This is the P2PU Archive. If you want the current site, go to www.p2pu.org!
Open Governance and Learning
My recent threads
You haven't posted any discussions yet.
Recently updated threads
- Notification of research observation Wed, 2011-04-06 09:18
- End of the course - but it's not a good-bye Mon, 2011-04-04 12:32
- Week 6 - Task and guest of the weekl Wed, 2011-03-16 18:30
- Week 4 - Task of the week Tue, 2011-03-08 16:49
- live meetings - times and testing! Tue, 2011-03-08 14:44
Week 3 - Task of the week
Hello Good People,
We are entering the third week of the course. The plan is to start to examine how open governance works in P2PU, but feel free to chose other organizations for your project, as Civicsense has done (http://p2pu.org/general/node/15762/forums/25873). If you choose P2PU, please browse the Internet and look for documents about its history and its current governance strategies.
Our guest this week is: Phillip Schmidt - P2PU Founder
He will respond to questions posted in http://piratepad.net/opengov-questions-schmidt, and will join us in a webbased meeting on Feb 16, 2PM GMT: http://oufm.open.ac.uk/fm/1e5762-2784. Please be there if you can. He really would like to talk with you and respond to questions.
The task for this week is twofold:
1) Please find few documents on the organization of your choice and look at the organizational structure and the processes in place for communication, coordination, and decision-making. What kind of leadership they seem to have? How do they make-decisions (apparently at least)? Do they seem to be consensus-driven?
I just found out a very useful article that might give a fair idea of what you want to look for when working on your project.
Peer governance and Wikipedia: Identifying and understanding the problems of Wikipedia’s governance, available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2...
2) By the end of this week 3, that is, by February 16, write at least one entry in the course blog about your analysis work. If you prefer, you can start your own blog for the project, ideally a posterous blog (when you become contributor you also create your own blog) so that it is connected to the one of the course. Let’s avoid spreading things out too much, otherwise they get too messy and we struggle to find where your contributions are.
3) Feel free to use other formats besides writing. Upload video, pictures, whatever works best for the purpose of your project.
As said earlier, working on this task also helps develop several skills and achieve important learning objectives, such as those
• Express clear, coherent thoughts through writing
• Analyze or critique existing work
• Connect course topics with current events or personal experience
• Debate and discuss issues in the field topic
• Conduct research, contribute to course content repository
• Reflect on learning, metacognition
• Review the work of classmates
(source: http://wiki.p2pu.org/w/page/28604020/Learning-Objectives-Alignment)
The quality of posts in the blog during week 2 was high. They were crafted in such a thoughtful manner that make it for in depth, protracted discussion beyond the very short time of this course. This is one of the goals of creating the blog. This collective blog can become part of your personal ePortfolio.
Since one of the main goals of a portfolio is reflection on learning, the blog is a good option and we can be use it as an online reflective journal and an environment that invites collaboration beyond the end of the course.
Kostakis's methodology can give you some hints on how to work on your own project. He reviewed books and articles published on peer governance in Wikipedia, searched online records of disputes, and contacted current and ex-Wikipedians for reflection on the issues.
On a much smaller scale, we have suggested that you only review few documents, but, if you like to go the extra mile, you may want to interview someone. Up to you and your time constraints.
I would like to add some suggestions about possible questions to ask when reading documents:
- how is the activity in the project organized?
- how are roles divided?
- how does decision-making work?
- what are the conditions for entry in the project?
- what tools and procedure are used and who chooses them?
- how is leadership appointed?
Of course, you do not have to answer to all these questions. Depending on the documents you use, you can focus on one/two aspect(s) addressing one/two question(s).
Regarding P2PU, you can find useful stuff in their blog and wiki:
http://blogs.p2pu.org/
http://wiki.p2pu.org/w/page/12427308/FrontPage
Less than promptly as usual, I'm collecting documents about the organization I'm interested in, The Free Software Foundation. So far: Leadership http://www.fsf.org/about/leadership.html staff http://www.fsf.org/about/staff/ ... not a great start, but I'm moving.
You are not late! You have started, it is good:-)
just e-mailed my write-up to the blog, it's not great, but its a start. i couldn't find too much detail on my internet search (perhaps my internet detective skills are simply not as Sherlock Holmes-esque as I like to tell myself they are).
>i couldn't find too much detail on my internet search ...
You can check on a US organization's 501(c)(3) status by seeing if they are listed in IRS Publication 78:
IRS Publication 78
http://www.irs.gov/app/pub-78/
Name: Starts With
All of the words
Found => Free Software Foundation Inc.
To get additional corporate information including financials register with GuideStar.org (it is free) and search for "Free Software Foundation"
GuideStar
http://www2.guidestar.org/
=> http://www2.guidestar.org/organizations/04-2888848/free-software-foundat...
P2PU will show up in both of these places if they filed for 501(c)(3) status but it can take up to a 90 days for the information to propagate.
Finally posted an entry for The Eclipse Foundation. Was a great read. I changed the posting date to appear 15 days ago just to ensure the blog entries are in sequence.. hope that's alright.
Great! Thank you Maya.