Slow hunches coming together

Part of the process of developing good ideas is to surround yourself in a community that will have ideas colliding into one other and thus coming up with something more profound. Steven Johnson writes about that in Where Good Ideas Come From. But where is the best place in today’s society to develop new ideas? Easy – the online community. By working together the evolution of ideas can happen at an even faster pace. Now someone has come up with slowhunch.com that will soon be unveiled as an app and online community targeted at developing good ideas. Take a look at what Johnson has to say:

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there’s an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.

And here is what the developer of Slowhunch.com has to say:

SlowHunch.com will be a free, open database of hunches. A Wikipedia for ideas. It will be an “open environment”; the “fertile soil” where hunches can make new connections.

Johnson himself even seems to suggest this: “…create an open database of hunches, the Web 2.0 version of the traditional suggestion box.”

This will be that database. But what about features? Here’s a short list:

Users should be able to store hunches quickly and easily. Hunches will be searchable and taggable.
The site must be accessible from anywhere – mobile as well as web. It must be available to capture slow hunches at all times (“runs in the background”).
Users will be able to vote on hunches, ideas and suggestions, Reddit-style.
But the differentiating feature of this app is that hunches will connect with each other in surprising and unique ways. This is the key feature – the Web 2.0 juice – behind this app. This is SlowHunch.com’s “raison d’etre”; its reason for existence. Happy accidents and serendipity.

This community should be a lot of fun. It has a tremendous amount of potential to help people connect with each other and see some real innovation through social networking and crowd-sourcing in a way that has a bigger purpose.