If we want our hard work to be useful, we have to tell people about it; otherwise, when we die, our ideas and knowledge will die with us.
If we communicate our experiences and what we learn from them, then others can learn from us long after we’re gone. This is the basis of progress, and the only form of immortality we have available to us.
But the ugly truth is that even communicated ideas can be lost. Journals can get thrown out or damaged, and things that we tell others can be forgotten or misremembered.
Even more troubling is that our ideas can easily be dismissed as being obsolete or irrelevant by future generations if they’re not kept fresh in some way. A dusty idea may be better than one hot off the press, but if it’s clothed in obsolete technologies, old-fashioned language, or mixed in with ideas that really are obsolete, then it will be largely ignored.
What we need is a way to give ideas a life of their own so they can live and grow beyond us. That is what an open artifact project is all about.
Open Artifacts
First, an artifact is simply something that we have created, part of the human-designed world. Our thoughts, knowledge and experiences are internal to us, but we use them to create things that exist outside of us. Those things are artifacts. Your artifacts reflect who you are, and are part of your thinking processes. They can be a test of whether your ideas actually work in the real world.
An open artifact project is like an open source project, but it’s not limited to software. The artifacts of our work are published in a form that is accessible to others in the hope that they will learn from them and contribute to them. Almost any human artifact can be an open artifact. For example, if you write a book, you could make the manuscript an open artifact project and invite others to contribute to the second edition.
Open artifacts communicate our ideas in such a way that others can take them, build on them, and nurture them so they stay alive. That’s why I think making something seemingly finished — like a book — into an open artifact project is such a great idea.
We think of these things we create as being static, but with the exception of the arts, where a creation stands on it’s own as a reflection of the culture and time in which it is created, they are not static. The idea that a human invention can ever be finished is an illusion. Our world is subject to evolutionary processes and if a part of that world cannot evolve within the whole, it is doomed to extinction.
Take, for example, a textbook that was written twenty or thirty years ago. It may be a masterpiece of instruction, with amazing explanations that illuminate difficult ideas, but since some portion of the subject matter is out of date, no one wants to look at it. An expert might know what parts are obsolete, but a student wouldn’t want to risk learning something that was now considered incorrect.
If that same textbook is made into an open artifact project, then the experts can make the corrections that are needed, removing ideas that have been disproved (or better yet, putting them into a historical context), and the book can stay relevant. The best material is preserved and the whole project is kept alive as a living document.
The Open Artifacts Initiative
In the coming weeks, I will be launching the Open Artifacts Initiative to help promote the creation of open artifact projects. If you’re interested in knowing more, feel free to send me an email. Otherwise, look for an announcement soon.
