There is plenty in the world that needs fixing. But as is the case with startups - if you try work on everything nothing works.

Focused* effort brings about the greatest likelihood of success.

*I realize I'm being a bit hypocritical as I'm proposing working on fixing oceans (which will have plenty of added benefits wrt climate change etc.) as a side project to bring about change; in addition to my full time freelance dev work.

I agree. But we could use a good summary of what are the most important problems, subdivided into areas that need work / improvement and some estimate of their impact potential, so that people who want to focus on a single thing can choose high-impact things.

I think the Global Priorities Project [1] has that covered - at least to first order.

"Definition: Global Catastrophic Risk – risk of events or processes that would lead to the deaths of approximately a tenth of the world’s population, or have a comparable impact."

[1]: http://globalprioritiesproject.org/

I'm slightly smiling. Aren't we reinventing politics ?

Are we? I don't see the similarity yet.

What I had in mind was an information source for individual decision-making (what to work on to best tackle problem X, how things are going), whereas politics is more about deciding as a group what problems are worth solving and then ordering resources to be directed into them.

Maybe I used the wrong word, "government" ?

I mean, joining forces to fix or improve the place we live in is the root of ideal politics/government.

Maybe, yes, but "politics"/"government" in this aspect is already a recusrive phenomenon - people self-organize on national scale, city scale, block-of-flats scale, etc.

Still, I don't think we need to try and make another body that would tell people what to do. Instead, I'm thinking of helping people who want to help by telling them where that help would have biggest impact, and as a secondary effect, creating a high-level overview of the scope of important issues[0]. Less of a government, more of an information service, I guess.

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[0] - even just reading and responding in this thread, I learned about areas that I never realized impact ocean acidification.

Pretty nice. A catalyst in a way.

Fair point nonetheless, being organized is one of the most important factor.