Goals

Mission

Ameliorate’s mission is to empower humanity to effectively solve problems by making it trivial to mutually understand the intricacies and perspectives involved.

Vision

Imagine a world where:

• you never have to leave a conversation frustrated that you aren’t understood, or that you can’t understand someone else;
• politicians and citizens of diverse perspectives can work together and be satisfied with decisions intended to better society;
• when you hear about a tragedy in the world, you feel like you can actually do something about it.

Core Beliefs

The beliefs driving Ameliorate are:

1. All people have unique, valuable knowledge to add to most topics.
2. If it was trivial to combine everyone’s unique, valuable knowledge, then we unlock society’s potential to work together and address problems.
3. Known processes for (a) getting up-to-speed; (b) identifying an individual’s unique, valuable knowledge that hasn’t been said yet; and (c) integrating that info into the current set of group knowledge; are nowhere near as effective as they could be.
4. The way that information is organized and presented has profound impact on improving the processes in 3.
5. Known ways of organizing and presenting information are nowhere near as effective as they could be.

Golden Test Case

We’re focused on the following test case, which revolves around refining a document (in Ameliorate, we use a Topic) that captures the group’s understanding of the problem and potential solutions:

1. Person A picks a problem or solution and dumps their relevant knowledge, opinions, uncertainties, about it into a document.
2. Person A gives the document to Person B.
3. Person B tries to add their relevant knowledge, opinions, uncertainties, to the document, without duplicating any piece that’s already in the document.

The document then could be given to Person C, and so on.

This test case is intentionally narrow and specific. We believe that improving this two-person case generally improves many cases in which someone wants to address a problem, and wants to work with others to better do so.

Golden Measurables

Given this test case, these are the three characteristics we want to optimize:

1. Comprehension: how long for Person B to comprehend the knowledge in the document
2. Identification: how long for Person B to identify their own knowledge that isn’t yet in the document
3. Integration: how long for Person B to integrate their knowledge into the document

Note that we want to optimize these characteristics such that (a) Person B can quickly identify and integrate their first unique, valuable piece of knowledge, and (b) Person B can identify and integrate all unique, valuable pieces of knowledge they have.

As is aligned with our Core Beliefs, we are working on optimizing these by developing a structure to organize the document , and an app to work effectively with that structure .