STILL PRETTY DRAFTY!!!


As you know we are working with Mozilla to create the first "School" of P2PU. There has been some discussion about the best name for it (the strategic implications of the different naming options) and also about P2PU's role in these kinds of partnerships to create Schools.

The two overarching questions that need your thinking, are:
* What is the right name/branding for the School of Webcraft that we are building with Mozilla?
* What is the right model for building lots of Schools (with other partners)?


Background

Mozilla's long-term vision for this partnership is to play a substantial role in the web developer training landscape and make sure that developers can gain skills in open web technologies, and find jobs. To achieve this, they are willing to make a significant investment of their time, put in funding to hire staff, and throw their name and community behind the project. Since they have a mission to promote the "open" web - they want to make sure that the School of Webcraft focuses on the "open" web and not closed technologies. Associating their name and brand with the School (as in Mozilla School of Webcraft) would give them leverage over what courses are part of it since it's not the general School of Webcraft but the Mozilla one. Mozilla is also interested in issuing badges for people who gain certain skills in the SoW courses. 

P2PU brings a community that is passionate about peer learning, our model of how to run open social courses, our (budding) expertise in new authentic assessment and a platform to host all of it. We would take the lead on methodology, learning, assessment, and platform. For P2PU there are different ways to think about setting up Schools like this one and the implication this has for the branding. One approach is that P2PU cares deeply about certain content areas - for example web developers - and like Mozilla, want to develop a brand that is associated with that area. In that case, we'd probably want our name to be used in the same way as Mozilla's, e.g. the P2PU/Mozilla School of Webcraft. In the same way as Mozilla we would then also make a significant investment of time and resources into building the content of the SoW. Another strategy for P2PU would be to focus on the enabling role that we play in setting up Schools - figuring out the social learning practices, the assessment mechanisms, and providing a technology platform to host them. We already talked about some ideas for other schools, like a School of Peace, a School of Social Entrepreneurship, etc. One way of building these schools is to find a strong and respected parter in a particular community. In this approach it probably makes more sense to connect the partner's name with the content area and P2PU's name with the enabling component - P2PU is the place where learning happens, so in this case Mozilla School of Webcraft at P2PU. 


Some questions to consider … 

What's the best name for the audience we are trying to reach? --> In this particular example, will users be attracted to sign up for courses, because Mozilla is involved and backing them or because they are hosted at P2PU. Hopefully both, but which one gives us street cred in the web developer world? 

Nobody wants that, but what if a relationship goes sour? --> Would it be sufficient to allow P2PU to continue running a "School of Webcraft at P2PU" and letting Mozilla run the "Mozilla School of Webcraft" somewhere else or do we need something more? If yes, what would that be? 

What about other Schools of Webcraft? --> Should we try to protect the generic term SoW or are we happy to see lots of other potential Schools of Webcraft - they just wouldn't be the Mozilla School of Webcraft. Can P2PU or Mozilla work with others to set up additional separate Schools of Webcraft? I think it's difficult to try to restrict this even if we wanted to, but the reality is that we would choose to focus our energy on this particular SoW, and so would Mozilla, and that would mean we are not focusing as much energy on other Schools of Webcraft.  

What is the implication for other partnerships --> Would Drupal or other Web organizations want to work with us if we are already building the Mozilla School of Webcraft? While there might be no formal restriction to prevent this, I think entering a partnership with one organization always impacts one's ability to partner with others. That's why I think chances that there will be other Schools of Webcraft at P2PU are fairly small. 

What's the price of a name? --> Does any of the partners have inherent control over the name and the other partner should pay for use of that name? 

How are decisions made about which courses are part of a school? --> This would not be up to random decision making, but based on a "charter" document that sets out the scope of that particular School. Also, just because a course does not fit into a particular school - doesn't mean it won't fit into P2PU. We can still run (pretty much) any course as a normal P2PU course. 

Do we see P2PU developing content specific expertise, or is P2PU really a platform that others -- who care about the content -- can use? --> If we look at individual courses right now, it's the course organizers who are the content experts and stewards. Do we want that same model to apply to organizational partnerships as well? 


What do you think about all this? 

Best - P