Why Sci-Map becomes Mapedia

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

***From Olivier Ramier’s original article, “In search of the learning map”.

Intro

After more than 2 years of working on Sci-Map.org, some big changes are coming. I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what these past years have been like and to review the lessons I acquired along the way which ended up defining the next evolution of the project, namely Mapedia. I’ll also use this opportunity to reflect on the social entrepreneurship journey.

Sci-Map

First, let’s recap what Sci-Map is (or was):

Sci-Map.org is an attempt to help people learn online in an accessible way by building a crowdsourced graph-based “learning map” of all known concepts and indexing learning materials in this “knowledge space”. The goal is to allow for seamless navigation in the knowledge space, learning without blockers — whether having a specific goal in mind or just out of curiosity. This product would be at the crossroad between Google Maps, Wikipedia and Khan Academy (with some sprinkles of Reddit and even Spotify). It is an ambitious idea that fully developed would be an all-in-one optimal solution for learning, and I’m not alone in envisioning it (“The Learning Map” by Danny Hillis, Learn Anything, Learney ).

For me this vision came from my frustration with learning inefficiently, the potential I saw in online communities and crowdsourcing in particular, and my introduction to graph theory during my studies.

The journey of the past 2 years

Start of the journey

While I knew that I wanted to work on realizing this vision since my last year of study (2016), I only made the jump in March 2020 when I left my job at Forto. My motivations were and still are multiple: having a positive impact in an area I deeply care about (equality of opportunities, open information, social progress…), a project with high potential reach, something that I would enjoy doing, and something I believe I can be good at.

Coming to that decision, which represented a big commitment for the next few years of my life, was an incredible emotional roller coaster: some days I felt an incredible excitement, pacing around in my room and taking notes at 4 am. On other days I just felt terrible doubts and anxiety. When people say that the emotional journey is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, they’re not kidding — I realized that as soon as I took the first step.

“the hardest part, no matter the level of success, is the perpetual, ever-recurring loop of mental chatter, difficult emotions and body sensations”

— Someone

Thankfully I was accepted into Entrepreneur First before even leaving my job, which was probably one of the best ways to get started in entrepreneurship. I didn’t find a cofounder there unfortunately, but I learned a lot and found a great network.

First iteration and night coding

After EF I just started coding all the time. I had pretty much the lifestyle of a vampire during summer 2020, spending my nights building the prototype. I made some good progress laying out the bases, but this first version turned out simply unusable and useless. I had developed a personalized learning recommendation algorithm that required a proper concept mapping and the state of knowledge of the users (which concepts they know). The first visual map, a concept dependency mapping, was poorly displayed and no one really understood what it was about. In terms of building an MVP it was simply a failure, but as an exploration phase, it was pretty much a success. I’ll take it as the latter, but I nonetheless reflected on my approach: I was obsessed with building this thing I had in my mind, disregarding the value for users or the constraints such as data acquisition strategy — a huge, obvious mistake in retrospect. In a way I think I was aware of it at the time, but I had to do it. I had to start with the core of the product, the visualization and the personalization, and get better visibility on the problems that would lay ahead. Testing how difficult it was to implement and what issues would arise in terms of UX definitely taught me some valuable lessons, as well as validating that personalized learning was possible with this graph-based approach.

The second iteration (autumn/winter 2020) was more interesting. I tried to think more about what people want, think more about data acquisition, growth, usability, etc. I developed the learning paths functionality back then, explored the learning goals feature (kinds of crowdsourced roadmaps — unplugged now, but will make a comeback ;) ). I started building mockups before the implementation phase. The product started to spread in a lot of directions and ended up with quite a few UX issues.

Spring 2021: applying to programs and feedback

Note: while the /about/team page showed different cofounders from time to time, I was mainly working alone on the project.

As my unemployment money was running out, I started looking for funding. I teamed up with Leo, a potential cofounder I was talking to at the time, and together we applied to the Fast Forward accelerator which is the leading organism in the tech non-profit space. I applied as well to a few other grant programs in Berlin.

Not getting accepted was pretty crushing — my lowest point of the whole project so far. I bounced back after a little soul searching in Athens, and jumped to plan B: freelancing for a while and keep building!

The feedback from Fast Forward was interesting, they were questioning whether the non-profit status was the best form for this project. While comparing to other projects applying to Fast Forward, Sci-Map did feel like an odd one: other non-profits were tackling very tangible societal pains such as racism, human trafficking or others.

In education, many non-profits (e.g. Learning Equality) focused on access to education and targeted children in Africa for instance.
In comparison, Sci-Map offers more of a vitamin at a large scale, rather than medicine to a concrete pain of society. Its impact would be to help people learn effortlessly, to foster curiosity and create new passions. Sure, it would also improve accessibility, but being a service online and in English already means that a very motivated learner would be able to find some kind of learning material to answer their needs.

Not focusing on a highly relatable, tangible pain of society makes building a nonprofit much more difficult: your fundraising and your hiring will be centered around this problem you are fixing and how deeply people connect with it, relate to it. A related problem that arose for Sci-Map was that it made finding a cofounder more difficult than it would already be in the case of a startup.

So, how to adapt and turn around?

