Lego Brick Commons & Spontaneous Collaboration

This piece is an adaptation of the slides I put together/drew for my upcoming lightning talk at DWeb Camp . It's easy to get caught up in the seriousness of some of these ideas and I wanted to make it more fun and playful, hence the Lego theme and mediocre hand-drawn pictures. I've taken a lot of inspiration from ecological economist Kate Raworth (author of Doughnut Economics ) who recently started a circus to communicate her ongoing academic work. I recently learned about it in this podcast episode .

If you've ever had a Lego phase in your life, you'll be familiar with the sight of piles of Lego splayed out on the floor. These piles are the starting point of any building journey.

Many of us who've built Lego in the past built from sets with instructions. Fewer of us ditch the instructions and venture into uncharted territory -- building sets from our own imagination.

It gets significantly more difficult but also infinitely more creative. Especially with a big bin of Lego pieces, the limit of what can be built truly is one's imagination.

In my own experience, they process involved discovery, discernment, curation and creation. Everything starts with an idea or an initial hypothesis. Then it's a iterative, cyclical process all the way until the end.

First, I had to search through my pile of Lego, collecting an initial set of pieces I think are relevant or useful to what I'm building. At some point, I'd start assembling some of the initial components or experiment with a certain contraption I wasn't fully sure how it would actually work. I'd then realize I need more pieces of specific types, so I go back to the pile and look again.

This iterative process was necessary: I didn't know fully what I could build without knowing what I had, and I couldn't really know what I had until I had a reason to look for it. Furthermore, I didn't really know what I could build, until I straight-up tried building it.

It was an immensely consuming and fulfilling hobby. I spent hours and hours in my room this way. Yes, I'd be proud of the final creation (showing it off to my friends and whatnot) but really it was the process itself that was most fulfilling. And eventually, I'd have to break down an old creation to make those pieces available again for the next.

The cycle of creation, Samsara , in kids toy format.

What if Lego building was collaborative?

What would the above process look like if it was more collective? For example, imagine if there was a shared, common space where lego builders could convene and pool their lego together: The Lego Brick Commons.

Firstly, this expands the total set of pieces available to any participant -- an immediate win. Sometimes there really are material constraints on what can be built -- not having the right piece, not enough of them, or not even knowing that certain pieces exist (which can limit one's imagination).

This is the obvious material advantage of commoning resources.

However, there's another benefit of convening people in this (hypothetical) way: spontaneous collaboration. If a whole bunch of creative lego builders were sharing space together, inevitably people would start collaborating. It's kind of just what we do .

"Hey, I'm looking for a piece like this. Could anyone let me know if they find one like it in their pile?"

"That's a cool way to build that contraption. How did you do that?"

"I noticed you're trying to complete this section with these kinds of pieces. Have you considered doing it this way instead?"

"I built this small component, but realized I don't need it. Could anyone else make use of it?"

"Does anyone have any ideas for how I can connect all these components I've built together?"

The iterative process of searching, experimenting, learning, and building becomes so much more effective and playful when socialized (in the right kind of environment, obviously).

I don't know about you, but this place sounds like a pretty rad collaborative environment to be in. Wouldn't it be cool if our online spaces were more like this?

Semble is the Lego Brick Commons for your bookmarks

In simple terms, Semble attempts to do what the above Lego Brick Commons does for an individual persons set of Lego pieces but for individual peoples digital bookmarks.

We go years collecting bookmarks. Sometimes we never use them, others we often come back to 'build' new perspectives, understandings, write a blog post and so on. We use our bookmarks to make sense in some kind of way.

Yet, their potential is severely limited by staying locked away, never to be found or used by others with shared interests. If we pooled them together, a whole new world of possibilities open up. We start to see what other people are working on or thinking about. Ideas cross pollinate. Collaboration emerges spontaneously.

The modular science angle

In broad strokes, scientific research is shared in these big, monolithic papers that condense years of work and meaningful but perhaps tangential side quests into a single narrative output: abstract, method, results, conclusion. etc.

In Lego terms, it's as if people work on a set for years and only show the final result. Leaving out all the interesting lego pieces they found along the way, all the cool little components they built but ultimately left out. All the other sets they dismantled to find the exact piece they needed.

Arguably, what's most useful to share with other lego builders, though, is all that stuff that happens in between. They learn way more about how the set got built, why it was built, and any important lessons that came about.

What scientists and researchers (and journalists and analysts and writers and maybe even you) need are not only better ways to share the final output, but tools and environments for sharing the process that led them there. Sometimes that just means sharing space to create and work in.

At it's core, this really is what the modular science movement is all about: collaboration.

Onward!

Go forth, turn your bookmarks into the building blocks of a collaborative knowledge commons.

Semble is both a network of knowledge trails and the map for navigating them