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@jacobcole / IdeaFlow Vision / wiki/resource-matching-for-grand-challenges.md
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--- date: 2026-05-08 related: - wiki/north-star-thesis.md - wiki/system-map.md - wiki/layers/collective-cognition.md - https://worldissuetracker.com/progress-bars - https://worldissuetracker.com/tracker/scientific-grand-challenges - https://worldissuetracker.com/tracker/world-issues - https://worldissuetracker.com/issue/6bc61081-b564-4219-8065-51bc48d51626 - https://worldissuetracker.com/issue/96db73e5-b1da-4e54-b1f7-e5f6cc57b572 title: Resource Matching for Grand Challenges type: vision-note visibility: public --- # Resource Matching for Grand Challenges IdeaFlow is building a system that can match the resources the world is already generating to the grand challenges the world actually needs solved. Those resources are not only money or institutions. They include notes in people's notebooks, half-formed ideas, observations, scientific anomalies, private goals, public issues, social graphs, project histories, meeting notes, hackathon ideas, and the tacit knowledge sitting inside people's personal and team workflows. Most of this material never reaches the problems where it could matter. It remains trapped in notebooks, chats, PDFs, lab logs, personal task lists, and project-specific tools. The vision is to make those latent resources composable. ## Core Model The system has two complementary directions. First, top-down grand challenges: structured representations of the large problems humanity is trying to solve. These can include scientific grand challenges, country and civic problems, institutional goals, existential risks, health problems, education problems, and the more explicit Hierarchical Utopia Issue Tracker frame: a hierarchy of goals, needs, problems, blockers, strategies, and open loops. Second, bottom-up observations: the small pieces of reality people notice. A lab result, a surprising pattern, a field observation, a product idea, a policy failure, a note from a conversation, a hackathon idea, a personal goal, a user complaint, a local civic issue, a quote from a paper, or a private intuition. The work is to connect these layers: - observations to hypotheses - hypotheses to issues - issues to grand challenges - grand challenges to people, projects, funding, institutions, and next actions This is scientific propagation in product form. New observations should not just be stored. They should find the challenges they may help solve. ## Why This Belongs In The IdeaFlow Vision This is the collective-cognition version of the same IdeaFlow thesis: - At the personal layer, capture should be frictionless enough that thoughts and observations are not lost. - At the team layer, observations become shared context, tasks, roadmaps, and decisions. - At the humanity layer, those observations can feed public issue trackers, scientific challenge maps, Idea Hunt, WikiHub pages, and progress dashboards. World Issue Tracker is one civic/scientific surface for this. WikiHub is the durable knowledge surface. Idea Hunt and Idea Bank are the idea-discovery surfaces. ListHub-like lists can be the provenance-heavy observation surface. SuperConnector and Noos can connect the right people and private goals. The point is not that every surface becomes one app immediately. The point is that they share a substrate and can route useful signals to each other. ## Hierarchical Utopia Issue Tracker The Hierarchical Utopia frame should be treated as the explicit "goal tree" layer: - What does a better world require? - Which needs or goals sit above which subgoals? - Which problems block which goals? - Which scientific grand challenges unlock many downstream goals? - Which observations, ideas, and people might help unblock them? Scientific Grand Challenges should plug into this hierarchy rather than remain a separate list. A grand challenge like "understand consciousness", "cure aging", "make clean energy abundant", or "solve safe coordination at scale" should be represented as a high-level challenge with linked subproblems, observations, hypotheses, projects, funding needs, and related people. The bottom-up side is equally important. A list of scientific observations should not be treated as low-status raw material. It is the sensing layer of the system. Many important discoveries begin as anomalies or notes that did not yet know which grand challenge they belonged to. ## Product Implications World Issue Tracker should support featured scientific grand challenge trackers, including the existing Scientific Grand Challenges tracker: - https://worldissuetracker.com/tracker/scientific-grand-challenges It should also connect those challenges to World Progress Bars, which already exists as a WIT surface: - https://worldissuetracker.com/progress-bars Progress Bars is the measurement layer. Grand challenge trackers describe the problems and blockers; observation lists provide bottom-up evidence; Idea Hunt/Idea Bank propose candidate solutions; World Progress Bars asks what a better world is trying to become and whether reality is moving in that direction. A mature system should let a grand challenge point to progress bars, sub-bars, indicators, baselines, target states, and historical trajectories. It should also support or integrate with a bottom-up observation list surface in the spirit of ListHub. Those observations should have provenance, citations, confidence, novelty, source context, and links to the challenges or hypotheses they may affect. The system should eventually let agents ask: - Which observations might matter for this grand challenge? - Which grand challenges might this observation affect? - Which people have captured related notes, goals, or ideas? - Which projects, issues, or funding paths could move the challenge forward? - Which ideas in Idea Bank or Idea Hunt are actually subsolutions to a larger goal? ## Current WIT Links This note should stay connected to the WIT tickets created from the same thread: - Feature scientific grand challenge trackers and bottom-up observation lists: https://worldissuetracker.com/issue/6bc61081-b564-4219-8065-51bc48d51626 (`world-issue-tracker-0h5x`) - First-class related tracker links and tracker groups: https://worldissuetracker.com/issue/96db73e5-b1da-4e54-b1f7-e5f6cc57b572 (`world-issue-tracker-o9uj`) - Flesh out World Progress Bars as the measurement layer for grand challenges: `world-issue-tracker-mvjg` - Idea Hunt page and ideas surface: `world-issue-tracker-1m1` - Design tracker taxonomy and grouping model: `world-issue-tracker-aae` - Audit VisionCharter and WikiHub vision pages for WIT integration: `world-issue-tracker-2sb5` - Import hackathon ideas into Idea Bank without polluting Idea Hunt: `world-issue-tracker-6go0` - SuperConnector profile integration for WIT ideas and private goals: `world-issue-tracker-oqyv` ## Open Design Question The product should not prematurely decide whether this is one app or many. The better framing is one substrate with several high-fit surfaces: - World Issue Tracker for public problems, blockers, and dependencies - World Progress Bars for goal state, indicators, and measurable trajectories - WikiHub for durable knowledge pages - Idea Hunt and Idea Bank for ideas and candidate solutions - ListHub-like lists for observations and sourced claims - SuperConnector for people, goals, and matching - Noos/Cortex/Notestream for capture and routing from everyday work The grand-challenge layer is where these surfaces become more than tools. It is where captured human context gets matched to the goals that can use it.