The reasons for building a non-profit were two-fold:

• have an organization that can not deviate from its original purpose in the long term, avoiding its impact and vision from being eroded by investor pressure or search for profit.
• Foster user-generated content and contributions: develop trust with users that their contributions will be used properly to help other learners.

I considered DAOs for a while, but it seems way too early/too risky for now as clearing out the weeds is a bet I’d not be willing to take. It could still be a possibility in the future, a more democratic organization — more community-owned, built, and managed. This might also not be for this specific project but for something parallel or complementary to it. I strongly believe that ownership and development of a product can be better than it currently is. Let’s see how things develop — I can see a future where this idea of a learning map leverages some aspects of web3.

The solution that arose was to build an impact startup with a manifesto. Having a manifesto in its DNA, containing a clear mission statement and set of engagements, will hopefully allow our users to trust the organization behind the product, and trust that their contributions will be properly used. Frameworks like Purpose Economy help build this kind of purpose-oriented company model.

The goal would be to become a Zebra company (link): a sustainable for-profit business having a purpose, a mission to empower online learners. At the same time, it would respect some engagements around user-generated content, and remain free to use and open source.
Hopefully, this new form of organization will bring more people in, and enable faster growth.

On a personal level, this change was a bit hard for me to come to terms with. I am an idealist, and it sometimes felt like giving up on an altruistic, purely ethical ideal. From my teenage years I’ve been quite sensible to the negative aspects of capitalism — the damages that the search for profit can cause. I became a bit cynical and wanted to prove (to myself and others) that it was possible to do things another way.

The thing is, working against incentives is hard — getting things done often means aligning incentives and interests properly, and even if people want to have a positive impact, you simply can not ask them to make big sacrifices for it. People can of course be driven by a cause, but most of the time it is because they were affected by it, felt it emotionally. Humans move less for abstract, indirect causes (hello climate change).
In general, you don’t want to work against the current — but rather influence it towards the right direction, organize people based on their needs and interests towards a common goal maximally beneficial for all.

The whole experience and many discussions with people around me taught me to bring more realism and pragmatism in my thinking. A bit of utilitarianism as well: after all, the scale of impact matters, growth matters, and arguably, a well-functioning business can often reach more than a nonprofit. And finally (obviously), business is not a swear word. As for capital eroding purpose, in the end it falls on the people themselves not to become corrupted.

Road to Mapedia

Taking all these learnings into account, I started working on the next evolution of sci-map which would become Mapedia. The name had to change since the scope was more than sciences, but anything an online learner could learn.
While I was freelancing to sustain myself, I worked on high-fidelity mockups of what Mapedia would eventually become. This time I decided on a product design and development process consisting of working on high-fidelity prototypes that would then be user-tested. Splitting the product design and the development was very helpful, it had been an issue in my previous workflow as designing and developing are quite different ways of thinking. It’s better to focus fully on one or the other at one time. Proper user testing on such mockups would hopefully help fix the UX issues that had been tainting the previous versions.
I decided to recenter the product on one thing: building the base of the learning map, a strong “skeleton” that provides value to users through curation and by acting as a reference, and with basic network effects in place. Other features such as personalization would come later: the immediate objective is to make a usable, useful, and growable product there.

During that time, in the summer of 2021, I met Max who had just arrived in Berlin. From our first discussions, he was very interested in the idea and we spontaneously started working on it together. He supported me in the design of the mockups, and together we ran some usability testing sessions with friends of ours.

After some iterations on those high-fidelity prototypes, I went to Sicily and spent my winter implementing them (Siracusa ❤).

So what’s Mapedia ?

Mapedia is the evolution of sci-map based on those learnings, and Max and I teamed up to build it.

It is an impact-oriented startup, built around a manifesto containing a mission and a set of engagements. It is still open source, still free to use, and still unbiased. You can read our manifesto here.

The product is more user and community-centered. Anyone can add and recommend a learning material, suggest a topic or curate a learning path. It has a dynamic, interactive map allowing users to navigate between topics more easily, and have better visibility of the knowledge space. For any topic, it shows the learning materials that are most recommended by the community, and the individual users that recommend it.

It is a base for a learning map providing a better way of learning for anyone online, giving guidance to learners while leaving them in control — a tool for day-to-day learning. You can trust that we have many, many ideas about how to get there ;). We might provide a roadmap at some point in the future, let us know in the comments if you want to see it!

After a few months of development, we opened our beta to the public a few weeks ago. You can check it out here, and already add content.

We’re planning to launch publicly in mid-July, so stay tuned ;). You can follow our newsletter here or follow us on Twitter

Looking back, it was definitely a bumpy road: an emotional rollercoaster during the first year, and I did make some mistakes. I’m however satisfied to have stayed resilient, and I’m super excited for the future. I learned a lot about product development, design, copywriting and entrepreneurship in general. I don’t see myself ever going back to a normal job as an employee: I learned to love the independence I got with this project, I love thinking about these kinds of problems and it’s much more meaningful for me than any other job I can think of.

Finally, special thanks for the support to:

• Sem Hoogstrate
• Leo Laurence
• Ivan Sakov
• Niklas Begley
• Kasia Drozt
• Entrepreneur First
• ImpactHub Berlin
• Fast Forward

Keep on learning;)

Olivier