Mindshare – Preserving & Sharing Knowledge

Idea submitted by Samantha Bail & Tim Dobson

The idea:

Motivation

With the internet providing access to vast amounts of information, informal learning beyond established structures has become easier and more popular than ever. No longer do people only learn in the classroom, but also peer to peer, friend to friend, online and offline.

Throughout Great Britain like minded people interested in technology and digital media get together at regular events to share ideas and skills, discuss new developments and extend their personal network.

In the North West of England alone, there are almost daily events ranging from informal meetings (such as “Girl Geek Dinners”), programming workshops (such as “PHP User Groups”) to weekend long conferences (such as “Barcamps”). Most events are organised by the communities themselves and aim to be free, open and accessible to all. This is a great way of keeping up to date with modern technology, developing new skills and sharing knowledge, while not being constrained to formal learning environments.

However, whilst these events are widely attended, a lot of the information and knowledge shared is simply lost after the event, preventing those who were unable to attend from participating.

Aims

We aim to create a platform that offers access to information and content presented at such events whilst also encouraging attendees to discuss and share ideas afterwards.

This will preserve the knowledge for both the attendees and those who could not be there, combining it into a pool of information and making it accessible to anyone who is interested in the topic – beyond regional boundaries.

In addition, this will also encourage people who are not aware of the offerings provided by a particular community to learn and benefit from past and future events.

This platform will combine different types of information such as event summaries in written form, presentation slides, as well as audio and video recordings to create a multimedia “mash up”. We will also encourage users to interactively participate through discussions and microblogging integration (such as via “Twitter”).

Method

We will develop a website in the form of a multimedia knowledge base that is centred around a calendar type structure. We will include information on upcoming and past events that combines content from various internal and external sources – such as image, audio and video, microblogging, attendance lists, slides, discussion boards and hyperlinks to related web content. We will allow for editable text content (based on a “Wiki” structure) that summarises and reviews the event in an objective form. Data (including event dates, which are mainly obtained from an already existing event calendar) can be added and edited by registered users and is retro-actively moderated.

The technology used will be based upon an existing open source content management system (CMS), adapted to purpose. By utilising existing plug-ins as well as developing bespoke modules where required, we will efficiently create an open platform that can be easily extended. This makes the project cost-effective and easy to maintain. As a result of community contribution, the cost and effort of creating content and keeping it up-to-date will be minimised – as opposed to a single organisation being the “content provider”.

Sharing and reusing of content will be supported by users licensing their content on the platform under a “Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0” license.

As this project is a prototype, we will initially focus on events in the North West of England, with a view to expanding in due course. Whilst basing the platform on technology related events, the general concept and structure clearly allow for use by other interest groups, such as the cultural and voluntary sector.

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