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Mini P2PU meet-up / workshop

19 April - London 

Who is coming?

• John
• Bekka
• Chloe
• Nadeem
• Larry
• By skype: Philipp, Zuzel, Dirk

Venue

• Mozilla London Offices (101 St Martin's Lane, WC2N, right near Trafalgar Square)
• Google map: http://g.co/maps/4nscq
• Nearest Tube stops: Leicester Square (Northern Line) Covent Garden (Picadilliy Line), Charing Cross (Northern & Bakerloo lines)

Logistics

• Any problems, call Bekka!

Schedule (preliminary)

• Wednesday 18th - Dinner for those who are in London (Nadeem, you'll be missed) 
  • 8:30pm, 27 Clerkenwell Road (http://www.stali.co.uk/)
  • Nearest Tube stops: Farringdon (National Rail, Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City and Circle lines) Barbican (Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines) Old Street (Northern Line) 

Thursday 19th

• 9:30 kickoff / agenda / logistics
  • 10:00 - 11:20: Session 1
  • 11:30 - 13:00: Session 2
• Lunch
• 2:00 reconvene (Philipp will try to join by skype / 6am I will also try to join by skype)
  • 2:00 - 3:30: Session 3
  • 3:30 - 4: Summary (prepare for community call)
• 4:00 community call
• 5:00 wrap-up (John has to leave at 5)

Agenda

Small enough to work in the full group (5 people) - Nice!

SESSION 1

• Brainstorm: What does it mean and feel like to be a "lab"?

P2PU the lab is/ feels like:

• For hire
• Expensive to run [why? is that what it "sounds" like? or we know it's expensive?] labs are expensive places (at least, proper science labs are - they need good tools and smart people, but this is not a negative thing, necessarily. 
• A moving physical space to get help
• An incubator
• Leads others to solve shared problems
• Inviting to people who have new ideas
• A community that conduscts experiments
• A thought leader in peer-pased learning
• Research focussed
• An experimental space
• A design space
• Not risk averse
• Dynamic, iterative
• We are values and mission driven
• A boutique community-driven consulting company that provides services to paying clients in areas that align with our values and fall within our strategic interests

P2PU the lab is not:
A consulting company - it's a fine line to draw, we'll work with other people, and partners may bring in funds and that's cool. But we're not in the business of just building things for money. Our processe are collaborative, and work has to be in line with our priciples and values and sometimes we will approach other people and not the other way around. 

A product space (sandbox) - it's not a space where people build closed software. It's more like a prototyping space. 
necessarily connected to p2pu.org the site

• John ->Can it be confusing for people if they are called the same thing? 
• Nadeem -> The community of people taking courses is a great test site for people who want to conduct the experiments/research into peer-based-learning
• Chloe -> there may be a benefit if there is a shared brand 
• John -> there are assumptions at P2PU right now (we have courses, we have challenges) which can be useful but not all learning has to take place in those ways. Not every user of the site is going to be interested in the experiment/research side of things. 
• Nadeem -> School of webcraft is a good example of an incubated project which other research grew out of. Question is how wide do we cast the net? Do we look at all of education?
• John & Chloe -> we look at connected learning, since everything we do is connected to the internet and how it has affected learning. 
• Larry -> lab takes long-term, research focused look at needs

Financially Independent:

• Bekka: the lab doesn't have to be financially independent, the drive for independence can become too much of the focus
• 
  

Scenarios (from http://pad.p2pu.org/lab-notes)
Platform or Partner (was "Schools")

