Feels like a million dollar idea

A couple different thought threads intersect.

I had a slightly stressful morning conversation with the civil engineer on our home addition project. He is doing a great job facilitating things like the contractor/plumber relation and he has been of immense help, knowing everyone and moving the project along. I could not get the project done without him.

Separately, I have been doing this woodsholecalendar.com and trying to get some nice young people to throw some energy into helping me expand - with better music content; better source-to-aggregate automation tools; and, who knows?

So I am walking into town, thinking about adding resources like: free-form written content or classifieds, or whatever makes a newspaper useful. But online. What kind of resources would be valuable to a community? I am remembering a most recent text message from one of these younger guys, saying he was interested in "ways people can come together and form community". So I thought: rather than pitching online newspaper ideas to the guy [who I am trying to get interested in helping me] why not reflect his idea back at him. And I message back: "Like what? Besides what Facebook does...."

Around this time, thoughts of my morning conversation with the civil engineer intrude and I start to wonder: how could you create a community resource [sub-part of the calendar] that would help people like me and my civil engineer get a project going, scheduled, and completed? And in a way that encouraged community values? In a broader context I have been exposed to the philosophical discussions of building large homes and why they should or should not be allowed in different places. Right now, Woods Hole is listed (perhaps a bit inaccurately) as one of the top ten mostly costly home locations in America. Oversized houses are a problem here and in places like Concord and Chilmark on the Vineyard [We saw a great documentary from there called "One big house"]. The interesting thing is that the dynamic driving houses to be larger is not only coming from people seeking status. It is coming from feature creep in the design and construction of the home. It is a natural dynamic when homeowners are uncertain and the designers have a conflict of interest: they desire to please and they desire to make profit.

The 'community value' precept comes both from the discussion with my young colleague and from the discussion of oversized houses. They converge on the idea of doing something

To facilitate the interaction of builders and homeowners during the project while serving community values*

Think about doing that online and add a spark: non participants watching the progress of the project, like a reality TV show. These viewers could add a lot of value back into the project.

So the sub-webpage could be called "My Home Project". You go there as a homeowner and start a project. Then builders etc go there to find work, or to track it. What is publicly viewable is a negotiation between homeowners and potential builders. Hopefully this social medium becomes a useful networking tool for the project. I am not sure what is the incentive of a builder, other than the homeowner calling the shots and trying to manage things though this website. SOUNDS TOO AMBITIOUS SO: is there a minimal version of this sort of thing that is doable?

* Beauty, energy efficiency, neighborhood character, feature integration (rather than sprawl), use of local resources