Standing on Shoulders: The Landscape

This site exists in a broader ecosystem. Before building, I researched who else is working on "opportunity mapping"—systematically identifying what should exist but doesn't. Here's what I found.

The Closest Analogues

These projects explicitly map opportunities, bottlenecks, or gaps:

Foresight Institute — Technology Trees

Foresight produces "Technology Trees"—navigable maps of a domain showing key actors and outstanding bottlenecks. This is closest to what I'm calling "Avenues." They frame it as an onboarding tool: here's the landscape, here's what's stuck, here's who's working on it.

Nesta — Innovation Sweet Spots

The UK innovation foundation Nesta developed methodology (with open-source code) for semi-automated horizon scanning—combining signals from research funding, publications, patents, and news to detect emerging opportunities. This is essentially an "overhang detector" automated at scale.

Engineering for Change — Solutions Library

Engineering for Change maintains a practical "what works / what's been tried" knowledge base for humanitarian and appropriate technology. 60,000+ members, webinars, fellowship programs. Less "mapping opportunities" and more "cataloguing solutions," but directly relevant.

Appropedia

Appropedia is a long-running wiki focused on appropriate technology and sustainability. It's one of the most direct "problem wiki" ancestors—organized into topic portals with practical how-to knowledge. Less "overhang mapping," more "open knowledge base."

Open Source Ecology — Global Village Construction Set

OSE attempts to enumerate and build a civilization-scale set of 50 industrial machines. It's an "opportunity catalog" in hardware form—a living wiki plus Discord community. Marcin Jakubowski's 2011 TED talk on "open-sourced blueprints for civilization" captures the ambition.

Progress Studies

A cluster of writers and institutions asking: why does progress happen, and what's blocking it?

Roots of Progress

Jason Crawford's institute is the hub of progress studies. Not exactly an "opportunity database," but reliably asks what's blocking progress and points at missing institutions and translation layers. Runs fellowships, annual conference, and maintains the Progress Forum.

Works in Progress

Long-form publication with a "build the world" orientation—infrastructure, industry, institutions. Good for understanding why things are stuck at an institutional level.

Low-Tech Magazine

Kris De Decker's site systematically surfaces forgotten or underused technology. Different axis than frontier tech—focused on "viable things not adopted" from a constraints-based engineering perspective. Also runs on solar power and goes offline when it's cloudy.

The Historical Angle

Appropriate Technology Movement

Grew around E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" and intermediate/appropriate technology. Practical Action (formerly ITDG, which Schumacher founded) is the institutional anchor. The movement had waves of prominence and perceived decline—useful context for why "technology catalogs" are hard to sustain.

Office of Technology Assessment

The US Congress had an institutionalized foresight function from 1972 until it was defunded in 1995. OTA systematically assessed emerging technologies and identified opportunities/risks. Its political vulnerability is a lesson in why these efforts struggle.

Open Source Ecology — The Maintenance Challenge

OSE's recurring community discussions reveal the difficulty of sustaining an ambitious hardware catalog over time. Useful for understanding why "opportunity catalogs" decay—even well-designed projects face execution and maintenance challenges.

Academic Programs

These don't always use "overhang" language, but they systematically identify needs and turn them into buildable briefs:

MIT D-Lab — Participatory design + engineering for global development, with a standing "how to design + disseminate" pipeline
Stanford d.school — Design for Extreme Affordability — Structured around low-resource constraints and real-world partner problems

Communities

Where neglected problems get proposed and worked:

Engineering for Change — Global development engineering discussion, peer exchange
Open Source Ecology Discord — Active builder community
High Impact Engineers — EA-adjacent, focused on physical engineers; runs Impact Forge forum
Solarpunk / practical-utopian maker subcultures — Less structured, but significant "neglected problem energy"

Tools You Can Actually Use

If you want to find overhangs systematically (not just write about them):

Nesta's open-source horizon scanning code — Combines multiple signals to detect emerging opportunities
Foresight Technology Trees — Roadmap-style decomposition of bottlenecks
Open Know-How — Federated search for open source hardware, connecting Appropedia, OSE, Field Ready, OSHWA, and others

Where This Site Fits

Based on researching the landscape, the gap is clear:

Most projects are either:

(a) Libraries of solutions — Appropedia, E4C
(b) Thought leadership — Progress studies, Low-Tech Magazine
(c) Roadmaps for experts — Foresight, government strategic intelligence

Very few translate "bottleneck → concrete, AI-amplified amateur contribution paths" with explicit scoping, safety constraints, and validation pathways.

That translation layer is what I'm trying to build.

Why Multiple Efforts Help

I'm not trying to avoid duplication—multiple people working on the same problems is good. The goal here is:

Learn from what exists — Don't reinvent wheels
Find potential collaborators — These communities are where I'll share work
Understand what's been tried — And why some efforts faded
Position clearly — Not replacing anything, adding a specific angle

If you're working on similar things, reach out.

Research sources: GPT Deep Research landscape scan, December 2025