Hi Erick! Although we haven't met and talked much (it's theoretically impossible for you to deeply know so many students), I will be using this document to present you briefly of what I did inside and outside school. ## Inside School ### MIN Last school year I worked for MIN as the project manager, and basically provided the leaders with advice regarding how to run the entire thing. Shooting a TV program is a complex project that requires multiple people, equipment, and efforts, and it's inherently hard to make sure that every team member gets what they need (information / equipment) to do their job, hands over their job to others, and to make sure that things are just flowing in general. As a result, I redesigned a workflow and shared it with the team. We tried it out for one week and it was working quite good -- we produced and shipped one episode in the shortest amount of time ever. ![[MIN Workflow 1.0|900]] However, as the school year moves on, both the leaders and the members began putting their focus elsewhere, and the project eventually cools down. ## Mock Trial Logistics Similarly, I worked in the Mock Trial Logistics team and took care of the transportion and food arrangement on the day of event. ## The Flying Dutchman Serving as the layout editor of the school newspaper, together with the content editor and all writers we published monthly issues of newspaper, collecting opinions from the entire community. In the second school year, we plann to introduce a new renovation and make it more interactive by moving away from traditonal print and towards digital, interact-able online version. We are thinking about using Teams, and we are currently actively working with the school to ensure compliance with school policies and support. ## Outside School ## Learning & Note-taking I love learning, and I take notes of everything I learn & think about. I open-source all of my notes (currently nearly 1 million words) here: [https://jimmyzhang.space](https://jimmyzhang.space). You can find here books I read and things I've been thinking about. I make monthly updates here — Find the August update yesterday [here](https://jimmyzhang.space/Update+--+August+2025 "here") ## Homepage — Essays, Photography, & Projects On my personal homepage [https://jimmyzhang.org](https://jimmyzhang.org), you can find my essays, photography showcase, and a brief overview of the big projects of my life. ## Life's Big Projects ### OpenLearn OpenLearn is a meta-education Company So much wasted potential in my 12 years of education -- wonder what's the total wasted potential for humanity as a whole, and what height our civilization could have achieved. As a result, the mission of OpenLearn is to redefine learning by decentralizing education and empowering self-directed learning. What have I actually made? The initial idea was to build a community of self-directed learners -- [https://learninginpublic.space](https://learninginpublic.space). Recruited 20 beta testers, and turned out to be not working. There are too many similar "communities" "platforms" out there online that tries to get you in, promising great resources, yet fail to actually empower individuals other than as a marketing platform for certain products or courses. Haven't figured out a way to break this model -- seems like learning is such a personal and individualized journey, and empowerment is not possible if not on a one-to-one individual level. More of my journey exploring this path and what I learned [here](https://jimmyzhang.space/04+Bibliotheca/What+I+Learned+From+OpenLearn+Community's+Failure). As a result, I thought about moving on to individualized mentorship to help students who struggle with traditional educational institutions. I label myself as the "Learning Architect" -- an architect that instead of teaching students *what* to learn, guides them through *how* to learn, by showing & not telling. I hope to guide a student through the whole process of learning a topic -- from generating inquiries, searching for sources, to taking notes, organizing knowledge, and turning into sharable assets, and serve as a "co-learner". This idea was inspired by so many wonderful teachers I have met during my previous years who are all embodying this practice. Yet, I still deeply believe that the impact myself can reach through one-on-one mentorship is limited and not sustainable -- it requires my constant effort, and cannot become an asset for passive income. As a result, I am turning to software, aiming to build an App or platform that can basically embody my philosophy and practices to help countless individuals. I call it Larc (short for Learning Architect) Mini -- mini because due to the current technology in 21st century (laptop and mobile phones, GUI software, lack of spatial intelligence etc.) it will never be able to fully capture the full power of a transformative education. Nevertheless, it is never to early to start building -- I have built an MVP in the summer, which is basically a very simple markdown note editor with built in AI chatbox and custom commands, inspired by products like Obsidian, Dia, and Copilot. I hope that I will be able to share it with students and teachers on campus as alpha testers during the next few months. ### Nex For Nex and The Human Consultancy Company, I will be brief because compared to OpenLearn and Larc, as they are both more of conceptual ideas that haven't made their way beyond my thoughts and notes into the real world. The idea of building Nex stems from my interested in PKM (Personal Knowledge Management), and my belief that "Knowledge Management" is not and should not be "Personal". You can find more of this idea from my experience at the PKM Summit 2025 in Utrecht. In fact, human as a species urgently need a better infrastructure for the sharing & collective building of the knowledge of our civilization -- a move from PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) to CKM (Collective Knowledge Management). Currently, some attempts we have are Google, Wikipedia, and Github -- but each have their own strength and fatal weaknesses. The idea also stems form my observation and speculation of the inefficiency of our academic institutions -- of students writing "trash" papers that contribute nothing just to graduate, or students finding sources just to fulfill the requirements, of important pieces of knowledge failing to spread and harness their full impact, and of crucial information failing to connect with each other to paint the full picture. Thus the mission of Nex -- To build a collective knowledge interface for humanity and revolutionize the way humans create, manage, and communicate knowledge. Nex is short for the Latin word Nexus, which roughly translates into "connection" and "hub". ### The Human Consultancy Company AI is challenging human value. It's still too early in 2025 to say this, but fast forward to the 2050s and the latter half of the 21st century, it will have become a planetary crisis. The Human Consultancy Company is human's response to AI. We hope to build humans that are unLLMable by resisting doing what AI can do and re-searching for human value We hope to create a world in which every one can follow their passion and achieve their meanings, creating a healthy system of agentic humans. In a world where intelligence becomes abundant and cheap, we believe that the value of humans is beyond intelligence. As a result, we are in seek of what's left of humans in the age of AI and finding the next height for our civilization. ## This Summer For this summer break specifically, I have made a few projects. ### I Wrote a Book I compiled a short poetry-style book of mine called "The Education I Want". It talks about the possibilities of education. [https://theeducationiwant.my](https://theeducationiwant.my) You can read here: [https://read.theeducationiwant.my](https://read.theeducationiwant.my) ### I Made an app As explained above, for OpenLearn, I have started building Larc Mini -- an AI-native note-taking & learning app. It looks something like this -- a file browser, a note editing panel, and an AI sidebar. The vision is to build an agentic AI with cross-note context. ![[Screenshot 20250828 at [email protected]]]