Share back & Contribute
Why sharing back is crucial for our future
Hi good to see you clicking this section of the Academy. This topic is very important for the future of Precious Plastic. Let me explain, community power 💪 Most of the development published here in the Academy comes from the headquarters, we invite people from the community to our workspace and develop new things. This is for sure a fun and powerful way of developing. But it also requires quite some resources (budget, food, beds, space etc) And realistically we are never able to invite each one of you plastic experts here to the headquarters. And with a growing community and members around to world we (the community) figures out a lot of things on a daily base, improvements, machine hacks, washing systems, safety features etc. More and more we need to share knowledge with each-other, from around the world remotely. So we don’t all have to make the same mistakes and we can learn from each other.
5 reasons why you should share back
1. 🏅 Digital Street Credit: It strengthens your credibility in the community. People tend to help more if they see you contribute.
2. 🤝 Help others: Obviously people can just copy/past your work. which is amazing. But even if they don't exactly do it. Just sharing your process helps a lot for people to learn and gain knowledge. It's either way useful.
3. 📝 Knowledge stays relevant: People are in different stages of development. So others might still use the knowledge you uploaded 3 years later for their project. It takes you some effort ones but keeps living on and helping people for years to come. -getting karma points for years!
4. ⭐️ You already did the hard work When you are thinking about documentation you already did most of the work. You made a machine, designed a product, made a hack etc.. Basically 95% of the hard work is already done! But you just need to do that tiny last 5% which is about sharing back.
5. 🙃 Five sounds better then four: So point 5 is just to make a point
Centralised documentation: How to’s
Documentation and sharing knowledge is actually one of the challenges with working open-source. You easily end up with knowledge shattered on the web. Questions, Discord, GitHub, Stackoverflow, comments etc. It easily becomes a mess making it very hard to really find good long term information back. Thats why we started working on how-tos. A centralised place in the community where members can upload their design, lessons, hacks, upgrades etc. You can filter on tags to find what you need and refer to other how-to. Its a place to centralise all the things we as a community learn. We need each other.
Questions
Because there is still a lot to figure out when it comes to plastic recycling, we've started working on Questions. It's a section designed to facilitate the exchange of technical knowledge and expertise within the Precious Plastic community in the long-term. In a nutshell, its purpose it's to help you find answers to your technical questions about plastic recycling, machine operation, material properties and more.
Note: The Questions section is still very much under development. Many features like marking as completed and adding media to the comments are still missing. But the more you use it the easier for us to gather feedback and add improvements. So help us pioneering to make it better for the rest.
Tag us! #preciousplastic
When you share your creations with the world, please mention/tag Precious Plastic. Why?
Crediting: We give everything away for free and enable thousands in the world to make some cash with recycling machines or products. So a little thank you in form of a mention should be easy to give back 🙃
Featuring: We are always stalking the community to find inspiring creations to share. But we can only feature you on our social media or videos, if we actually FIND you and see that you are connected to Precious Plastic. So what to do? Use the hashtag #preciousplastic, or even better mention @realpreciousplastic, to help us find you
- ⭐️ Follow our instagram to have a look at beautiful things from our community
- ⭐️ Browse the community Facebook to see real and rough things made by our global army
- ⭐️ Visit this chapter in the academy to see step by step how to create the best how-to