Engineering. What do we associate it with today? With big corporations, bureaucracy, lack of accessibility? We do not have to keep this as the status quo. Imagine a platform for engineers addressing these problems; a platform for a kid who does not have access to resources yet is immensely motivated to create, improve his community; a platform for an engineer working on a well-known concept yet having to “reinvent the wheel” due to the non-disclosure nature of today’s world.
Our proposal is an educational social network platform based on the idea of global collaboration on projects through open communication between engineers in the field as well as aspiring engineers. This circumvents the issue of engineers having to reconsider their approaches to meeting social and environmental goals on a project-by-project basis with varying efficacy, and instead drives the creation of a community that tackles these issues together. The platform will host companies with existing solutions and a vested interest in educating future generations, thus allowing the inheritance of knowledge in one direction and a flow of relevant, future-focused ideas in the other. Creating a strong community of engineers would create a whole new level of inclusiveness, sustainability, innovation, and consideration of any user’s needs anywhere in the world.
It is time for us to come together as a society and encourage more cooperation between engineers, working together to solve the world’s greatest problems. We have had enough of investment banks telling us how to run our companies. We should bring back the excitement of applied science to all of our lives through collaboration between engineers and the education of upcoming engineers. A social network, a network for our future, a network of all of us.
This is an interesting idea, yet similar to this one, for example. The key question to keep in mind is:
"How should/could this platform be utilised to make global engineering more accountable"?
The 4 key principles to keep in mind are:
Responsible - Important questions would be; How would the platform maintaining EFFECTIVE responsibility?
Pursposeful - The platform would potentially provide a focal point for a broad range of disciplines along a project lifecycle. Think about how would you manage this, how would you filter the good from the bad?
Inclusive - By nature this platform would be inclusive, however, I refer back to how useful would much of the input be? How do you manage inclusivity whilst still maintaining the the other 3 key principles?
Regenerative - It's not clear from concept how this would be included. It's worth some thought here. Make time to think it through, those with the power to make effective change, are not in technical positions.
As a rule, discuss ideas with people outside your disciplines, hone it until they understand it; Then your pitch is more likely to be persuasive and hold merit.