The purpose of Ideate Foundation is to understand and facilitate the formation and communication of ideas.
What are ideas?
Ideas are identifying or descriptive. Each idea has a context. We represent ideas using symbols, and we interpret these symbols according to our knowledge of an idea’s context.

Importantly, ideas are not feelings, experiences, or actions. Ideas alone are not enough.

Communicating an idea is an indirect process. A listener forms their own idea. To communicate is to share context, and implicitly affirm or dispel assumptions in the mind of a listener. High fidelity mediums are those which enable us to more comprehensively share context and to more immediately provide feedback.

The written word provides fairly extensive and immediate feedback in the sense that the mind of a reader is able to generate and explore myriad ideas and yet immediately compare those ideas to the text on the page. The text varies little over time and so provides very consistent feedback.

Camping together provides excellent shared experience and immediate feedback as we work together and observe each other’s actions, and together experience the environment.

Instant messaging is a form of written communication. It trades some of the depth and durability of published work for increased immediacy. Its abbreviated nature diminishes its potential for establishing shared context, so I think it tends to work best between people who already have established shared context.

Online forums provide decent context but lack some immediacy. Wiki sites provide even better context, but less immediacy. Chat groups provide good immediacy but have a fluid, transient context.

I believe it is possible to develop better tools – a better platform – for organizing our ideas in a structured way and communicating with one another more comprehensively.

-Ladd