Love Knowledge: The Reboot

After a 7 year hiatus, Love Knowledge has returned. There is so much to discuss it's hard to know where to begin. I'll start with perhaps the most obvious question, where have we been all this time?

It may not be a secret, certainly not to those close to me, that Love Knowledge has been, in large part, a one man effort. Despite my enormous gratitude to everyone that has been involved with Love Knowledge since the beginning, like our initial board members and staff volunteers, those closest to the project should not be insulted to hear this as I initially did this as a full-time unpaid job while everyone else did this as a side effort. I mention this because the reason for our 7 year absence rests solely with me, Jonathan Galletta, the founder of Love Knowledge. After running the organization for 3 years, having earned no income the entire time, I had used up all my savings and was forced to look for a paid role again doing something else. This also coincided with the birth of my first son who was born 2 months later. And, to be perfectly frank, I was emotionally and mentally drained after 3 years of non-stop work. I needed to step away and focus on getting my life back together. 

One day I will write about all the details of my journey as I do think it makes for an interesting story, but for now, I want to focus on Love Knowledge. I have always been about promoting the mission and values of the organization and tried not to insert my own personal story into this, for better or worse. One could say it was better because the focus was on the mission, what we stand for, and doing the best job of disseminating what I and our team thought were important news stories and sources of information. On the other hand, perhaps having a more personal touch would have sparked more interest in the public, built more trust in our organization, and led to more of a following which we so dearly lacked. It's hard to say what was the right approach but things are different now, and this reboot will not look like our initial launch.

First, I have a rather intense full-time job and a family now, so I do not have time to work on this very much. Anyone with a family knows that free time is extremely limited, so I make no claims that I can devote much time to this project. But for me, Love Knowledge is my life's work. I see it as my purpose, my highest calling, and something I believe to have the potential to have the greatest positive impact on society, so I press on. 

Second, given the limited availability of time, my focus won't be so much on the daily updates of current news, which previously took up the majority of my time. In the span of 3 years, we managed to publish nearly 4,000 articles across a dozen different categories. Although the articles we published were sourced elsewhere, the time it took to review thousands more and filter to the most important ones, read and verify them, edit and post them, and so forth, all took a lot of time. Now, however, I want to focus more on the big picture of discussing news sources and how we rank/filter/analyze our sources of information, writing original articles and analysis, and going into great detail about the plans and vision of how Love Knowledge could be developed into a highly sophisticated and powerful educational platform.

Part of the original plan of this website was to show people a base level of key functionality, hoping to inspire others to see the potential of what we could build. From the wide range of categories and topics we were looking to cover to the unique structure of combining an independent news curation platform with a free online course platform with an educational library (of books, documentaries, podcasts, and so on) along with a social networking community, this was designed to be the foundation of a comprehensive educational platform. A key component of that has always been public involvement as this is a communal effort for a communal cause. Unlike media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and X, public feedback is actively sought after and will be seriously considered in our ongoing development of this website and organization. 

Third and finally, I see this reboot as a much more "open" project this time around. The first time, I had a more structured approach built on adding more news and slowly building out all the content, trying to market the site a little here and there, reaching out to a few other non-profits to collaborate, but mainly sticking to the news and content I was trying to promote. This time, I'm much more open to trying new approaches and being flexible with this as, again, this is not my full-time job and I am not all-in, so to speak, needing this to take off and be successful. Of course I would love for it to be, but I am going to be trying out various ideas to see what works and what doesn't.

As an example, one thing that I have done in the past 7 years was attend a coding bootcamp in an effort to become a software engineer. I very much would love to combine that passion with this passion and develop all the more advanced features (soon to be discussed) myself, but I'm also not opposed to hiring a developer to get things done faster. Which is another potential idea, creating mini fundraisers to pay for incremental advancements. I would discuss various options on improving our infrastructure, hopefully have an open discussion with our followers and website users, and try to come to a consensus on the best path forward. 

Stay tuned for more and I hope you'll join me (and our remaining trimmed down board of directors) in expanding Love Knowledge to be a more valuable public resource.

Thanks,

Jonathan