Debug the World Blog

A small release of Debug the World is online. It contains mainly bugfixes and some minor added functionalities. Some of the changes are:

• an illustration on the homepage to describe DtW
• list the number of problems and solutions on the homepage
• login and logout go back to the last page
• number of solutions is shown in some locations
• some GUI tweaks

Have fun with the new version!

Supporting Debug the World is easy! You can help the cause by doing some of the following:

• write a blog post
• tell all your friends
• create a link on your website
• write a tweet (e.g. via twitthis)
• like the facebook page
• discuss it on a forum

and last but not least create a new problem or help to solve a problem!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Let's have a look what happened this month with debug the world. Actually quite a lot. The most important thing was certainly the release of the first version of Debug the World. This release is still a very early one (obviously) with many desirable features lacking.

The release lead to a steep increase in traffic on this site as you can see in the following statistics:

The number of unique visitors increased by a factor 6 from august. The big numbers of pages and hits mostly come from a uptime checker I activated and should be ignored.

Currently there are 3 problems and 2 solutions (Ok, I admit, they are all from me but someone has to start). All of them are not yet very fleshed out and many references are missing.

To spread the word I created a Facebook Page and a twitter account.

For the next month I will continue to add problems and solutions as I think this is the only way to get people interested in DtW. If I find time I will try to continue the development of the application.

As you might have noticed, the current problem of Debug the World is to get started. To be a success, a certain amount of people (the critical mass) has to come and visit DtW. As soon as there are enough visitors, people will start to contribute. Before this no "normal" editing will happen.

So I guess the only thing I can do is add problems and constantly nagg all the few people who already know about DtW to contribute. So here it comes:

PLEASE THINK HARD ABOUT PROBLEMS AND ADD THEM TO Debug the World

So Debug the World is up and running. You probably noticed that already. What now? It has to start! And for this it needs YOU, your problems, your creativity, your ideas,...

If you observe or suffer from a problem in your daily life, consider creating a problem. There you can describe the problem with all details. Tell the people visiting why it is a problem, how it affects people, how long it already exists and so forth.

What kind of problems belong on Debug the World you might ask yourself. Good question. I hope the general idea is clear, but as usual the details have to be discussed. I tried to describe some rules in the terms of use. This still needs interpretation.

First notice, that it has to concern a group of people. If you have lost your job, as sad as this is, it does not belong here. If a company closes down and 1000 people lose their job, it would qualify.

The next point tries to limit the subject of the problem. I am not sure if this list is already definitive. The goal is to exclude for example programming or financial problems (that do not have an effect on the mentioned subjects!). The example with the jobs would qualify as it concerns the life and health of the persons who lose their jobs.

To prevent small day to day problem that affect many people but are not really "significant" to clutter Debug the World, trivial problem are not permitted. What I meant by this: How to remove a stain from a towel could pass the other criteria but is trivial. Significant problems could be a dry period in a certain region or the waste of environmental resources.

The last point about the Human Rights is there to define that we do not want stuff like calls for racism, violence, slavery and reduction of privacy. A problem that states "there are too many white people in XY" is in itself racist and leads to solutions that violate the human rights.

I hope this is clear and not too limiting. If you disagree with these rules feel free to post a comment so that we can discuss the issue. As I said in the beginning, go ahead and add problems, it's the only way how we can proceed towards solving them!

If you like to tell your friends that you want to solve the worlds problems, you can do this now with the Debug the World Facebook page. To keep you up-to-date you can now follow dtw twitter.

When time permits I will add the corresponding buttons to the blog. Please help spread the word and create links to debug the world.

A link to the blogcatalog.

I finally succeeded in putting the first release online. Go and have a look under debug the world. For feedback please write a comment on this blog post.

A short status update on my progress: The first release of debug the world is just around the corner. The functionality is all implemented, the two remaining things are intensive testing and some GUI improvements (don't expect too much in this regard). I won't give you any definitive date as some other things have high priority too but I really try to not keep you waiting for too long.

So far you don't know much about Debug the World: I got the impression, that there are many problems on this planet that are not known by enough people. It is obvious that it's not possible to solve a problem of which one knows nothing. Many good ideas or solutions can therefore not be applied to problems. My idea is to offer a platform to make the world aware about a problem and to discuss possible solutions. That's what I'm currently working on.

The application is written using python with the pylons framework. Development is advancing quite well, problems can already be managed, solutions and commenting are still missing. I hope to be able to release a first version within the next few weeks (depending on my workload from other things).

As you might have guessed, this is the first post on the "Debug the World" Blog. Debug the World has no small mission, it tries to solve many of the world's problems. Sounds impossible? Maybe it is, but it's worth a try. Come back later for more information...