• P2PU partners with Open Knowledge Foundation to create School of Data, a peer learning community focused on data analysis and visualization. OKFN has many enthusiastic software developers who volunteer to support the project and set up a separate instance of the Lernanta software. They make modifications to the code and ask P2PU's Tech Lead for help with problems they run into. Some of the changes they make flow back into the Lernanta code base. After the first year of the partnership OKFN decide to switch to a different platform - a micro-blogging system - because it offers the core functionality they found to work best with their users. 
  • John -> The scenario seems too specific, in terms of the software. We shoudl try as much as possible to keep the software in one instance, for technical reasons. Lernanta is not made for someone to run a school.
  • Chloe -> I think it's important to foster as many connections with other communities as possible , suggest to partners that they remain in the p2pu.org instance (beneficial to both parties - broader community)
  • Nadeem -> it always happens that you start using one thing, until something else comes along. I don;t see it as a failure if we use one thing until something else comes along
  • John -> in terms of bridging communities, stack overflow/exchange/travel do this really well - they are seperate communities, but the users are kind of connected to each other - people can see profiles, but you still need to 
  • Bekka: Maybe what the scenario is actually teasing out is if a partner comes along and has dev requirements and we have limited resources can we support them to develop it further. 
  • Bekka: what is the nature of the partnership we need to think more about what this entails: whats the give and whats the take?
  • Chloe -> perhaps we need to have a formula for partners/schools, which require certain things of them (user nembers, degrees of activity, a certain amount of dev time that is "bought"
  • John: stack overflow, you need to have x number of answers + y people of followers > in order to start a conversation / leveling up the more involved you get
  • Nadeem: beneficial if we formalize our relationships (and processes) in order to manage our resources
  • John ->Maybe we formalise on both sides - people come to p2pu for help, and we formalise the milestones required for degrees of help. On the other end, we formalise the process of us going to other people who we might want to partner with. 
  • Nadeem -> We can control what paid staff do, but the reality is that not everyone in the lab space might be staff, so how do we align these people's desires and motivations with those who are coming in and looking for someone to hack with. 
  • John -> this is a problem with the whole idea of consulting, because it may not align with the passions of the staff. People who do come in should bring in people to do things.
  • Chloe -> there are models for incubators, which offer exposure and a basic living situation while something is being built. This is someting we could offer - a mentorship programme which is part of the lab.
  • Nadeem > What if we had something like Kickstarter, i.e. I need this x ammount of people to advise/work on an idea
  • Connected Mentorship / Support for taking ideas of the ground.
    • Philipp > Yes, that's similar to stackexchange - I like that

• There is some connection between this scenario, and the one below:

• P2PU Sandbox

P2PU hosts and supports two websites. One is the stable production site that is used by most courses. The other site is more of a sandbox - it allows contributors to develop new features, run live courses to test them, and gather evidence for what works and what doesn't. The P2PU development team moves tools from the Lab into the production site. The way Lernanta (our software) is structured makes it easy for contributors to plug new modules into it. Our development team spends a significant amount of their time helping partners build tools that plug into Lernanta. We develope few features ourselves. 

• Nadeem -> the inherent assumption here is that everything we do translates into a feature on the site, when there is 
• John -> the permission issue is key here - a developer shouldn't have to come and ask permission to do something on the site/improve projects, but if something works well, it can be translated into a feature
• Nadeem -> there is a cultural component here, why arent people forking the codeline and doing this anyway?  is the reason that they need an audience for the feature which is essentially what the live site gives them.
• Nadeem -> the question still is how wide do we cast the net/articulate what the lab is about - Is it around peer-based learning, or something else? 
• 
  
• John ->Answering the question of how we decide who gets in to the incubator and who doesn't is going to become increasingly difficult (berlin for example - we have more applicants/ideas than we can fund). 
• Nadeem -> Some resources we'll probably not run out of (time to discuss things) but finite resources, like dev time, will be more difficult to allocate.  How do we mobilise an army of volunteers around ieas that they are seeded by individuals, matchmaking?? 
• Chloe -> the good hackathon example: we can match people with a passion for the mission of P2PU with people who have ideas and need help. 
• John -> startup incubators are quite closed, but from the open perpective, we can look at people who want to share expertise and time 
• P2PU the nerd-dating/matchmaking site!

