While driving to Healdsburg last Saturday, I had a big idea. Actually it was more of a big awareness, blooming out loud as I was talking with Stephanie. Recently I’ve kept a few of these “big” ideas to myself, rather than blog about them, especially when they seem like something I could build (in other words, some kind of web application). This makes me wonder: how many other people keep their big ideas to themselves, for fear that someone else might steal them? How many big ideas have lived and died unshared in the course of human history?

It strikes me that one of the reasons our energies flag while working on our big idea projects (if we even get that far) is that no one else ever finds out about them. The ideal of a lone artist making art for her own sake doesn’t really carry over into the world of programming. At least not for me. But then there’s something unintuitively social about programming. Especially and inherently when applied to the web. Which is probably why it’s a great reason to be an employed programmer. The whole nature of my work is built around doing things for others. That people already depend on me is a daily motivator.

But outside of a traditional work environment, if we could overcome this fear of people stealing our ideas long enough to share them, we might actually attract other people’s interest, whether solely for the end product, or—even better—for participation in the making. And I’m pretty sure that every bit of external influence would increase the probability of something actually getting done. I mean I’d be ecstatic if someone was interested in an idea of mine enough to want to contribute to it.

I linked to the following quote last August, and I think it’s totally relevant here. Linus Torvalds perfectly debunks the imagined tension between sharing our ideas and keeping them to ourselves when asked by ITBusiness.ca whether he worried about losing control of his “intellectual property” by open sourcing Linux:

“First off, even if you’re the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it’s really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don’t worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They’ll probably not even know about your work, and they’ll certainly not think that it’s worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can’t really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught.”

So what was my idea? That will have to wait for another post.

Update: I’ve described it in Think globally, blog locally.