ideablog

Friday, June 30, 2006

omidyar.net

omidyar.net


I'm looking for websites that have significant communities of thinkers, where esoteric and complicated subjects are discussed in layperson's terms, or at least with the goal of increasing common understanding of difficult topics.

Omidyar.net came up when I searched for the term "good question". I believe that a resource that centred around answering "good questions" would be very valuable. Already there are several quality sites for getting answers to common questions people have, e.g. Answers.com, Ask.com etc. A resource I'd like to find is one where very smart people in a variety of disciplines are connected around discussing questions that are truly difficult to answer.

Wikipedia does a good job of documenting major concepts and related controversies, but does not provide much forum for the inevitable arguments that arise. It is not a space intended to air speculative thinking. A site that allowed both space for speculative pieces as well as a wiki-based documentation space might be valuable.

There seems to be a lot of activity around "good questions", with a lot of interest in edge.org's World Question Centre. Some excellent questions have been posed and answered here, with many great thinkers providing fascinating responses.

A website that encouraged regular people to submit responses, with opportunity for responses and feedback might be interesting. This kind of content exists everywhere, split across millions of sites and communities, where people pose their questions to their select group. As a result, many good questions and answers are buried in search results.

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