Suggest edit — World Issue Tracker

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---
confidence: high
related:
- wiki/projects/world-progress-bar.md
- wiki/projects/manifestos-world.md
- wiki/concepts/collective-intelligence.md
sources:
- raw/transcript.md
title: World Issue Tracker
type: project
visibility: public
---

# World Issue Tracker

GitHub Issues, but for **civilization's bugs**. One of Jacob's projects in the [[Humanity 3.0]] family.

## What it is

> "I started building the world issue tracker project... so you could see progress bars towards human goals."

The shape (inferred from context):
- A first-principles taxonomy of **human goals and human needs**
- An issue-tracker UI on top: each known problem is an issue, with sub-issues, dependencies, owners, and proposed solutions
- A debate graph layered on top so disagreements are explicit and refinable

## How it differs from existing things

The world has many trackers of problems:
- News (which is more "what happened" than "what's open")
- Wikipedia (snapshots, not workflows)
- UN SDGs (high-level goals, but no per-issue dependency graph)
- Academic literature (per-paper, not per-problem)
- Various activist platforms (per-issue, but siloed and not interoperable)

Jacob's pitch: a **single, structured, queryable, contributor-friendly** issue tracker — applying the GitHub Issues model (or, more abstractly, the bug-tracker abstraction) to civilization-scale problems.

## What David recognized

> "We kind of have this open-source repository of, like, all of the world's biggest problems and our biggest schools, all derived from first principles. So you can see through a very clear chain of logic — this is the problem, here are all the variables and factors involved."

Jacob: "Exactly. It's a giant graph. It's a big graph database, effectively, yeah."

The defining feature: **graph-shaped**. Not a list. Each problem is connected to its causes, its proposed solutions, the assumptions behind it, and the people working on it.

## The debate-graph layer

> "If someone reads this and they disagree, they can contribute their own. They can say, like, 'Oh, exactly, this chain is wrong, this is what...' Yeah. And you can make arbitrary meta comments on whatever you want."

The debate graph is what distinguishes this from a static taxonomy. Disagreements aren't suppressed; they're **first-class structures** in the graph.

This is hard to build well. The history of "rationalist" debate-graph attempts (Kialo, Truthsift, etc.) is mixed. Jacob's bet is that LLMs can do enough auto-curation / consolidation to make the graph navigable.

## Connection to other projects

The World Issue Tracker is the **problems** view. Companion projects:

- [[World Progress Bar]] — the **measurements** view
- [[manifestos.world]] — the **futures** view (where do we want to go?)
- [[Accretive Collective Action]] — the **action** view (how do we move?)

Together they form a four-quadrant infrastructure for collective sense-making.

## Why this matters

Jacob's bridging claim:

> "Once we agree on what we're trying to do — and I think the strategies is where we disagree, we almost all agree on the basic needs, some disagreement on prioritization, but we don't disagree on most things — is what I think as a society."

If the disagreement is about strategies (means) rather than ends, then **making strategies explicit and refinable** in a shared graph dissolves a lot of apparent conflict. The World Issue Tracker is the data structure for that work.

## Status

Jacob says he "started building" this. The transcript doesn't specify scale, current state, URL, or whether it's part of the [[manifestos.world]] site or separate.

## Related

- [[World Progress Bar]] — companion measurement layer
- [[manifestos.world]] — companion vision layer
- [[Collective Intelligence]] — the broader frame
- [[Vision for the World]] — the synthesizing theme