The Human Experience Wiki is a subjective Wikipedia—a grassroots AI-enabled project for collecting and connecting authentic human experiences in audio form. The crux is an AI enabled interface that treats experience contributions as queries for related experiences. You speak about an experience you've had, then immediately receive a playlist of Voices from others' about very similar experiences.
The only way to access experiences in the database is to voice your own. This dynamic creates a degree of privacy and incentivizes authenticity.
I've built out this technology as part of Plexus (https://plexus.earth), a public benefit corporation for which I raised 1.2m in venture funding and worked on for two years. I shut down the company when I wanted to grow the platform more slowly than venture capital demanded, but I bought all the IP (including the database of 16000 raw thoughts across just over a thousand contributors), and am interested in spinning it up into a non-profit that prioritizes and honors the diversity of the human experience which the platform holds.
The closest existing tool is Reddit, but Reddit suffers from only 1% of people contributing and 99% of people just lurking and more public/polished content. Because of the give-take dynamic in the Human Experience wiki, the contribution ratio will be much higher.
I want the Human Experience Wiki to be the place anyone can go to find connection around any particular/weird experience—be it a strange breakup, or combination of intellectual interests, transition to a new job, etc.
The first major milestone it to reach 1 million thoughts across 100,000 people.
To reach this milestone, I'll need to:
build a simpler version of the app
hire 2 experience collectors
spend 1 year collecting experiences from New Yorkers, virtually and in person.
the in-person work will be a lot of fun. We'll have a public theme each month: Subways, Cafes, Parks, Museums, etc. For example, during the Subway experiences month, the three of us will spend about half our time approaching strangers in subway stations, asking them to voice strange Subway experiences, and sending them a link to the playlist of Strangers experiences that get generated, so that they can access the experience engine on their own time too. The other half of our time will be spent making a social media presence and getting tweets about the experience engine to go viral.
180,000 to support three of us for one year.
The three of us will primarily be Experience Collectors, collecting experiences from NYC according to our monthly theme, and creating online content/social media stunts to get some viral popularity too.
I'll be developing/simplifying the app.
I have two friends who are geniuses at community building who've committed part time so far, and whom I could pull into full time work with enough funding. Lili Davis specializes in protest movement organizing and progressive childhood education. Micah Corning Myers is a social scientist, acclaimed Reddit community moderator, and community builder. Both are gregarious and perfect for the role of collecting people's experiences.
The project won't occur if we can't raise the funding to support ourselves, but in that case I'll still work on it for a couple hours a week anyway. And I will ultimately raise the money: I raised 1.2m for a venture backed public benefit corporation before I knew what I was doing; I'll be able to raise 200k for non-profit as a second time founder.
Just started to apply for funding now.