Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

make OurBigBook Markup good enough, to the point that it allows to create a static version of the website, which is used to prototype certain ideas, and for Ciro to start writing test content.

Status March 2022: reached a point that it is already highly usable. The following website may continue.

find a university teacher would would like to try it out.

Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.

He would like act like a "super student" who has a lot of free time and motivation.

Ciro would start by mapping the headers of the lecture notes onto the website, and then slowly adding content as he feels the need to improve certain explanations.

Finding teachers willing to allow this will be a major roadblock: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA.

If such enlightened teacher is found, it will allow for the initial validation of the website, to decide what kind of tweaking the idea might need, and start uploading quality technical content to the site.

if things seem to be working, start adding more advance features: PageRank-like ranking sorting and WYSIWYG editing

The recommendation algorithms notably is left for a second stage because it needs real world data to be tested. And at the beginning, before Eternal September kicks in, there would be few posts written by well educated university students, so a simple sort by upvote would likely be good enough.

and on the other hand, how will you get university students to trust you are not a pedophile and that you actually want to help them?

The missing aspect is how to join their main "class communication group", e.g. a WhatsApp or Discord chat they have. That would be the perfect entry point to communicate with the end users. But that entry point is also generally closed exclusively for students, and sometimes lecturers, and will not accept anyone external.

Perhaps Ciro would be able to do something with one of the two Universities he attended in the past: École Polytechnique or University of São Paulo. But there was no clear channel in those institutions for that. There is either an "infinitely noisy Facebook with everyone that bothered" or silence, deathly silence and isolation of no contact. The key hard part is getting a per-course granularity chat. Discord Student Hubs are a fantastic initiative in that area. Shame that Discord is an unusable mess with zero ways to select which notifications you care about: Section "Discord email notifications"!

One approach method that shows some promise is to follow the Student societies, which often host open events of interest outside of work hours.