| name | social-impact-lens |
| description | Review a captured idea from a social-impact and ethics lens — who benefits, who is harmed, second-order societal effects, environmental footprint, accessibility, and alignment with the user's personal values. Use when the user wants to weigh non-financial considerations. |
Social Impact Lens
Not every idea worth building optimises for return. Apply a non-financial review.
Steps
- Read the idea + user context (especially any stated values).
- 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
- Score each on a simple scale (Net positive / Mixed / Net negative) with one sentence of reasoning.
- 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.
