The OurBigBook Project is creating the ultimate tool to publish textbooks/personal knowledge bases/Zettelkasten/digital gardens in the learn in public philosophy, and to be our best shot yet at the final real-world Encyclopedia Galactica by allowing effective mind melding/collective intelligence.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous.
Ultimate goal: destroy the currently grossly inefficient education system and replace it with a much more inspiring system where people learn what they want as fast as possible to reach their goals faster without so much useless pain.
How to get there: create a website that incentivizes learners (notably university students taking courses) to write freely licensed university-level natural science books in their own words for free. Their motivation for doing that are:
- getting their knowledge globally recognized and thus better jobs
- improving the world
- learning by teaching
Notable features:
- focus on mind melding/collective intelligence via the topics feature, which makes your articles easier for others to find with a sort-by upvote Stack Overflow-like view of multiple users articles on the same topic
Video 1. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like OurBigBook Web topics
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Video 2. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the VS Code extension.
The OurBigBook Web website is the main tool of the project. OurBigBook CLI is another complementary tool.
- OurBigBook.com: reference OurBigBook Web instance
- donate to the OurBigBook Project: donate
- project announcements:
- Section 12.14.5. "News": long form
- twitter.com/OurBigBook: short form. Other official accounts at: Section 12.14.1. "Official accounts"
- cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook-com: further rationale behind the project by the founder Ciro Santilli
- cirosantilli.com: showcase static demo document with interesting content, published with OurBigBook CLI. Primary inspiration for OurBigBook development.
- cirosantilli.com/oxford-nanopore-river-bacteria: a self-contained tutorial style part of the above. Note how internal links integrate seamlessly into the more global topic of biology, e.g. when talking about DNA we link to the global topic cirosantilli.com/dna.
- github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/blob/dev/oxford-nanopore-river-bacteria.bigb: source of the above showcase documents
- Section 3.2. "Design goals": OurBigBook Markup and OurBigBook CLI feature overview
- github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook: OurBigBook source code
- github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues: project issue tracker
- github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/blob/master/README.bigb: source for this document
- docs.ourbigbook.com: rendered version of this document
- docs.ourbigbook.com/editor: live in-browser editor demo
- github.com/ourbigbook/template: good template to get started with OurBigBook CLI, see Section 5.2. "OurBigBook CLI quick start"
- cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook-media: media for the project such as for documentation and publicity, more info: Section 12.12. "OurBigBook media repository"