Consulting

• JP Morgan hires P2PU to redesign its professional  development offerings. P2PU will work with JP Morgan staff to design a series of challenges and hosts a separate learning space for JP Morgan on our server. JP Morgan's global community participants in courses. The courses are not open. JP Morgan is interested in the possibility of using technology to scale PD offerings to their employees. For P2PU this project offers a source of consulting income but also an opportunity to test our social learning models in a professional development context.
• Nadeem -> we've never said that we wouldn't work with traditional universities, so would we turn away potential corporate partners? Can we occupy the space as thought leaders if we say no to some people?
• Larry -> one reason to say no is to think about the headlines the next day: "JP Morgan does private experimentation which isn't actually open". The reason for saying yes, means that you would need a very seperate space, with very clear defining lines and no bleed over. 
• John -> 2 scenarios: the for profit, and the non profit. Would the people who do this work be volunteers or staff? If volunteers, then I say go for it - help people who want to volunteer find paid work. In the case of staff, the question is can we actually do that (open requirements in the staff contracts)
  • I wouldn't be ooposed to us having something that we sell to JP Morgan, but the staff of the non-profit didn't sign up to work for JP Morgan. 
  • Look at Skillshare example, partnership with GE, but backing of Maker Faire, Little Bits (Open orgs) > what if coorporate partnerships were turned beneficial for our community of learners (i.e. badges backed by JP Morgan)
• Bekka: feels wrong to have something on the side the dirty little secret we dont talk about
• Larry -> you need to tease out the implications, move beyond the entity and see what the conditions are under which we would be happy for the agreements to be public.
• John -> the distinction is what comes out of it, rather than the company we may or may not work with - 
• Larry -> the real test will be when this scenario really arises, and the questions have to be asked in each specific case, and make specific calls, and it's good to have general ideas, but each scenario will have specifc issues. 
• Larry: More likely that companies that are forming to disrupt education would approach us as experts in the area: its a closer example than JP Moran.

Scenario Variation

• What if there was a partner we felt was more aligned with our values?
  • Nadeem -> regardless of who the potential partner is, we need to be better at knowing what we're delivering, and making sure that we get what we need to out of the partnership
    • It's hard to predict in advance what these scenarios might look like 
  • Chloe -> we also must remember that everything we do has to have some impact on peer learning and the assessment/accreditation/learning models that we've been working on
  • Key criteria for making decisions on partnership / consulting projects 
    • Reputation from being associated with a very well respected brand
    • Exposure / marketing - we get traffic through the partners
    • Motivation for new community members to join > get certification from industry stakeholders
    • Aligns with our core values as a community
    • QUALITY of materials > we offer highly valuable challenges/courses
    • Ability to re-us the work we do (open source code) or the learning that has happened
    • Buy in from community
    • Does it help us move the field / conversation forward?
      • I think as long as we approach it as bridging the barrier between higher education 
    • Does it provide an attractive sustainability opportunity?
    • Assessment should be driven by the community (as written in the white paper) and aligned with what the industry needs and this is something that should be remembered when we think about these partnerships

Who is Our Community/ Who Might Our Customers Be?

• "Customer" -> Who do we focus on? Who should we focus on helping? Who do we provide value to?
  • "Customer" is not a great word / not all of our customers have a monetization aspect
  • Empower people to make cool stuff happen / build cool stuff
• Majority of our customer base are the people on the P2PU community list
• Zuzel : community is the people that volunteer to work with us in powering peer learning expending part of their time in joining our discussions and building stuff
• Community of people we work with bring large communities of learners
• Nadeem -> cutsomers and community are very different things when you think about who we might monetize
• Who do we exist for? 
  • John -> the people who are here to build cool stuff.
  • The lab exist to reach the long tail of learners and the people who come to build stuff
  • We don't know who our community will be though in 1 years time say, if we grow our user base
• Chloe: We might now know enough about this
  • community vs. user base
• Bekka: till now we have branded this as a tool accesible to a variety of users. The lab however is more about our priorities > FUN
  • The onus is on us to start doing a lot of the really exciting work ourselves
  • WE NEED TO BRING BACK THE FUN
  • 
    

