When we started the OpenTechSchool movement about a year ago, we established a few core values we follow. Alongside of that we also promised ourself to “document everything” to make it the easiest for others to copy the concept and get their own education efforts off the ground the most efficiently possible. This is of course an unachievable ideal but we are sure todays launch of the ask.OpenTechSchool knowledge base brings us a hell lot closer.
Already with Project Blueprint we tried to provide more in-depth documentation on how to do things and share, what works for us. Out of that came a bunch of handbooks, we constantly iterate over and publish new ones. From early on we also used twitter to publish information, numbers and statistics like the number of participants of a particular workshop. We tried to document as much as possible - we even counted cats - and managed to publish a lot of them. But we are very aware of that fact that there is a difference between publishing and making information accessible.
And especially with the growing network of local teams more and more information was collected and published within email conversations and not made available to the broader audience. At the same time it became increasingly difficult to find the right people to speak to if you actually wanted to get something of the ground or to follow updates and things on-going around a certain area. With our askbot knowledge base we are tackling these problems.
We want this to become a central knowledge base for everything OpenTechSchool; from the numbers we’ve collected on workshop participation or the current size of our community, and a starting point for new initiatives to get off the ground, like this discussion about tools to use for an advanced github workshop, this one about a video-workshop all the way through to organising groups more efficiently, like this request for others to join starting OTS in Brussels.
But ask.OpenTechSchool isn’t limited to that, quite the opposite: everyone is welcome to ask any question about and around OpenTechSchool, our projects and events and everything on-going. So if you have any question or request, don’t panic, just go to ask.opentechschool.org, ask us and the whole OpenTechSchool community will do the best to get you an answer. Oh, and if there is a conversion you’d simply like to stay up to date on, there is a handy “follow”-button to your right and you’ll receive emails on every change.
Thanks to Marc Falardeau for the great picture.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://blog.opentechschool.org/2013/05/more-documentation-and-more-open-too.html