What do you want to see brought forth into the world?

By Anonymous -

How does one make a thing? Or perhaps a better question, as Eric Ries asks, is “why should we make it?” This further echoes Mark Buntzen’s question, asked horribly early in the morning, with me only part way through my first coffee. “What do you want to see brought forth into the world?” I’ve been grappling with these questions, and am beginning to find the glimmerings of an answer.

The 'thing' I care most about, is access. I want to see people get (better, more) access, especially people who currently do not have it. The obvious question then, is access to what?

That’s a bit harder. Not to books or computers (or 3D printers) - those are just delivery mechanisms for information. Maybe access to skills? That seems too short term. Perhaps it is access to ways of seeing or ways of knowing. If people could access the frameworks of knowledge, they could decide what they needed, and how to find it. For example, I acutely feel the loss of oral cultures and worldviews in our rush to litericise, but also see the value my ancestors saw in the written word – it gave them access, to other ways of seeing and knowing.

We now see another shift happening – knowledge gathering is increasingly moving towards learning through making and talanoa – a shift which may be seen as a ‘return’ to orality.

This leads to two questions:
·          As Libraries move (backwards) into the future, how do we help our communities learn to access these knowledge frameworks?
·         How do we resource this learning?

I believe the Product Development Experiment is one response to those questions. The premise is that we can create business-to-business 'products' from great library services, and channel the revenue earned into more experimentation. 

If this works, we will have both new models of working (Lean Startup in a Public Library context), and revenue to fund communities/libraries to experiment. As anyone who has tried anything can say, innovation implies failure. If we can reduce the risk (and fear) of failure by finding revenue streams that are not directly linked to the public purse...this is good, yeah?

This is a six month experiment. And while I am scared (there certainly are risks), the potential far outweighs the risk. This is a chance, not only for the *Libraries to learn through making+talanoa, but to resource our communities to learn through making+talanoa.

I think that answers Mark. And Eric. Now to work out the how. 

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