• How do we fit the partners who pay us into the 2 categories (community/partners)?
  • Nadeem -> people will come to P2PU already familiar with who we are and what we do
  • John -> we discussed P2PU the Lab as a way of people who come to innovate with us being able to make a living (line 120)

• Work through scenarios on http://pad.p2pu.org/lab-notes (1.5 hours)
  • Keep notes on the etherpad
  • Try to surface all the different opinions / don't try to come to a compromise solution
  • Try to /really/ understand the implications of difference scenarioes as well as the different perspectives that we all bring to the discussion
• Add one or two new scenarios
  • Good scenarios are related to things we do already, but suggest new directions that we may or may not want to go into

SESSION 2

• How do we present ourselves as a lab on the web? (1.5 hours)

• What are some of the pain points right now?
  • [Larry] The space is moving forward very fast - a lab can play in that fast moving space
  • It's hard to cover all content / curriculum
  • Lab projects have lightweight decision-making structures. Taking decision is hard and slow (the lab should not be the place where it is hard to take decisions)
  • Users have very limited ability to create content on the site / P2PU is not hackable for the normal user
    • Idea of Lab as a Kickstarter-esque platform where you ask for help/support/time as opposed to money
    • Is this true? At the moment this is happening on the mailing list - and we don't have the framework for people to do this. 
    • In the lab, as we imagine it, this problem might be solved by the kickstarter idea that John mentioned earlier (I want to run this, who else is interested)
      • Reasonable barriers to getting a project started (like stackexchange starts new sites)
  • The amazing core community (the people working on initiatives and projects) is almost invisible
    • The mailing lists are hidden, so we should stop doing that. 
    • Problem: people want stuff in email, or they won't respond. 
      • 2 options: we expose what's going on, and point to email on the site OR we move the conversations onto the site
      • What kind of activity do we want to expose on the site?
        • Chloe -> we should expose the learning (like comments in the challenges)
        • John-> how do we distinguish between P2Pu the site and P2PU the lab?
        • Nadeem -> do we need to distinguish between the 2? 
        • Bekka & John -> not much point in doing stuff for P2PU the lab yet, because we don't know what it is, so let's get exposing p2pu the site right first
        • Chloe & John -> We should make the activity log more relevant, and portray our users better (we have quotes that we've collected and we should use these) and showcase discussion threads rather than mere comments. 
        • This kind of work is not incredibly difficult, but the problem is making decisions
          • Our decision making process has evolved a lot (red, yellow, green) so maybe we need to use this + the tacit consent principle to mov processes forward. 
        • Anyone who is working on something at P2PU should be featured on a team page, as a way of exposing the community +1
        • What are the LAB-esque projects right now? project owner, mailing list etc.
        • We should index these, and have a low-tech approach to exposing them
        • Index the etherpads on the site, so people can see where activity is taking place
          • Track pad activity and we can track real activity and contributions
          • Create some kind of link from the homepage to where the pad activity happens (this would be housed in the "lab space" section of the site)
        • Showcasing community members is really important - showing people and what they do - coderwall
    • How can we reimagine the blog as a tool for social learning and make it more participatory? 
    • Can we use a wiki and/or etherpad as a space that is more participatory
    • Some projects that we have at the moment should be better outward-facing, 
    • Can we try to embed some etherpads in the blog for these projects (assessment and badges) and see how it looks/gets exposed/gets used
    • Maybe the "Get Involved" pages should point you to these projects, and community members can get involved. 

