Ciro Santilli Ciro is looking for:
- university teachers who might be interested in trying it out as described at Section "Action plan", especially those who already use open licenses for their lecture notes
- funding possibilities for this project, including donations as mentioned at Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com" and contracts
The initial incentive for the creators is to make them famous and allow them to get more fulfilling jobs more easily, although Ciro also wants to add money transfer mechanisms to it later on.
We can't rely on teachers writing materials, because they simply don't have enough incentive: publication count is all that matters to their careers. The students however, are desperate to prove themselves to the world, and becoming famous for amazing educational content is something that some of them might want to spend their times on, besides grinding for useless grade.
There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.
Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.
That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.
Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:
- extra-curricular initiatives to get younger children interested in science. These may have some money stream coming from the parents of the children. This happens because for young children, the parents are more in control, and the parents, unlike the students, have some money to spend. An example: www.littlehouseofscience.com/The space is also further crowded by several not-for profits.This business model is possible because experiments for young children may be cheap to realize, unlike any experiment that would matter to a teenager or adult.
- creating a private university, for profit or not. Of course, at this point, you would be either:
- competing against the reputation and funding of century old universities
- or be offering more boring, lower tech or techless courses, to (God forbid the phrasing) "worse students", i.e. at a "worse university"
Teenagers and young adults:
- don't have money to give you if you want to "help them learn for real"
- are somewhat forced to obtain their "reputable university" reputation to kickstart their careers
It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.
This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:
- www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dzvoxXrjA9xNHLpdgLhTkZz "Obsessed" playlist by Wired. Helps Ciro feel better about himself.
- Don Quixote
- pipe dream
- Video "Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)"
Dangerous combination:
One man with a laptop and a dream.and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.
Once the ball starts rolling, these are people who should be contacted.
Basically anything under educational charitable organization counts.
It is also worth having a look under the Wikipedia page for open educational resources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
Start with consulting for universities to get some cash flowing.
Help teachers create perfect courses.
At the same time, develop the website, and use the generated content to bootstrap it.
Choose a domain of knowledge, generate perfect courses for it, and find all teachers of the domain in the world who are teaching that and help them out.
Then expand out to other domains.
TODO: which domain of knowledge should we go for? The more precise the better.
- maths is perfect because it "never" changes. But does not make money.
- computer science might be good, e.g. machine learning.
If enough people use it, we could let people sell knowledge content through us.
Teachers have the incentive of making open source to get more students.
Students pay when they want help to learn something.
We take a cut of the transactions.
However this goes a bit against our "open content" ideal.
Forced sponsorware would be a possibility.
Would be a bit like Fiverr. Hmmm, maybe this is not a good thing ;-)
Don't like this very much, but if it's the only way...
Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.
Then:
- like YouTube, pay creators proportionally to views/metrics
- paid subscription to remove ads from site
Maybe we should talk to innovative schools, as they might be more open to such use of technology.
Not a fun of giving up control for such a low-maintenance cost venture... but keeping a list just in case...