The Odd Socks project

(Note - This is only a light-hearted attempt to stimulate your thinking about possible projects. Get your creative juices flowing, add a bit of smarts and submit your idea by 30 October.)

I am the ED of the Re-uniting Odd Socks Co-Operative (ROSCO). We keep a register of reported cases of both lost and found socks and then try to match them on our database, so that we can re-unite them whenever possible. We believe that if we could re-unite every odd sock with its partner we could save the community several billion dollars annually and reduce wardrobe trauma and the stress of odd sock fashion disasters. However tracking odd socks is an expensive and time-consuming activity and we have very limited funding from the Ministry of Miscellania. Our efforts would be greatly enhanced if we could extract all reports of lost and found odd socks held by police, transport authorities, and other government agenices nationally.
We could then map all this data to:
- increase our sock pair re-uniting ratio, thus reducing community stress and improving the balance of trade by lowering sock imports
- identify areas where odd socks are more likely to be lost and/or found, so that we can concentrate our scarce education and counselling resources in the right areas and develop local support groups where necessary. (Anecdotal evidence suggests the problem is more widespread in households where no-one over 30 is present but to get further funding we need to provide hard evidence.)