Truly Open-Sourcing the World

The Intersection

Years ago, when I was at community college in West LA, I was walking through an intersection and imagined a smart stop sign, one that turns its face green when it detects no pedestrians or cars, so you can drive through without stopping. Slightly silly. Exactly the right kind of silly. Small enough to picture, big enough to imply a whole platform behind it.

I wasn't really thinking about the stop sign. I was thinking about the platform the stop sign would have to live on. A place where one person could design a thing once, document it, and a thousand cities could install it. A place where anyone walking past a problem could pin it, describe it, and link it to the people who could actually fix it.

I started calling that thing OpenWorld in my head a long time before I started building it.

Git, but for the Physical World

The closest analogy I have is git. On GitHub, anyone can publish a useful piece of code, anyone else can read it, fork it, improve it, and apply it to their own problem. That ecosystem is the reason most of the software you touch every day is what it is.

The physical world doesn't work like that. The good ideas live in heads, not in a registry. The fixes are local and unrepeatable. The infrastructure of our cities is mostly opaque to the people who live with it. There's no version control on a sidewalk.

OpenWorld is a deliberate borrow of git's concepts: pull the good ideas out of people's heads, attach them to specific places, let them be referenced and reused, and put the whole thing in plain view of everyone.

Four Kinds of Pin

On OpenWorld, every contribution is a pin on a map. There are four kinds:

• Idea: a proposed improvement. "This intersection should have a smart stop sign."
• Issue: something broken. "There's a pothole here that's been here for two years."
• Kudos: something working, worth recognition. "This volunteer-run library is incredible."
• Timer: a time-bounded event. "Beach cleanup, this Saturday, 9 AM."

Most civic platforms are problem-engines: report a thing, then watch it sit on the list. Putting Kudos in as a first-class pin type was a deliberate choice. The world is more than its broken parts. Naming what works changes the emotional gravity of a platform, from "here's what's broken" to "here's what we have, here's what's broken, and here's what we want."

Timer pins exist because most civic action isn't a state, it's a moment. A march. A town hall. A neighbourhood cleanup. The pin appears, the moment happens, the pin retires.

Proposals and Blueprints

Every pin supports full markdown, descriptions, diagrams, links. That's the proposal layer. On top of it sits a second primitive: Blueprints.

A blueprint is a reusable design. The smart stop sign, written up once, with the electronics, the failure modes, the cost, the install steps. Anyone can reference that blueprint from a pin in their own city. One person designs it once; a thousand pins in a thousand places can apply it.

That's the open-source-the-world part. The same relationship as a git repository to an issue: a proposal is specific and located; a blueprint is generalizable and portable.

OpenWorld Doesn't Try to Replace the Action Rails

Here's the part that took me longest to get right.

When you imagine a "civic platform," it's tempting to want to build everything , funding, voting, contractors, government APIs, the works. That way lies a decade of failure. The funding rails, the political rails, the volunteering rails, the petition rails, they all exist. GoFundMe exists. Your council member has a contact page. There are sign-up forms and event platforms and petition sites. They mostly work.

OpenWorld is the coordination layer, not the implementation layer. Every pin can link out, and the markdown supports it richly. A Timer pin for a Saturday cleanup links to the sign-up sheet. An Idea pin for a smart stop sign links to a GoFundMe, or to your council member's office. A Kudos pin links to the contractor's website so other neighbourhoods can hire them.

The bridge from proposal to reality is humans taking action. OpenWorld doesn't replace that bridge. It makes it shorter.

Where It Is Today

Honest status, May 2026:

• The marketing site at www.openworld.run is live.
• The web app at app.openworld.run is intentionally minimal. The phone is the real experience, pinning is a physical-place act and you do it standing in front of the thing.
• The iOS app is now live: OpenWorld: Pin & Improve on the App Store. Apple approved it earlier this month.
• The Android app is still in closed testing on Google Play Console while we wait on Google's review. Once it's approved, it goes public.

Why I'm Building This, of All Things

I've always been the one in my family to try to make things better. To heal relationships. To give people the benefit of the doubt. I've done good and bad. Truthfully, I just want to help make the world a better place.

I had this idea before I had children. They're here now, and they're entering a world that might be very different from the one I grew up in. The world I grew up in had a lot of freedom, both good and bad. I want a platform where people can actually have their ideas heard, and we can act on them.

I'm not a super environmental type. I don't like the idea that humans are the cause of all the issues. We might be, but if everyone can fix the little things, make tiny changes and improvements to the world, that compounds. And maybe it's not so bad that we drive gas-powered cars, if the rest of the time we're continuously improving the world together.

That's the dream. People are good. Action compounds. Agency over guilt. A future where we are all continuously improving the world together. I hope it inspires others.

The Six-Month Bet

Six months from now, I'd like:

• iOS and Android publicly in the stores.
• Hundreds of users on the platform.
• Creative use I didn't anticipate: the surest sign that the primitive is right.
• Real action taken because of an OpenWorld pin: a politician who responded, a cleanup that happened with strangers I've never met, a blueprint reused in a city I've never been to.
• Donations and sponsorships that keep the project sustainable.
• An active community recommending features and ideas.
• Personal growth as a leader of the platform: continuing to mature alongside it.
• Starting to make waves.

That's the bar. Anything less and I'll keep grinding. Anything more and we'll have something to talk about.

If Any of This Resonates

Download OpenWorld: Pin & Improve on the App Store if you're on iOS. Visit www.openworld.run for the marketing page. Try the web app at any desk. Email me to get added to the Android closed-testing group while we wait on Google review. If you're a politician, organizer, journalist, or community leader and you'd want something specific from a platform like this, I especially want to hear from you, whatever I'm building probably needs your eyes.

And if you're someone who walks past a problem in your city every day and thinks I wish someone would fix this: that's why this exists. You're the someone. OpenWorld is the place to put it.

See you on the map.