Open Sourcing MMA

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 The world of open source software has enabled incredible innovation by making source code freely available and allowing a community of developers to collaborate, review, modify and distribute that code. I'm going to try to take a similar "open source" approach with the martial arts techniques and training methods I teach starting with the MMA class I'm going to start teaching.

For the uninitiated, open source software is computer software with source code that is distributed publicly, often with an open collaboration model. This stands in contrast with proprietary software where the source code is kept secret. This open "crowd sourced" approach has allowed software to advance in unprecedented and unexpected pace. You can read more about open source software here: 

My goal is to put as much of the MMA class material online as possible for a few key reasons:

  1. Making it easily accessible to my students to facilitate learning and retention of a large body of techniques.
  2. Giving back to the broader combat sports community that has benefited me, just as I've benefited from open source software.
  3. Opening up the techniques to review, iteration and community collaboration in the hopes of expediting functional martial arts development - similar to how open source has turbocharged software growth. I feel like BJJ has embraced the internet to a much greater extent than any other martial art, and has benefited immensely, so in a sense it's the 1st Open Source Martial Art - blog post to come on this.

This is very much an experiment, but I'm excited about the potential of increased transparency, sharing and collaboration to advance practical martial arts skill. I'll be publishing videos, articles, curriculum, , training methodologies and more online in the coming weeks and months. So stay tuned as I work to open source what has been a rather closed discipline!

The way I'm trying to teach this class is an experiment and I'm hoping to document every step of the way,  good or bad so we can all learn from it. The bigger the lab, the better the results!

Something I'm trying to do is document things well in a form that is easy reference. I've already made a few adjustments since putting out my original 3 articles. I've decided to plan more at the topic level, which will have multiple classes. I will make a class notes post for each class and associate back to the topic. For the class notes, I will try to have video for each. I also will back link the slices and topics.

Also, I'm going to add a Thoughts/Challenges part to each of the class notes starting with class 3, explaining thoughts, challenges as well as what I'm going to do with that information, with the hopes of being transparent that it can help someone, as well as let the students know what I'm thinking


Changes

5/24/2024

  • Add that I'm going to add my thought process and changes

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