Reduce, reuse, recycle
Motivation
This pattern can guide project participants in identifying and managing available resources.
Context
In a peer production context, you are simultaneously “making stuff” and building on the work of others.
Forces
Derivative: you don’t have to do everything yourself!
Sensemaking: resources are useful only when you can make sense of them.
Sharing: your understanding gains robustness when you share with others.
Problem
Many projects die because the cost of Reinventing the Wheel [c2] is too high. However, this is just one possible symptom of overfocus on a few priorities. Concerns may also arise if the project’s output is not actually used by anyone.
Solution
“Steal like an artist,” and make it possible for other people to build on your work too. In the Peeragogy project, we have used off-the-shelf and hosted software suited to the task at hand (including: Drupal, Google+, Google Hangouts, Google Docs, Wordpress, pandoc, Github, ShareLaTeX). Early on we agreed to release our Peeragogy Handbook under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), the legal instrument that grants the greatest possible leeway to downstream users.https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ This has allowed us and others to repurpose and improve its contents in other settings, including the current paper. Follow the steps indicated by the keywords in the pattern’s title:
- Reduce the panoply of interesting interrelated ideas and methods to a functional core (e.g. writing a book).
- Reuse resources relevant to this aim, factoring in “things I was going to have to do anyway” from everyone involved.
- Recycle what you’ve created in new connections and relationships.
A paradigmatic example of found-art. “Fountain by R. Mutt, Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS”.
Rationale
Clearly we are not the first people to notice the problems with wheel-reinvention, including “missing opportunities, repeating common mistakes, and working harder than we need to.”https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/learning-patterns-new-way-share-important-lessons/ As a guest in one of our hangouts, Willow Brugh, of Geeks without Bounds and the MIT Media Lab, remarked that people often think that they need to build a community, and so fail to recognize that they are already part of a community.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpyQfYVKfBI converted our old pattern catalog from the Peeragogy Handbook into this paper, sharing it with a new community and gaining new perspectives; could we do something similar again?
Resolution
Reweaving old material into derivative designs and new material into existing frameworks, we build deeper understanding, and carry out collective sensemaking. The project’s Roadmap develops by making sense of existing resources – including our worries and concerns. Often we only know what these are when we attempt to share them. Drawing on a wide range of resources boosts our collective Carrying capacity.
Example 1
Contributors are encouraged to recycle existing works that are compatible with the Wikimedia-wide Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-By-SA) license.https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15411/ Some sub-projects have been created purely to help repurpose other existing works in this way.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/PlanetMath_Exchange On the downstream side, DBPedia is an important resource for the semantic web, built by collating data from Wikipedia’s “infoboxes.” http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ themselves increasingly being populated automatically using information from WikiData.https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page able to develop tools that reuse Wikipedia content in other ways.Silvan Reinhold. 2006. WikiTrails: Augmenting wiki structure for collaborative, interdisciplinary learning. Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, ACM, 47–58. Nathalie Henry Riche, Bongshin Lee, and Fanny Chevalier. 2010. IChase: Supporting exploration and awareness of editing activities on Wikipedia. Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, ACM, 59–66. However, these research projects do not always result in a tool that is accessible to day-to-day users.
Example 2
The knowledge resources and collaboration tools currently available online are what make a low-cost, high-quality, formally-accredited future university conceivable. However, the available resources are not always as organized as they would need to be for educative purposes, so peeragogues can usefully put effort into Reduce, reuse, recycle’ing available resources into a functioning university Library.
What’s Next in the Peeragogy Project
Are there other educational resources and peeragogical case studies that we could fold into our work? Can we recycle material from the Peeragogy Handbook into a format that is easier to understand and apply?
- Examples of the hairdressers and rowing club folks: this doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
- Is there anything new here…? Well, we are distilling what exists in the raw materials?
- Chris: With the pattern of Heartbeat, that has chimed with the Co-Operative university in terms of, where people are co-producing things, how to keep the momentum going.
- Charlotte: this happens a lot in my projects.
- Chris: Quite an interesting discussion, I liked what Lisa was saying about different beats for different contexts. Almost having to fit a pacemaker.
- Charlotte: With the concert series, I would like to hand it over to someone else, but it’s a bridge too far to document that and help people become stakeholders.
- ACMi, they have problems - he is really good at revving people up about projects, and showing them what they can gain from a completed project.
- E.g., I stared this studio production for publishing. But it was too complicated to bring elements together. Motivating volunteers, getting a core of volunteers that overlap. So you can produce things at any point in time.
- Livestreaming is super easy! It wasn’t perfect because the people were on the beach with their phone. But it is easy!
- Is added value of TV station to make it more perfect, with better production values. But it has way less volume, because you can’t mount one every week.
- Chris: Stew and Cake: Livestream is a stew, everyone can contribute. But a TV recording is much more of a cake, you need to plan the ingredients, bake it at a certain temperature.
- Cake mix, reheated curry, etc., it may not have everything you want.
Briefing: Johnathan was looking at Thinkhubub. Lots of people online, you can react to the comments, the film maker can be online, maybe some from Co-Op group. The film is about the impact of modern slavery. It’s kind of geared around co-production and responding to some of the material in a flipped manner. Can continue the conversation elsewhere?
Schedule for 2PM and then we can pick this up. If it gets into the Calendar it can interpret it for any time. This could be something that Jeff is interested in.
Next time: We will watch a film from https://aru.ac.uk/people/shreepali-patel
We can learn from the experiments that others are doing, by joining in. Maybe more peeragogical to join in, and look at what the measures of success are?
