Open Governance and Learning

sorry for this late notice. the schedule clashes with another meeting I have for tonight. Look forward to the notes and will try to post some questions in mind for Philip. Thanks and see you guys next week.

Feb 16 at 6AM PST is a bit tricky, so I am unlikely to make it, but I did try to figure out why my audio did not work in the first meeting. It seems to be my p2pu openid does not allow me to sign in, except as a guest. Maybe that was the problem. I created a new password, hoping that will fix it. Anyway, I've been listening and enjoying the meetings later in each day. Looking forward to doing that again.

Hello!
We had a really good meeting with Philipp. As usual the recording is here: http://oufm.open.ac.uk/fm/fmm.php?pwd=1e5762-2784

Joe wrote a lot of notes:
NOTES ON THE VOICE COMPONENT

Special group with authorities? No one was really interested in being
in a special group, even though they were interested in project
leadership. People felt like working on whatever they wanted to work
on. No one wants to stand in anyone's way, everyone just has to do
things transparently. On dev side, give access to people who want it
when they have something to contribute.

In the previous years, it was really a community of people
experimenting. Shifting now to think more about the user experience,
and "professionalizing". P2PU launched the site super early. Idea:
to have employees who "own" a given UI and represent the users
interests for that area of the site. These people can be
"facilitators" for conversations in this space as well. In the
future, try hard not to have an "us" and "them" of foundation vs
community.
* The "labs" area sounds really important, to continue the
experimental aspect (i.e. not shoot self in foot given that experiment
is what the existing group is good at).
* Webcraft: real problems with infrastructure issues, and not enough
discussion about the work. Need to make the platform operate
smoothly, to discourage disengagement. Roll out plan for new
platform?

Interviewing people for tech lead, hoping to finalize by the end of
next week. Where is the "red thread" that aggregates the
conversations about technology development into some kind of roadmap?
(for April: How can we build better tools into the existing platform
in a way that still carries over nicely to the new platform?) (After
April: hope to migrate to the new platform.)

Who holds the guy who wants to help accountable? The community of
developers takes some time to get to know the person... and they try
to have a conversation step by step. The core dev group would flag
any problems.
* This raises the issue about backups and overall security of the site.

The platform was/is a source of frustration, but this could also be
seen as an opportunity: a disaggregated platform vs a Virtual Learning
Environment? P2PU courses don't need a VLE? A good idea to provide a
"bare minimum"; not always frustrating to go outside of the platform.
The choice of centralized or decentralized environment should depend
on e.g. pedagogical models.

Various things could be changed about the platform that would make it
a lot better. This isn't always about adding more features and
certainly isn't about becoming an LMS. But... people expect to be
taught when they take a course! We're not making it easy for people
to think of themselves as "peer learners" who have something to
contribute. The metaphor of courses makes it hard. The site also
does a bad job of creating connections between individuals. There are
lots of issues around communication that make it difficult for people
to figure out where to be. With respect to disaggregation: the
original idea was just be to use other platforms. But that really
only works for the most tech-savvy users. More aggregation and more
coherence would help.

No accreditation plans - you would have to conform to a given set of
standards that would make difficult to be experimental. But a huge
interest in certification, so that people who participate get some
form of recognition that makes sense in their context. E.g. the
ability to put a Mozilla-backed badge on a CV. Also some
conversations with UC-Irvine about doing something similar for
continuing professional development, e.g. in psychology. The credits
would come from UCI, but the course would take place on P2PU. So far,
CVs, registering as independent study, etc.

Going for certification aspects... What are the barriers to this? Do
we need community-wide agreement about what's valuable? What are some
of the steps towards this? The idea: grounding this in a community
("of practice"). The community for whom the assessments are important
needs to be involved in defining the assessment terms. However,
moving away from the traditional "guild" model. Bring the community
into defining the badges and assessing whether people should have a
given badge.

Example of badge: generic web developer badge; talk to Erin Knight.
Later will hire someone to redesign/maintain the badge system as a
whole.

Small community vs open badge giving? You may need a certain
community of experts to make standards. This wouldn't take away from
the P2PU community. Not that any voice should count equally: think of
the way the open source community works, as opposed to traditional
universities. In open source communities, everything is transparent.
And the people who act in quality review roles have the trust of the
community (which could be revoked, and the people can change).
* This obviously gets to the issue about Meritocracy that was discussed before

There is a lot of learning that can take place in discussions *around* badges.

In the course that was preparing people... there was emphasis on the
badge programme, but there wasn't a real connection with the courses.
E.g. Dan's course has no concept of assessment in it. The badge idea
has to be baked into courses from the beginning, not added on in the
end. Rather, integrate it into the curriculum!

Several of the courses have not thought about assessment. A weakness?

It would have been nice to have this discussion earlier with course
organizers. One of the big debates: to separate the badges from the
courses? Make the badges more generic achievements? But this makes
it so that people aren't connected with each other, so they might not
know who is good at what.
* I have some misgivings about the idea of "most helpful colleague"
badge. The whole "good job" thing...

Wouldn't it be nice to bring people together who are working together
in this space? Let's say we all succeed - what will the world look
like? That would be a great workshop or meeting. P2PU does not have
the resources to build the infrastructure and the wider community, so
this has generally been pushed off the todo list. However, in a way
P2PU is one of the "projects" - and it might be easier for someone who
isn't doing an active "project" to do this. They would be more
neutral. The OER Foundation is active with lots of projects around
the world - there are other organizations that may be better
positioned to play that role.

Thanks Marisa, great learning about P2PU and thanks for raising the question I had.

Hello all, Please look for me in the chat tab of our meeting today. It turns out that I will be able to attend today's meeting as a guest, but since I used an open-id for my acount, I will not be able to attend as a speaking guest, just chat. At least this is my expectation.

Sorry everybody, I have been out for a long time but I have a good excuse, I have moved to Casablanca, Morocco. I got an internship a few weeks ago and I have been fighting with exams, vaccines, an intensive course, accommodation and the move in general.
I will try to catch up but I still have no internet home. Cheers!

Congrats Jorge!!