Item — HN Reader

Why try to guess what many people would want? Let them tell you more directly via a service for collaborative startup specification. Unlike implementation, specification -- at least at an informal level -- can be done by pretty well anyone. Of course, you will need to provide some way to end up with a coherent spec from all those user contributions. But if something like wikipedia can produce stellar results, then why not this?

And when you start working on something, why not keep all those people up to date with your progress? They would probably be very eager to see what you are doing with their spec contributions. And they may evolve the spec over time, again, in a collaborative way.

When your startup is ready to launch, you will then have all those people ready to try it out and tell their friends.

1 comments

Wikipedia isn't the right mechanism. It's fine when you're collaborating on documenting something that's completely objective, but as soon as you get into something controversial it descends into chaos. There's good reason that some of the highest-quality articles on Wikipedia tend to be the ones about math.

Darcs/git might be a better model for this sort of thing: everybody gets their own working copy and can merge changes made to other copies into their own.

Maybe you can use something like reddit for this purpose.

I suppose the sincerest form of voting would be merging others' ideas into your working copy. The system could track that and maintain a leaderboard of most-assimilated specs.

I see two challenges in this idea:

- to make a darcs-like tool intuitive to non tech types (lest you filter them out), and

- to represent such specs so the system can track them while keeping them palatable for humans.