---
title: Reduce, reuse, recycle
---

## Reduce, reuse, recycle

### Motivation

This pattern can guide project participants in identifying and managing
available resources.

### Context

In a peer production context, you are simultaneously “making stuff” and
building on the work of others.

### Forces

>  **Derivative**: you don’t have to do everything yourself!
>  **Sensemaking**: resources are useful only when you can make sense of them.
>  **Sharing**: your understanding gains robustness when you share with others.

### Problem

Many projects die because the cost of
<span><span>[Reinventing the Wheel](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReinventingTheWheel)</span></span> \[c2\]
is too high. However, this is just one possible symptom of overfocus on
a few priorities. Concerns may also arise if the project’s output is not
actually used by anyone.

### Solution

“Steal like an artist,” and make it possible for other people to build
on your work too. In the Peeragogy project, we
have used off-the-shelf and hosted software suited to the task at hand
(including: Drupal, Google+, Google Hangouts, Google Docs, Wordpress,
pandoc, Github, ShareLaTeX). Early on we agreed to release our
*Peeragogy Handbook* under the terms of the Creative Commons Public
Domain Dedication (CC0), the legal instrument that grants the greatest
possible leeway to downstream users.[^fn1]
This has allowed us and others to repurpose and improve its contents in
other settings, including the current paper. Follow the steps indicated
by the keywords in the pattern’s title:

- *Reduce* the panoply of interesting interrelated ideas and methods
to a functional core (e.g. writing a book).
- *Reuse* resources relevant to this aim, factoring in “things I was
going to have to do anyway” from everyone involved.
- *Recycle* what you’ve created in new connections and relationships.

*A paradigmatic example of found-art. “Fountain by R. Mutt, Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS”.*

### Rationale

Clearly we are not the first people to notice the problems with
wheel-reinvention, including “missing opportunities, repeating common
mistakes, and working harder than we need to.”[^fn2]
As a guest in one of our hangouts, Willow Brugh, of Geeks
without Bounds and the MIT Media Lab, remarked that *people often think
that they need to build a community, and so fail to recognize that they
are already part of a community.*[^fn3]
converted our old pattern catalog from the *Peeragogy Handbook* into
this paper, sharing it with a new community and gaining new
perspectives; could we do something similar again?

### Resolution

Reweaving old material into **derivative** designs and new material into
existing frameworks, we build deeper understanding, and carry out
collective **sensemaking**. The project’s
<span><span>Roadmap</span></span> develops by making sense of existing
resources – including our worries and concerns. Often we only know what
these are when we attempt to **share** them. Drawing on a wide range of
resources boosts our collective <span><span>Carrying
capacity</span></span>.

### Example 1

Contributors are encouraged to recycle existing works that are
compatible with the Wikimedia-wide Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-By-SA) license.[^fn4]
Some sub-projects have been created purely to help
repurpose other existing works in this way.[^fn5]
On the downstream side, DBPedia is an important resource
for the semantic web, built by collating data from Wikipedia’s
“infoboxes.”[^fn6]
themselves increasingly being populated automatically using information
from WikiData.[^fn7]
able to develop tools that reuse Wikipedia content in other ways <span
class="citation">\[1,2\]</span>, However, these research projects do not
always result in a tool that is accessible to day-to-day users.

### Example 2

The knowledge resources and collaboration tools currently available
online are what make a low-cost, high-quality, formally-accredited
future university conceivable. However, the available resources are not
always as organized as they would need to be for educative purposes, so
peeragogues can usefully put effort into <span><span>Reduce, reuse,
recycle</span></span>’ing available resources into a functioning
university Library.

### What’s Next in the Peeragogy Project

Are there other educational resources and peeragogical case studies that
we could fold into our work? Can we recycle material from the *Peeragogy
Handbook* into a format that is easier to understand and apply?

### References

1. Silvan Reinhold. 2006. WikiTrails: Augmenting wiki structure for collaborative, interdisciplinary learning. *Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis*, ACM, 47–58.

2. Nathalie Henry Riche, Bongshin Lee, and Fanny Chevalier. 2010. IChase: Supporting exploration and awareness of editing activities on Wikipedia. *Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces*, ACM, 59–66.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[^fn1]: <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>

[^fn2]: <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/19/learning-patterns-new-way-share-important-lessons/>

[^fn3]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpyQfYVKfBI>

[^fn4]: <https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15411/>

[^fn5]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/PlanetMath_Exchange>

[^fn6]: <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/>

[^fn7]: <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page>