Reasons for No Central Repository:
* Confidentiality: Companies often consider project data and learnings to be proprietary and confidential, especially for projects that didn't succeed.
* Variety of Formats: Project documentation comes in many forms (reports, code, presentations, etc.), making it difficult to standardize and store.
* Ownership: Data and lessons learned are often held by the individual teams or departments who worked on the project.
* Legal and Ethical Concerns: Sharing data might involve privacy issues, intellectual property concerns, or risk revealing sensitive information.
Alternatives and Approaches:
* Internal Knowledge Management Systems: Many organizations have their own internal systems for storing project data, lessons learned, and best practices.
* Project Post-Mortems: A structured way to capture learnings from completed projects, both successes and failures.
* Knowledge Sharing Communities: Teams can create internal communities or forums to share their experiences and insights.
* Industry-Specific Groups and Conferences: Professionals in specific industries often meet to share knowledge and best practices, including from failed projects.
* Publicly Available Datasets: Some organizations make anonymized datasets or project reports publicly available, but these are often limited to specific domains or projects.
* Academic Research: Researchers often study successful and failed projects to generate insights that are published in academic journals.
Key Considerations:
* Purpose of Knowledge Sharing: What are you hoping to achieve by accessing this information (e.g., learning from mistakes, improving future projects)?
* Access and Privacy: Who should have access to the data and what measures need to be taken to protect privacy?
* Organization and Retrieval: How will the data be organized and how easy will it be to find relevant information?
In conclusion, while there's no universal repository, you can find valuable insights from closed projects through various means. It's important to choose the approach that best meets your specific needs and respects the confidentiality and ownership of project data.