Issue #11: From Cave Walls to Digital Queries: The Evolution of Community Wisdom in Machuca Valley

Launch of a new platform Machuca Answers: A New Chapter in Local Collaboration

History

The year is 3,400 BCE, you’re sitting in a cave with your mates, about to go out to hunt an elephant. It’s your first hunt, so you’re a bit nervous, you look around and notice everyone has a spear but you. You turn to Mike(yes, they had “Mikes” back then) and ask “Hey Mike! Where did you guys get them spears?”. Mike chuckles happily at such a simpleton question and then proceeds to explain how you take a rock, a stick and some grass to tie it all together, or if that’s too much, Lagar the tribe elder will give me one in exchange for a goat.

25 years later you’re sitting in the same cave, now much older and wiser, with many elephant hunts behind you, getting ready to go out on yet another one. A young chap sitting next to you, looking nervously around, turns and asks: “Hey Mike, where do you guys get spears around here?”…

We’d like to think that we know how this story ends, writing is invented, we start to record spear-making techniques and suddenly knowledge is shared “at scale” through cave drawings instead of orally.

Current Reality

Scroll forward to 2024, the place is Machuca Valley, we’ve had 5,000+ years of progress, we’ve evolved from cave drawings to scroll writing to books to Internet. We have YouTube and Google Maps and Yelp and TripsAdvisor and slew of Costa Rican bloggers sharing their stories about how to navigate this country. And yet this is a quite common occurrence:

It’s a familiar story - you come to a place where Amazon 2-hour delivery is not a thing and you finally understand the meaning of the term “The Map Is Not The Territory” after a few unsuccessful Google Maps navigational fiascos…

Bird photo by Florian Kuster, photoshop + comic by Anton

Add language barrier and you realize that familiar modern ways of navigating the reality don’t always work here, so you turn to your neighbors and start asking basic life questions as they come up. Where is the bank? Where is the hospital? What do I do when snake bites me? Where do I get organic biodegradable non-toxic all-natural GMO-free non-animal tested soap? and my personal favorite: Can someone share a number for a taxi? (Uber! Where are you!?)

There is nothing wrong with that on the surface, we have a lively community with many people eager to share the answers because they themselves were once in the same situation, but one can’t help but wonder, isn’t there a better way to share, preserve and evolve this knowledge? As the valley continues to grow and more people arrive, this becomes an important topic.

Solution

I realized this problem early on and as an avid knowledge collector and sharer, I made a little site called sanmateo.love which has a basic directory of people as well as a few pages with links to local beaches, restaurants and markets which I kept up as I learned new things. People found it valuable, but it needed to be kept up-to-date and one person can only do so much.

As a software engineer by trade, this problem is very familiar and has a widely accepted solution to it. We engineers often ask questions when learning a new eco-systems, and at the same time tend to optimize everything, including the process of finding answers. It's not surprising that StackOverflow, a popular Q&A site, originated in this industry, later inspiring similar platforms across various other sectors. The basic premise is this: you post a question, people with knowledge post answers back, best answer gets voted by everyone and becomes the “top” answer, moderators ensure no duplication of questions and at the end you end up with a site that has answers to everything, organized neatly, with best answer readily available and an easy search to find what you need. As time goes on, answers are edited to include new information, which ensures the answers remain relevant.

Today, we’d like to pilot this here in Machuca Valley. Introducing Machuca Answers:

A site where we can ask and answer common questions and keep them there organized and searchable for future visitors to discover.

How will it work?

In the initial phase we need to build up this common knowledge store by actively adding questions and answers there. You will still likely ask the questions in the chats, but if you can record that answer here, over time the site will have more and more answers and we can start referring to it when common questions come up. As time goes one, people will realize that they can answer most of the “easy” questions by searching the site which will reduce the amount of common questions asked in the chats. That in itself may have second order effects where because the common Q&A chatter is reduced, room is made for other conversations to unfold.

Beyond being a good citizen and sharing what you already know, this platform has a notion of “Reputation” which you earn by writing good answers and questions that others give thumbs up to. Perhaps with time we’ll have a leaderboard along with some prizes for frequent contributors. Both asking good questions and providing good answers is rewarded!

We have seeded the site with a few common questions from recent chat history and we’re excited to see how this pilot unfolds, please give it a try and tell us what you think, we can work together to improve this platform.

https://machucavalley.com/

Thanks to Elvi, JP, Human, Trisha, Jim, Lovica & Ian for helping test out the site before we launched!