I would give away an idea, several if I had them. I have no interest in developing games, just playing them.
Frankly, ideas are not hard to come by, at least not for me. If I was doing a game, I would try and figure out what kind of story I wanted to tell or what kind of experience I want the player to have and then design around that.
For example, I would like a modern setting game where the story unfolds according to whatever approach the player takes. With true multiple paths of play, leading to possible multiple different endings. The world would probably be smallish, but within that world, nearly everything would be interactive and available. Some items might be useful in one path but not another and some might not be useful at all. Similarly conversation and characters as well.
The plot doesn't have to be heavy handed. It could be something very simple: What ever happened to Jake Olson, that guy I knew in High School. Maybe he moved to India and joined an Ashram, maybe he's a mechanic at dealership, maybe he's a soldier, maybe...but you get the idea.
You could use a survey of some kind at the start of the game to help seed the options for the game based on the player's responses. Different responses lead to different stories in the same locations.
Such a game would feature a level of interactivity unprecedented to date as well true branched story telling. I'm not saying that a game like this would be easy, but it would be impressive as hell. Look how gaga people got over ME3 and it's level of branched story telling is limited by comparison.
People like it when what they do in a game matters.
That's not a bad idea, but for a small indie title you might be thinking too big there.
The biggest problem with designing indie titles like what Joshex seems to be looking at doing is you have to think in much smaller terms than most powerhouse AAA companies do, because you don't have dozens of programmers, hundreds of artists, and millions of dollars to get everything you want to have in your title actually put into it. You have you, and maybe if you're lucky, a few other like minded individuals who live near you that you can collaborate with to get more stuff done, but largely it still needs to be a smaller endeavor, or you'll never finish it.
I have an "open world RPG/third person Fighting" game (Kind of like Prototype, only no zombies or mutants, and it's a fictional magic-based world, and not modern day New York...) that I've been working on solo for the past year almost, and I'm still no where near 10% completion of the intended features for the game. Granted, I am working on the project alone, and I'm no programmer so I'm struggling with building the systems I need from misc. tutoriials and patched together workarounds, but it's the same concept as what I'm warning you all against unless you really intend on following the project through all the way. I knew going in that it was going to be a long painful process to do this on my own, and I tried on multiple occasions to try and get classmates to jump in and help me out on it if only a little (with no success...), but I've resigned myself to the idea that it may take me a few years to finish the core structure of the game, and that's not even counting actual content, story, missions, or art assets, all of which will be needed once the core game systems are built up...
So as I said, think smaller. Make a "tetris" like game. Make a card game (standard playing cards), a dungeon crawl/maze or puzzle game. Something small and easy to put together, and can be made quickly. You can add icing on the cake so to speak to make it interesting once you have the game built (Angry Birds for example uses a very old and super simple game idea that's been done many times before, but puts a fun spin on it that catches people's attention), but until then, you can't try to do too much or you're going to get overwhelmed and give up part way through. I myself am already walking the razors edge of that point with my own game project, and it's quite possible it'll simply be abandoned for a few years until I get better funding/support to try tackling it again later with some help from other indie developers or friends. (Not going to ask for help on that project here, as I would much rather work with people I can speak with face to face on such a large project, rather than only through message boards, email, or skype... Smaller projects I'm more flexible with though...)
Above all, try to make it something that's as fun to work on as it is to play. Never hurts to enjoy making things as much as playing with the end results.
