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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

Because ideas are free, here is one: as Bezos, I would like to know what things I could do to improve the world, both with my time or with my money; I would like some kind of social platform where I could learn about issues, propose solutions, and make them happen. In other words, a massive issue-tracker for the outside world.

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"People are starving in Somalia"

"I think there's already a JIRA for that one."

Oh I hope that with some good moderation it could get much better than that...

"People are starving in Somalia" is as useful as "people around the world are suffering", or (like in many software projects): "this program is too slow".

But if you can narrow the scope, like, "There is a neighborhood in Baidoa, Somalia, that have no access to fresh water since the beginning of June because a pump is broken" then we could think of possible ways to solve that. And if you also include information about organizations in that area that could help, then we are much closer to a real solution.

Kiva is kind of like that!

Edit: not Python

What is Kivy? the only reference I found is about some python framework

I think you mean Kiva?

Yes my bad.

"People are starving in Somalia" is actually relatively fixable. "Somalia was one of four regions singled out by the UN secretary-general in February for a £3.6 billion aid appeal"[0]. Just cut £3.6bn from the world's trillion dollar military budgets. Maybe a general principle could be made that no money is to go for bombs until people have food.

[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/somalia-dead-...

The Effective Altruism community is a group of a few thousand people that have been attempting to do this for the last few years. Organizations like GiveWell.org (giving money) or 80000hours.org (giving time) have proved immensely helpful in my career and donation life choices.

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