EdTerm — Human Wisdom Database
We are building the infrastructure to change that — preserving lived human experience as structured, searchable knowledge available to everyone, everywhere, forever.
"We are losing the knowledge that matters most — not facts, but the wisdom of how to live, work, and navigate the world."
— EdTerm Research Framework, 2025
The Crisis
Every day, experienced professionals retire without documentation of what they truly knew. Industries transform faster than knowledge can transfer. Mentorship — the primary vehicle for passing wisdom — remains radically unequal, available only to those lucky enough to be near the right people.
Meanwhile, journalism — the discipline best equipped to elicit and preserve human experience — is collapsing as an industry. Its practitioners are becoming homeless just as their skills are needed most. These two crises share one solution. EdTerm is building it.
The Method
EdTerm is not an AI that invents advice. It is a system built on real human experience, collected with discipline, preserved with care, and made accessible to anyone who needs it.
University journalism programs are restructured around Wisdom Journalism — training students to elicit, structure, and preserve lived human experience as Wisdom Nodes.
Wisdom Nodes are collected from people across industries, geographies, and life stages — with rigorous ethical consent and institutional stewardship through universities.
The Human Wisdom Database finds patterns across thousands of real experiences and surfaces what people in structurally similar situations actually did — and what happened next.
The Unit
A Wisdom Node is the fundamental unit of the Human Wisdom Database — a structured narrative artifact that captures lived experience in a form that is both deeply human and computationally retrievable.
Who this person was, what world they were operating in, what the stakes were. The metadata that allows future users to find relevant nodes.
The specific decision, crisis, or turning point at the heart of the story — when something was truly at stake.
What they were actually experiencing psychologically. The fears beneath the surface. The most valuable — and most undocumented — layer.
How they moved through it — specific actions taken, mistakes made, reversals navigated, resources drawn upon.
What the experience left behind. What changed in how they see themselves and the world. The transformation that makes it wisdom.
What someone navigating a similar situation could actually use — developed collaboratively, never forced or prescribed.
The Vision
EdTerm is not a product launch. It is the beginning of a new kind of knowledge infrastructure — one that treats lived human experience as the resource it actually is.
Partner with 2–3 university journalism programs to develop and validate the Wisdom Journalism curriculum. Train the first cohort of Wisdom Node collectors. Build the ethical and consent frameworks that will govern the database.
Universities become active stewards — collecting from faculty, alumni, and communities. Professional schools replace static case studies with living nodes from practitioners. The database achieves the scale needed for meaningful pattern recognition.
Anyone navigating a consequential decision has access to the distilled experience of thousands of people who have navigated what they are navigating. The guidance gap closes.
The Mission
The wisdom that disappears fastest belongs to people whose lives contain the most hard-won lessons — those who have navigated poverty, illness, discrimination, migration, and exclusion without documentation or recognition.
EdTerm is an act of epistemic justice. Your experience counts as knowledge. It deserves to outlast you and reach people you will never meet who are navigating what you have navigated.
"The guidance I needed existed. It just lived in people I never had access to."
First-generation graduate, Tampa FL
"Forty years of knowing how to do this job — and there's no place to put it."
Retiring public school teacher
"The case studies in school were from the 90s. None of them looked like my situation."
First-time entrepreneur, Lagos
Get Involved
EdTerm is at the research stage. We are looking for university partners, journalism educators, data scientists, narrative psychologists, and anyone who believes that lived human experience deserves to be treated as the knowledge it is.
Independent researchers, academics, and potential collaborators welcome.
