This site is intended to support the collaborative development of, and so demonstrate the potential for, a form of deliberative infrastructure. A form that would enable citizens to take better care of themselves, each other and the future. It is a pathfinder project and itself a form of social enterprise.

At this stage, I have not thought about money, I am asking for potential friends of the project to read the ‘vision and intent’ document and contribute their thoughts. If you think it is a good idea, or if you have the capacity to help, I am asking you to contact me (use the orange button in the header).

My dream would be to launch an app on the web and (after testing) to have a growing number of contributors (a bit like Wikipedia). Operating a large online database application undoubtedly requires either money or a lot of charitable help from one or more organisations.

In my view deliberative forums that support social learning and perspective taking are a universal requirement. Global, National and Local governments have a ‘duty of care’ extending to provision for good social decision making. Large commercial social media operators have a similar duty – to avoid degrading individual and social health and well being through the interactions they profit from.

If enough people came forward with organisational, emotional and financial support for a charity or non profit to promote the ideas underlying ‘Value Prospecting’…then I would love to help write a constitution and help set one up, especially if it was closely coupled to a project like this one.

On a smaller scale if you really want to use ‘Buy-Me-A-Coffee’ or ‘Go-Fund-Me’ to speed up the work, then let me know and I will find an appropriate way to channel the money and account for it transparently/properly. I’m ‘retired’ so my time is free, but there will be good people with the knowledge and experience to help the project that can’t afford to do the work for nothing.

It is not what I intended but if you would like to give the project/idea a boost and you have money but no time, let me know. We can think it through.

A software development team can be quite small, and not everyone has the relevant skills. But there is plenty of other work, ultimately a never ending stream of new Prospects to evaluate for human value impacts…

I would really like help building and registering (as examples on paper and then in the app)…a diverse portfolio of Prospects and their Value impacts that is compelling and humane. Ultimately the main activity within the application will be to curate the public’s value stories, prospect descriptions an impact assessments.

The process and the (societal) Value choices currently available to characterise each prospect are not mature. Not enough people have contributed for them to be diverse, inclusive and representative. I would normally expect to workshop this form of activity (I think this is essential). Even to provide a workshop with a starting point I need examples of value and prospect stories…

So, if you can provide an example of a beneficial initiative (a ‘Prospect’) that you care about or understand deeply, and, If you can express that benefit/justification in terms of societal forms of human values…Please send me an outline, or a fully developed description. I will record these on this website as inputs into the design.

If you would be prepared to assess the impacts of other people’s Prospects within a certain scope (as a subject expert) then please drop me an outline.

Some of the issues and concerns that could be worth documenting could be quite mundane. The most striking examples are cases where business is not getting the human value balance right.

In the UK there are a number of BBC (public broadcasting) radio programs and podcasts that could be mined for Prospects relating to ethics and human value. e.g. ‘Any Questions’ for current political choices, ‘Sliced Bread’ for material product choices, ‘AntiSocial’ for examining culture war tropes in a style that allows us to ‘disagree-agreeably’.

A Pan-Cultural Baseline of Value Priorities. Individuals differ substantially in the importance they attribute to the ten values. Across societies, however, there is surprising consensus regarding the hierarchical order of the values. Across representative samples, using different instruments, the importance ranks for the ten values are quite similar. Benevolence, universalism, and self-direction values are most important. Power and stimulation values are least important…