Your two suggestions are both close to things we had in mind (on the first one we were thinking less someone who’s very new, as someone who’s somewhat engaged already, and may be up-to-speed on some areas but want to learn more about others).
Another use case is helping people who are considering doing research or strategy work to orient themselves with respect to the whole space of current thinking. This can help people to understand how different parts of research translate into better decisions, which in turn can help them to pick more crucial questions to work on. The hierarchical structure can also make it more apparent if there’s a topic which should be worked on but hasn’t been: rather than just explore out from existing streetlights we can spot where there are big patches of darkness. This might be strengthened by your suggestion of a hybrid wiki/forum (we talked about something in this direction, and our feeling was “could be cool, revisit later”).
Yeah, I see potential for this to be useful even if no-one uses it who isn’t already familiar with the content: just structuring and categorising the information allows us to be clearer about which questions we can and can’t answer, and be more aware of our conceptual gaps or weak points. I see that as a really useful and underrated clarifying tool, and I’m excited to see it develop further.
If the structuring and organizing of the content is a big part of its added value, that can be hard to preserve in a wiki or forum, which are often chaotic by nature. There’s probably a trade-off between
curation of content, particularly ensuring that content meets overarching goals and broad organizational principles, avoids duplication, self-contradiction, etc.
quantity and depth of content, responsiveness to changes and developments, representation of a range of perspectives, and some sense of community-wide legitimacy
Broadly speaking, I’d guess that getting more people involved hurts (1) and helps (2). We already have a forum and a wiki, so maybe (2) is better served by existing resources, and your comparative advantage is (1). But I’m open-minded about the possibility that you can find a way to manage the tradeoff and maintain the structure despite an open contribution model.
Your two suggestions are both close to things we had in mind (on the first one we were thinking less someone who’s very new, as someone who’s somewhat engaged already, and may be up-to-speed on some areas but want to learn more about others).
Another use case is helping people who are considering doing research or strategy work to orient themselves with respect to the whole space of current thinking. This can help people to understand how different parts of research translate into better decisions, which in turn can help them to pick more crucial questions to work on. The hierarchical structure can also make it more apparent if there’s a topic which should be worked on but hasn’t been: rather than just explore out from existing streetlights we can spot where there are big patches of darkness. This might be strengthened by your suggestion of a hybrid wiki/forum (we talked about something in this direction, and our feeling was “could be cool, revisit later”).
Yeah, I see potential for this to be useful even if no-one uses it who isn’t already familiar with the content: just structuring and categorising the information allows us to be clearer about which questions we can and can’t answer, and be more aware of our conceptual gaps or weak points. I see that as a really useful and underrated clarifying tool, and I’m excited to see it develop further.
If the structuring and organizing of the content is a big part of its added value, that can be hard to preserve in a wiki or forum, which are often chaotic by nature. There’s probably a trade-off between
curation of content, particularly ensuring that content meets overarching goals and broad organizational principles, avoids duplication, self-contradiction, etc.
quantity and depth of content, responsiveness to changes and developments, representation of a range of perspectives, and some sense of community-wide legitimacy
Broadly speaking, I’d guess that getting more people involved hurts (1) and helps (2). We already have a forum and a wiki, so maybe (2) is better served by existing resources, and your comparative advantage is (1). But I’m open-minded about the possibility that you can find a way to manage the tradeoff and maintain the structure despite an open contribution model.