A side-quest board for unfinished civilization
You do not need to solve cancer, climate change or poverty by yourself. You need one bounded thing that genuinely helps, a clear proof standard, and someone who will use the result.
How a quest becomes real
The playful surface hides a strict contract underneath: the quest giver is a real mission owner, the win condition is an accepted output, the proof is a verification protocol, and the reward has to be funded before paid work opens.
Every side quest needs a contract
A named organization or program owner must be able to accept, reject and actually use the output.
The output and acceptance criteria are written before anyone spends time on the quest.
Verification is real labor. Reviewer capacity is budgeted, staffed and allowed to become the bottleneck.
Purpose does not replace compensation. Paid quests show the reward and reserve the funds up front.
Prototype questline
A huge problem is not a quest. The useful unit is a bounded piece of work with a real owner, a proof standard and somewhere for the result to go.
World map / fog of war
The 100 issues are locations on the map, not a leaderboard. Most are still fog-of-war: important problems that have not yet been decomposed into owned, verifiable quests.
Future evidence can include burden, urgency, neglectedness, tractability and equity. We leave unsupported scores blank.
A location becomes questable only when there is ownership, safe decomposition, verification capacity, trainability and funding.
Health / Cancer
The questline is research-grounded, not endorsed. Every side quest remains a prototype until a real institution owns the work and its verification.
Quest chain
Prototype side quests
Phase one prefers public or explicitly cleared data, non-clinical outputs, reversible work and explicit escalation. No diagnosis, personalized treatment, unsupervised trial-eligibility decisions, identifiable patient data or open biomedical experimentation.
Quest matchmaking
The matcher is a compass, not a boss. It explains why a quest surfaced, lets you change the inputs, and never turns ranking into a hidden judgment of your value.
Quest sheet / work-package protocol
Win condition
Proof required
Who checks the proof
Safety + governance
Reward
Contributor rights
Quest log states
A quest is not won merely because someone submitted something. The log preserves every step between effort and actual downstream use.
Source trail
Quest log / proof of work
No streaks. No levels. No vanity points. Reputation should come from traceable work, qualified review and whether a real mission owner actually used the output.
A contributor delivered an artifact.
It passed its quality protocol.
The quest giver accepted it.
It entered a real workflow or asset.
Someone used it in a later decision or process.
There is evidence of a later public outcome. This may never be attributable to one person.
Field notes
Citizen science, humanitarian mapping, paid crowdwork, public employment and platform-work rules already contain useful mechanics. The field notes record what we borrow, what we reject, and what still has to be proved.
Recruitment already exists. Crowdsourcing already exists. Paid micro-work already exists. The unproven quest is whether we can connect mission ownership, decomposition, fair pay, verifier capacity, worker rights and downstream evidence in one shared operating layer.
Full field notebook
The research folder records labor-transition evidence, adjacent systems, work-design patterns, funding and governance, cancer safety, prioritization, ChangeGamers/Tilly, partner discovery and the source registry. The quest metaphor never outranks the evidence.