Mine
No, no, silly – this isn't meant to say that "IDWIL" belongs to me (like this). In fact, I like to think that it will become a community-owned entity that we can all be proud of! "Mine" in this second part of the series is all about actually refers to digging into the resources to find your own proverbial gold.
Within the website is a catalog of video interviews with people that have the IDWIL mentality – they've been successful at aligning their values and passions with what they actually get to do for a job or what they get to do to contribute to society in some way. This is the main component of Project:IDWIL's website resource. To give you a little background: the original intent was that I would assume a certain amount of control on how the videos looked and how they were produced and edited. With that type of workflow in place, it would take an extremely long time to build this catalog for you and other users to actually be able to use. It was a great day when I got permission from stlcurator.com to use the videos in their catalog that were appropriate to IDWIL - not only because it helped triple the catalog overnight, but it allowed me to understand that it's okay to "let go" of the creative control for the better good – in this case "the better good" being more content for all of us.
So where part one: "define" ends, part two: "mine" now comes into play. The assessment process has to have somewhere to point you, right? Even when the IDWIL catalog was just six videos, the process of developing a system that allows users to assess their own values, strengths, and interests that then points you to content that is relevant to you is still a valuable resource. However, it has always been the intent to provide the user a robust and diverse set of possible careers and outlets to discover. Today, with the additional support from British Columbia's government program CareerTrek, the catalog is up to over 80 videos with enough in the backlog to get us over 100 in the next week. This has also opened some new networking possibilities, and I am very excited to speak with one local resource that could alone provide over 200 additional videos. But, we'll have to see how that turns out.
There is a part of this mining the process that blends smoothly into the third (aligning) segment that you will see in the next post, and that is the importance for users to understand that successfully using these tools will require action to be taken on his/her part. In the mining process, the results are knowledge and inspiration. Those, are important and very helpful in the discovery process but, alone, cannot move forward. The user needs to decide what information is relevant as well as how to then take action.