IdeaTorrent – a great idea.
Recently a co-worker, who just returned to our company from a brief stint at SourceForge, turned me on to a opensource project called IdeaTorrent which I have started to really like. The idea is basically a submission and voting engine for people to submit ideas and then allow them to collaboratively up/down-voted and commented on. Eventually this process would help drive the pipeline for R&D or Product and, hopefully, turn into a real feature or product.
As I started implementing the product I realized that it also helped satisfy another requirement that we had been having in our existing R&D process – documentable proofs of intellectual property. Dealing in the industry that we are currently in, music, there is a lot of fierce competition over product development and intellectual property. In addition we signed up with a fairly large electronics manufacture to build a joint product next year and there are significant hurdles when it comes to joint IP and ownership of ideas once the product takes off.
Things happen, partnerships dissolve, and in the end you only have your records to prove that it was your idea far before the partner says they came up with it. IdeaTorrent is a great way to start documenting those ideas in a loose way before going on to other tangible assets like notebooks, emails and printed documents. In fact, with IdeaTorrent it is entirely possible that it can help start the documentation process far sooner than a hallway conversation – some of those take weeks to actually make their way into a forum where IP law starts to take hold.
While the system itself needs some work to get into an easily installable solution (it requires some pretty strict standards – drupal and postgresql only) - I think that eventually it will be a defacto tool for thinking organizations.
