Do you sometimes have too many ideas and no time to implement them? Or would you like some collaborative input on these ideas? How about the ability for you to fork someone else's idea, or for someone to be-able to fork yours into a new direction? Most idea collaboration software is closed, where only a small team can collaborate and grow this idea into something. These existing software suites do not provide a means for public collaboration. Forums are the closest you have for idea collaboration, however forums do not allow you to easily take over an idea and send it off in a new direction. My latest idea was to create an idea collaboration software suite, something with features that will appeal to the open source community, with features like forking of ideas into new branches to enhance collaboration. It was also a priority to enable easily access to analytical data, where you can easily see what other similar projects are using to develop their ideas or see what projects are using the same tools as you are. Having this type of data at your disposal can help grow ideas quicker, as cross-references between ideas can be made. If your seeking help on a specific tool, you can easily and effortlessly see who else is using that tool and seek assistance from them or from their open source code directly.

This collaboration suite is not only for open source projects, but it can be used to collaborate on almost any type of idea you can dream of. If you have an interesting idea and want to see how much interest it may spark, plant the idea here and see if it grows. There is no commitment to maintain the idea you plant yourself, as someone more specialized in the field can easily fork it and grow it themselves. Each branch is tracked and can be easily cross-referenced to see the differences in one direction from another.

Uarica: Idea Collaboration will see many new features in the near future. Currently the main features are available for public consumption, such as Forking, general notes, idea asset management(used for analytical data), user profiles, ability to follow users, like ideas, and more. This website was build using Django in roughly 1 day, and is a testament on how rapidly something can be built using Django. It is currently deployed on RedHat OpenShift platform.

Future features will include full GitHub and BitBucket project integration for open source projects. You will be-able to access both the Issues and full source code repo. BitBucket's API is very nice, and supports both of these features. I haven't yet played with GitHub's API, and I am hoping I can do the same with it. User profiles currently include the ability to link to both websites via a standard link. Ideas can also link to both sites as well.

Another feature which should be added shortly is a Twitter feed for each user profile and idea, so all of your tweets will appear in your profile and in the ideas page. This will allow people to easily see what you have been up to. Feeds for GitHub and BitBucket are also planned.

Currently closed door ideas are not available, but are supported in the backend. These types of ideas will be made available to the general public once the site gains enough open door ideas, and once more features that compete with existing project management suites are added.

I also hope to look into APIs that can help accelerate ideas and implement them. There are a vast amount of resources on the Internet, and being able to use them easily in a single collaboration suite would be very nice to have. For example, the ability to turn an idea into a Kickstarter project with the click of a button comes to mind. Perhaps integration with existing project management software such as BaseCamp. Google Drive integration is already planned, as it provides a nice cloud whiteboard for easily collaboration and document storage.

The latest feature I just added(in about an hour of coding) is a petition add-on. This allows you to effortlessly create a petition attached to your idea. It supports a goal, a closing date, and user liking. Petitions are especially useful when attempting to get your idea out there, especially in front of political parties or large companies. There is an example petition on the Uarica idea, which closes at the end of this month with a goal of only 50 signatures. Petitions are available to anybody to view, but in order to place your signature on it, you will need to be signed-in. When forking an idea, petitions don't go with it for obvious reasons. I may add the ability to copy over completed petitions, if there is demand for it.

Let me know what you think of this idea in the comments below.