Hi Guys, I’m not sure I have really understood the “use case” to use an IT term for your knowledge platform. Isn’t the current seriousplaypro platform exactly that.? On this site, some people ask for recommendations of questions or roadmaps and others share examples of questions or approaches that they feel may be of value to others. This is an example of the collaborative economy. In 2010, when we set up this community, there was an idea going around that may have even been initiated by LEGO that a whole market would establish itself, where good designers would sell their design skills to folk who could facilitate, but not design a roadmap, that others who might be good at designing might not feel so happy managing a group and then others again might be good at selling the idea and getting business, but might not be happy to deliver the engagement at all.
There is nothing stopping us from selling our individual skills, but until now I have seen very few cases of LSP trained people outsourcing part of their mandate to colleagues here on seriousplaypro. On the other hand, people do offer their knowledge for free.
Now, if you wanted to set up a more formal repository of professional knowledge or experience, I think you might find yourself up against a structural challenge. How would you formalise all of the environmental elements that influence your choice of exercises, questions, timing, group size, etc. in order to have any value?
The point that I’m trying to get at is that if I have two clients of roughly the same size from the same industry sector in the same country and in the same language, who give me exactly the same mandate, with exactly the same words in the contract, the final workshops, including the roadmaps will be different, because the organisations are different, the time of year is different, current affairs are different. Because beyond all the things that are the same, the people in those organisations starting with the sponsors for the mandate are different. Therefore you need to tailor your workshop components to the actual needs of those people in those organisations.
So, basically, if you want to structure your knowledge, the amount of metadata you would need to describe the contextual setting would be huge and after doing all that the value of the knowledge would be questionable because after searching the database and obtaining a result, you couldn’t guarantee that the result would be useful in your own context. So finally the query result from the database could only serve as a template, which would then need to be modified.
And to formalise that knowledge into the database’s structure would take a lot of effort. To what extent would be people be prepared to go through the additional effort of structuring their experience without any form of compensation?
If you think it would work, by all means try.
Personally, I am happy to see that more people are using seriousplaypro and I fear that starting up another tool will detract from the momentum that we are finally gathering.
All the best,
Eli
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