The Great Challenge of Open Knowledge Creation
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Podcast Notes
After thinking about the profound meaning behind Open Achievement to change the world, I discovered a meaningful insight. Knowledge creation has largely remained a slow, proprietary, outdated, sometimes costly, commercially & institutionally driven process throughout the world. The internet has solved this issue with knowledge distribution, where access is now fast, virtually free, and open to much of the world. It is now time to solve the other side of the equation which is the challenge of open, collaborative knowledge creation. It is the future and it is achievable. This is a big part of the mission of the Open Achievement Project.
Ultimately, I’d like our solution to fit the open personal internet where anybody can collaborate around an interest or passion, as well as fit formal knowledge-based R&D projects within organizations & institutions, such as universities. There are two keys to this, which are the elements of collaboration and openness.
I think it would be a great analogy to compare our open knowledge creation platform at Open Achievement to open source software. Mature open source software communities are a great comparison for what we want to do here at Open Achievement, except that instead of having to be a computer programmer, anyone can participate in furthering the study for what they personally have an interest or passion in. With dedicated open collaboration, the big benefit is in fast iterations. Meaning that instead of waiting years or even decades for certain information to be widely published by an expert and then pondered by others who can advance those insights, this can happen almost in real-time, within days or weeks. Think of how fast the cutting-edge solutions of important areas in life can innovate if a large number people with drive & expertise openly collaborated through an integrated platform like this, compared to only through disconnected, proprietary, commercially driven publications that don’t really build off of one another.