• We don't get enough recognition for some of the research / thinking that we do
  • how do we tell people about the cool stuff Danny has been doing in latin america?
    • do more to celebrate these "successes" 
    • Bekka: this would have to be really easy to do cos staff members dont necessarily have time.
  • Bekka: Do we need to throw money at a PR firm ? 
    • John: its hard to make these decisions without people objecting  or wanting  a tonne of discussion
    • Bekka: maybe we need to think about paying someone to help us do marketing, none of us are expert marketers > communications person
    • Larry: UCI sends out press releases, and it keeps us in the news pretty consistently. There are inexpensive approaches that could be helpful. Its a series of stories that we tell.
    • Nad: who is the audience we want to reach with our marketing?
    • Nad: before PR / Marketers don't we need to more fundemental things like do more blogging, make more noise on our own site about things we think are successes.
    • Chloe: Social Media intern?
  • Levels to solving this : social media, hiring a communications officer
  • What else do we do to promote our selves?
    • Bekka: a lot of it is personality driven, we have our personal networks etc. e.g.  Philipp
  • Nad: How would we communicate/agree our mission as a Lab amongst our selves? 
  • Nad: How do we explain what the lab is to the community and everyone else?
  • Bekka: do we need a long mission / vision discussion?
  • Chloe: maybe we just need some copy? 
  • We have to open the discussion, or we have to articualte who is creating the copy
  • Larry: Flip it around, what would the media consider newworthy ->  NS great way of thinking about it
• How do we make it easier for users to connect with projects?
• Show users that there is a community of innovators (the community mailing list at this point) who they can connect with?
• How do we represent projects ?
• Example projects include "Assessment", "MOOCs", "Badges", "P2PU dev" ...
  • What do we mean by Project? to my mind anyone saying " i have an idea do others want to explore this?" 
  • How long is a project? What does it mean for a project to be completed? 
  • Maybe the pathway for an idea is that in the lab, it evolves to a point with milestones and timelines, until it moves out of the lab and evolves to the point where it matures out of the lab and we focus resources on it. 
  • Perhaps we need to think about curating what happens ; i.e. this year our focus is in these 3 areas
  • Nadeem -> we have to have a blend. We can have a formal labs theme for a year, but we should also allow people to work on their own ideas that fall outside of this, or we will loose them
  • Projects will be driven also by funding we decide to pursue
• Question: are schools projects or something else?
  • Should schools start in the lab before they become formal schools? 
• Chloe -> Key point of success for the lab is the local community/incubator/startup aspect - P2PU has been virtual up to now, but the lab implies that some stuff happens face-to-face
• Focus on practical and concrete changes we can make to our websites today (not big picture / mission statements / messaging!)
• For example, are there ways to use the blog more effectively for projects?
• Should we use the wiki/ etherpads more? 
• (Aside: I think it would be a distraction to try and support all of that through Lernanta. Lernanta's focus - to support social learning online - is already very broad)
• What are some of the Berlin proposed projects that we want to work on in Berlin - might these help us define what P2PU the Lab is
• Mentorship App +1
• Everyone: The summer projects pad doesn't have many things on there we would class as "Labs" projects, we need to make a distinction between innovating in labs, and todo list of things we already know we need to day to day

• Challenges with challenges
  • There have been a number of interesting posts (Jessy's blog post, Vanessa's emails...) about the limitations of challenges
  • Given the mix of people at the London meeting, it would be interesting to analyze some of the issues that are raised
  • And think of ways to address them

• AFTERNOON SESSION
• 
  
• What is the difference (if any) between P2PU and P2PU-The-Lab?
• Philipp -> is the lab just an approach, which informs how P2PU does things and continues to do things?
• Nadeem -> If it is an approach, it makes things much easier when it comes to thinking about how staff time/resources are allocated and managed
• John -> P2PU was started as an approach to a problem, but the lab is a space where we approach a whole lot of problems, and we try things out, and whatever sticks, we keep working on. 
• The lab is a space where we can spin things out, but if things grow in that space, then it's possible to break them off and allow them to continue
  • Philipp -> if we come up with a great solution to a problem, but cannot take it futher, we should look for ways for them to be taken further by other people, like the Badges did with Mozilla
    • In the non-profit world, you don't always retain equity, sometimes you just had the ideas over, or you might spin something off that becomes a for-profit, or it becomes something that evolves into long-term project. 
    • But can also spin off for profit if that makes sense and P2PU can retain equity
    • Or we can grow a new department/ business inside P2PU that generates income
    • Implication here is that something might be so successful that we have to abandon other projects, or lose core people.
• Nadeem -> if it comes to a situation where an idea that has grown in a lab can't be prioritised, then it can still be spun on to the community, rather than elsewhere

