sandbox to research React Native development front to back.
Why IdeaSource?
Coming up with good ideas can be hard, especially after a while when echo chambers tend to appear in teams, groupthink takes over and creative solutions are left out of the conversation.
We wished to introduce an easy way to share and manage ideas generated by a larger pool of people than those directly tasked with coming up with a solution, providing mechanisms for everyone to vote to sort the proposed ideas.
It’s about opening the discussion an enabling everyone to participate in a creative process, both in the generation of ideas, and in their sifting/sorting by means of likes.
How does it work?
Ideas are gathered around challenges, which can be problems, aspects or topics a group or organization may need to fix or improve. A challenge can be anything ranging from the next feature/product to invest in, to what could be the new perk in the office, to creative ways to address pollution in a municipality.
In order to create a challenge you must enter a description, upload an image and set a deadline. Challenges can be either private or public. Private challenges are only available to users registered using the same corporate email domain, while open challenges are open for every user in IdeaSource. We may review this in the future, but for v1 this is the way it works.
Once a challenge is submitted, everyone can start contributing ideas, and votes for ideas already shared.
Main features
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- Challenge creation and management: Create open or closed challenges scoped only to users that share your email domain.
- Challenge creation and management: Create open or closed challenges scoped only to users that share your email domain.
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- Idea sharing: Propose ideas for the challenge you feel closer to.
- Idea sharing: Propose ideas for the challenge you feel closer to.
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- Reacting to ideas: Navigate and react to ideas with ease.
- Reacting to ideas: Navigate and react to ideas with ease.
- Everything organized in your own profile: Check out the ideas you have created or liked, and the challenges you shared within your personal account.
Where can I get it?
The app can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play Store, as well as it can be tried from the web browser.
Regarding the code base, IdeaSource is meant to be an open source project for open innovation in organizations, so that it can be forked and modified, and for custom versions to deployed. In the following weeks we’ll be sharing the GitHub code repo. In the meantime, we would love you to try it and provide feedback!