Education and Community.
Community is the key to growth. Community based organisations and groups have proved themselves time after time again to be the best way to create change and impact in today’s rapidly changing culture. On top of that, crowd sourced products/projects have grown in quantity and success as online innovation moves to a more decentralised state of being. The simple fact is; in all sectors, including education, communities and grassroots organisations are rapidly generating and leading progress and innovations of all kinds.
When deciding which direction to take Mapedia.org in our early stages of development, we wanted to think of ways to emphasise our vision in every aspect of how the product is built and used. After diving deep into the purpose and goals of Mapedia, we quickly discovered that we actually should not be the ones “building” and “owning” this platform. Instead, we realised that if this product was to be used by a community of learners, it should be built and owned by that same community. In fact, we soon realised that the core of Mapedia IS that same community.
Here are the 3 main reasons WHY community is the core of Mapedia.org.
A product built by its users
With the recent trend of open source, decentralised products and applications, we have grown to witness the incredible things that collectives, rather than corporations, are able to accomplish. By giving power to the users to design, strategise, and even build their own tools — you end up with a product directly designed for the ones who are actually receiving the end value. It’s product management heaven — skip the formal user interviews + constant iterations, open up a direct link to your customers and let them show you what they want.
In the case of Mapedia, we are working to develop a constantly evolving knowledge map which essentially serves as a snapshot of the worldwide education sector for a current moment in time. This is not something even a large corporation with100,000s of people could accomplish. In order to accurately depict the current state of civilisation’s learning, ever single day, on an ongoing basis, an equal spread of civilisation must lead the charge.
Wisdom of the Crowds
Investopedia finds the term “Wisdom of the Crowds” to signify the
idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individual experts when it comes to problem-solving, decision-making, innovating, and predicting. The idea is that the viewpoint of an individual can inherently be biased, whereas taking the average knowledge of a crowd can result in eliminating the bias or noise to produce a clearer and more coherent result.
This concept remains at the core of Mapedia, as we strive to be a part of a community of learners and educators that drive the content other members consume to grow. By allowing the community to validate every aspect of Mapedia and the resources embedded within it, we are able to successfully enable a collective intelligence to provide the best possible guidance.
We aren’t the experts
Mapedia is positioned to be something so much more than just an education platform. Mapedia had the opportunity to scale into a location for any individual to grow in any direction they desire. And the truth is — this is not the task for a small team or large company. For Mapedia to grow to its full potential — it requires a highly developed ecosystem. One filled with subject matter experts leading their zones of knowledge and designing the infrastructure of their field of knowledge, expert curators designing the optimal learning paths for their peers to follow, and a strong body of individuals teaching one another through their own growth and struggles. We are the experts of none of these areas, merely individuals who want to be apart of something bigger, and want to contribute in any way we can to allow anyone, from anywhere, to learn.
Summary — What’s Next?
Our community is still growing! As of now, Mapedia is only in the early stages of community organisation and development. If you want to be part of the journey to create Education 3.0, join our newsletter and sign up for Beta access here!
Stay tuned and follow our newsletter as we continue to discuss the education sector and how we plan to change the way people learn. 🧠
Follow the journey at Mapedia.org to see how leveraging data, a graph database, and the wisdom of the crowd can re-shape how the world uses educational resources to explore, learn, grow.