• What kinds of things might the lab produce and who might the audience be? (1 hour)
  • Library/repository
  • Mentorship
  • Couchsurfing for learning
  • Let's Talk TED Talks -> http://johndbritton.com/2011/10/27/lets-talk-ted-talks/
  • Mobile App
  • Directed problem solving (picking problems, incubating solutions)
  • Schools and curricula (there is a definite audience for this) also it adds to momentum, and we can build on that 
  • Something completly irrelevant to the platform - like a game/dance/cooking competition
  • Contests - work with partners to raise money and then host the contest to find solutions to problems. for example Open Ideo (could tie to social issues) (and our competitino are different / attractive because we are open and community driven - but still have VC folks interested)
  • A better model (methodology & technology) to run online courses
  • A better way to do assessment online - reflecting the competencies that really count rather than multiple choice questions
  • Recognition that doesn't discourage - badges and other forms of certification
  • Matchmaker - P2PU is a connector - a place to find people who want to work on projects that solve open education problems
  • There are a lot of things we think that we could do, which are not a bad idea, but it's not clear what we feel like we have to do, or what we cannot do
  • Have to be prescriptive for staff and their time
    • If there is a separation of the lab and the site, then there would be a logical division of staff time along those lines too
    • Open ed and higher ed is changing fast, and the opportunities that will come along in terms of funding and we need to think about what the areas where funding will be are, and how we think we can play with that stuff in the labs area
  • Philipp -> for me there are certain ways a lab operates, and P2PU has always been a lab, although we don't call ourselves that. 
    • If we focus on the model building, assessment and recognition then we can define 3 or 4 content areas and every partnership we build and all the work that we do, and people who want to do other work can set 
• HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THIS? -> What are the key problems / questions the lab tries to solve? -- what are the key problems / questions the experimentation in the lab will be trying to solve?
  • Finding good OER - Scavenger the crap
  • Social issues - how can what we offer help address the issues faced by communities who do not have access, i.e. attract more women in CS, solve education problems in dev countries
  • Connecting ideas and people
  • Inspirational topics related to open education > policy, journalism, social issues, accessibility, digital media, games, film ....
  • Research
• What are different scenarios for our platform? 
  • Stackexchange.com / Wordpress.com - Core service provided to community and partners / we control features 
  • Moodle - open source software that is used by others on their own servers
  • No platform - Central wiki with courses that happen all over the web

Build a volunteer community to run the lab / How?

• Motivates people to get more involved if it feels like a lab
• The army of awesome - repository of active volunteers (not jus "community members") who have signed up to reply to certain bugs / a little bit like boyscouts (but not all boys!)
• This should be a core aspect of the lab, and this should happen online 
• Highlight the projects and people behind them

Notes:

• What does prototyping look like?
  • e.g. from the past
    • customizations to OSQA for initial badge pilot
    • course metrics dashboard in main platform but restricting use to a subset of users
    • initial development of alternative learning model (challenges) available to users as an alternative to courses
    • read-only app developed in paralel by contributors
  • things we could explore in  p2pu as a lab:
    • ...

• How does our technology platform support innovation and experimentation / P2PU=lab (1 hour) - http://pad.p2pu.org/lab-tech
  • What are our biggest platform challenges?
    • Fast pace of development on the web / new tools popping up all the time
    • Experimentation vs. narrow focus
    • Competition from for-profits who have resources to build niche applications faster

• John --> Communication / User Acquisition (1 hour)
  • We do lots of stuff, what's the most important - home page messaging
    • Simple, Simple, Simple.
    • define the message