Open Ideas — the difficult second album

Tom C W
2 min readJul 18, 2024

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About 18 months ago (how!?) i ran an experiment when I asked people to post their ideas openly and then I gave one of them £500 to do something with their idea. No strings, no report, no follow up. You can read about it here https://tomcampbellwatson.medium.com/open-ideas-97b93729b341

It was a fun experiment, but I thought there was more, and wanted to put together a resource for sharing ideas. I wrote about what I would do pretty quickly after https://tomcampbellwatson.medium.com/open-ideas-what-next-44cd4d4c105e

And then I promptly parked it and never got back to it, because life.

But it was always there in the back of my mind.

Then I clocked this from Friends of the Earth where they offered up ideas that they just couldn’t take forward, and asked you to steal them, to make them real. And i shared it, and people loved it.

And so, inspired by that I decided to spend a day or so finally building version 2 of Open Ideas

https://www.openideas.uk/

Open Ideas is a free resource that aims to share ideas openly for social good. By sharing ideas openly, I hope to build a community of thinkers and doers who can collaborate and support each other.

Anyone can contribute an idea. You can add as much or as little detail as you like. It can be an idea you have tested, or just something you dreampt up on a walk or a run.

The goal is to encourage the sharing of ideas and collaboration. So you can choose if you’d like to be contacted by others via the site. Your email will be stored securely and only used for users to contact you. You can then choose whether to pursue that contact.

I believe that by working together, we can achieve more than we ever could alone.

And yes, I’ve now got ideas for on ‘Open Ideas Fund’ — if you want to know what that is, well, you can see it listed as an idea on Open Ideas.

I’d love to have more people share ideas on there, because everyone owns the great ideas. Let them free, and maybe they turn into reality.

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Tom C W

Do Good, Be Awesome. Thoughts on startups, social change, awesome things, and possibly running.