FYI,

Absidea (Asylum for Absurd Ideas)
http://absidea.free.fr/wordpress

about absidea
http://absidea.free.fr/wordpress/index.php/about-absidea

: Absidea is a free online repository for absurd ideas.

: Its genesis is related to the 2004 PatentPool initiative by a group
: of european industrials. Initially, the objective was to promote
: exchange between R&D teams across the member companies. They set up
: a private cross-corporation intranet forum where R&D engineers
: could write down their ideas and comment on (or improve over) other
: colleagues' ideas. A key guideline was to avoid any kind of
: self-inflicted sensorship, and use the PatentPool as a vital outlet
: for creativity bursts. As board director Soren Kierkestrup puts
: it: `Better out than in'.

: The collaborative crafting of creative material boosted the R&D
: outcome, and the number of patent applications skyrocketed, making
: the PatentPool an all-time corporate award-winning project.

: However, the database soon became cluttered with a whole lot of
: ideas that had not found their way to an industrial application
: within the member companies. The PatentPool board boldly decided to
: salvage this invaluable corpus by freely sharing it with the rest
: of the world. A team of volunteers, mostly engineers participating
: in the PatentPool as their day jobs, put together absidea.

: Ideas in absidea are yours to read, to comment, to improve. They
: come with an OpenIdeas Licence (OIL).

: When an idea has been improved to the point it might become viable,
: anybody can freely take it and build upon it. It can be a team of
: volunteers launching a nonprofit OpenIdeas project on IdeaForge.net,
: or it can be a private firm patenting whatever improvements they
: can come up with, and exploiting the result for profit.

: Read on, and wonder.

Space
http://absidea.free.fr/wordpress/index.php/category/space

Architecture
http://absidea.free.fr/wordpress/index.php/category/architecture

Mark Reiff