What is this thing we call The Observatory?
People have been asking, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to explain what The Observatory is.
The Observatory (https://www.ministryoftesting.com/observatory) can be seen as community bookmarks. In keeping with our space brand, we call individual bookmarks 'satellites'. The Observatory is a view of all the satellites.
We can add them, tag them with topics and people. The more we do this, the more we build up a collaborative collection of knowledge. You can only bookmark a URL once. So if it's already there, it won't be allowed to be added again.
You can add any content (articles, videos, podcasts, GitHub, resources, books, etc). We encourage you to add your own in addition to other people's work you may stumble upon. We also encourage you to tag people if they have an existing account, it's not always possible, but this will also help them get the credit they deserve and it will help build up their MoT Profile too.
We encourage adding any content that will help us to think about testing and quality, this can often mean dev, design, UX, data and product content too.
Every time you add a satellite to The Observatory you earn a Community Star. This means it helps you earn credibility in the community. Community Stars can lead to other opportunities, like a Community Certificate, and who knows what else we'll do in the future.
We're also thinking about how collections can auto add content to it based on certain rules, like a specific tag. So we could end up with a collection on all things 'exploratory testing' for example. Or we could tag stuff with Testbash-Brighton-2025 and anything tagged with that (links, memories, talks, etc) will auto add to a collection.
All bookmarks become searchable in the MoTaverse, the latest view on The Observatory page is viewable by anyone, but if you want to browse further, a Pro account is required.
This is part of what I call Community Knowledge Management (CKM)—creating, managing and curating the information of the people/industry. Community bookmarks are one such format of information that helps with this. Other things that contribute to CKM are: glossary, tools directory, MoT Profiles, memories, courses, certs, club discussions, articles, talks, podcasts...etc.
