social-impact-lens

Social Impact Lens

Not every idea worth building optimises for return. Apply a non-financial review.

Steps

1. Read the idea + user context (especially any stated values).
2. Address each dimension:
   • Direct beneficiaries — who is materially better off if this succeeds; how much
   • Direct harmed — who loses (incumbents disrupted, jobs displaced, attention extracted)
   • Second-order effects — what happens at scale; who pays externalities
   • Environmental footprint — energy, materials, e-waste, carbon — qualitatively
   • Accessibility & inclusion — who can / can't use this; pricing access; cognitive/physical accessibility
   • Mission-coherence — does pursuing this align with the user's stated values, per user-context.md
   • Reputation risk — what story would a hostile journalist write about this in three years
3. Score each on a simple scale (Net positive / Mixed / Net negative) with one sentence of reasoning.
4. Flag any dimension where the idea is structurally problematic. Don't soft-pedal.

Output

<workspace_path>/ideas/<slug>/analysis/social-impact-lens.md with frontmatter:

---
lens: social-impact-lens
generated: YYYY-MM-DD
overall: <Net positive | Mixed | Net negative>
---

Notes

• Don't moralise. Surface trade-offs honestly and let the user decide.
• If user-context.md has explicit values (e.g. "I won't build anything that exploits attention"), use them as the spine of the analysis.