Ravelry: A Knowledge Supermarket for Knitters

If you are wondering what a fully fleshed out Knowledge Supermarket looks like, find someone in your life who knits and head on over to Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com This began as a social networking site for knitters, but it has become the best example of a public Knowledge Supermarket that I've seen.

(If you don't have any knitters in your life, I pity you - there's nothing more cozy than handknit cashmere socks - but you can create your own account so that you can poke around - and learn to knit your own socks).

Knitting is a technical craft with hundreds of years' worth of accumulated knowledge about stitch patterns, garment construction, fibers and yarns, and repeatable methods for producing intricate colorwork and texture.

Ravelry's developers have grouped all of this knowledge into the categories that will make this knowledge easy to reuse, provided a powerful search engine and data structures that support knowledge creation and reuse. A simple editing process keeps it all accurate. Meanwhile, the community has populated the libraries and made this a hub of links that bring the entire Internet's accumulation of knowledge available to Ravelry's knitters.

Here is one use case to show how powerful this is:

I find an interesting kind of yarn that I've never seen before, and want to know what I can do with it. On Ravelry, chances are that someone else found the yarn first and put in all the information that's important to me as a knitter - things like how many meters there are per ball of it, and how well it wears - and other knitters have linked their projects they made with this yarn. Ravelry makes some pattern suggestions for me, and I select one. If this is a free pattern, I just download it as a PDF and if not, I purchase it right online first.

If I have my iPhone with me, I can do all of this right in the yarn shop so that I can purchase the right amount of yarn and other supplies for the project, without having to make extra trips.

Now I create a project page that links to all of Ravelry's information about the yarn and the pattern, including the mistakes in the printed version of the pattern and how others have corrected them. I can post pictures of my WIP and my finished garment, then add my own comments about the yarn and pattern to share with the next person who uses them.

Meanwhile, if I encounter a new technique in the pattern, a search by the name of the technique pulls up blog posts, online discussions, photographs and even YouTube videos that demonstrate it for me.

There is no need to reinvent anything in a craft that's been perfected over hundreds of years, and having all that knowledge at our fingertips frees up our creativity for exploring how to use these techniques in new ways.

In my next post, I'll share one amazing project that was only possible because this site's libraries and online community pulls all this knowledge together in one place.

In the meantime, imagine if you had something like this for your key product knowledge inside your company? What would you be able to do that you can't do now?