15 March 2012
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- US Local / International +1 415 763 5901
- [Telco provided by http://twilio.com via John Britton - Thank you!!!]
Attendees (welcome to any newbies)
- Add your name (and twitter handle) here
- Vanessa (@mozzadrella)
- Piet (@bagabot)
- @jessykate
- Brylie (@brylie on identi.ca)
- @alisonjeancole
- Philipp
- Chloe (@varelidi)
- John
- @webbtronic
- William Huster (@whusterj)
- Bekka (so ashamed of being late - daylight savings continues to mystify)
Standups
What have you been up to? Short written notes (we'll discuss only if there are questions)
- Alison
- Bekka
- Berlin planning
- Contracting
- Paypal button is done (yay!)
- Swag sourcing
- Insurance
- Chloe
- John
- Working on getting the community involved in design
- Group / Challenge / Course - more on this during the call
- Google Summer of Code Organization Application - we hear back tomorrow at midnight GMT
- Adwords Improvements based on recommendations from Mac
- Philipp
- Zuzel
- helping from time to time to mark courses as reviewed
- Jessy
- people are signing up for programming w API challenge, yay thanks for helping promote it!
- jos is first one going through each task, and is already hacking it (doing it in a language that wasn't laid out in detail). this is very awesome
- chloe and i are going to associate some badges with it.
- working on open science challenges. http://pad.p2pu.org/p/opensciencecontent
- planning to reach out for some trusted/community feedback and then contact my "celebs"
- *** would LOVE input from others, especially people involved in research.
- participatory research lab ideas
- thinking through some initial efforts, people to engage.
- current thinking is to ramp up to a few key intensive summer activities (see below) and identify a core group of people to get involved
- working ideas:
- campaign: "summer of open research" ??
- giant user study of open science/peer review tools? (using science to study science tools, of course :))
- Alan
- Dear Alison: I promise you a blog post this week
- Organizing potential projects and project members for Berlin / SoSI
News of the week
Written notes on what's going on in our world (bring up special announcements on the call)
- Blog posts you wrote
- Articles you read
- Initiatives you heard about
Key updates
Super short updates about P2PU
- Exciting new courses to check out (Alison)
- Development priorities (Zuzel)
- Last release
- updated learn page on production
- gave p2pu staff (philipp, john, ali, bekka, chloe, me) community reviewers role (more people from the community should join)
- Implementing
- On Design/Feedback Stage
- Aleks designs for the site (includying main navigation, learn page, jobs page and staff page layout/coulors/...)
- UI improments releated to community badges
- State of the mustard (Philipp)
- +40% Comments
- +/- 0% - Users
- Slightly down on Joins and Groups
- 30/70 split logged in vs anonymous users
Agenda
Core of the call. Focused on four types of conversations (invited guests, challenges you need help with, proposals you want feedback on, ideas you need collaborators for).
- Add your agenda items here. Provide a link to background materials you want the community to review prior to the call.
- (~30m) Courses, Study Groups, Challenges, OH MY! [John]
- discussion thread on p2pu-community - http://jdb.io/Ag0w3N
- Questions / Reactions:
- Alison: separation of cohort and content. How do we denote responsibility for course faclitation?
- John: we will encourage mentors to create content and then make a group (or possibly the other way around)
- Content would still be separate from social components.
- People come to P2PU looking for content and then discover groups of people congregating around knowledge.
- Interviewees primarily wanted a list of learning objectives/tasks that they could check off to track progress.
- Courses also have task lists. Can we enable participants to mark tasks as complete in order to track progress?
- Alison: We may want to start a group to help with the bootstrap process.
- Zuzel: Courses and Challenges are very similar. Challenges are just a course without start or end dates and that allow participants to mark tasks as complete.
- Groups can be any demographic categorization (e.g. people from Minnesota, People who like pink)
- How can the pedagogy of the challenge go hand in hand with the larger course/group context?
- Philip: cohorts have different requirements, and work together more closely, than many demographic groups (such as people from Minnesota).
- John: Two directions we could go. One end of spectrum, the group is there to develop the content. Other end, the group are enthusiasts in their subject area or geolocation. Not mutually exclusive.
- Set theory can be applied between groups to find commonalities. E.g. intersect, join, diff.
- Focusing more on groups is another way to get community on to the site.
- Philip: We have a clear use case for people finding topics and connecting with people. Finding a cohort and working with people around shared content.
- The other, social, aspect seems distinct enough that we could consider building social features that let you form groups.
- We shouldn't give up on the collaborative content.
- Fluid groups are a natural flow; find people and work together on shared interests.
- Alan: fluidity can be part of the process. Design thinking group/meetup are starting to cohere into affinity groups, may at some point be activated or reach critical mass and start one or more courses.
- Chloe: we should be mindful about the transition from simple to complex. Challenges are rolling enrollment, one culture forms around the challenge group. Even people who finish the challenge, sometimes stick around to help facilitate.
- Keep the content and community cohesive, not fragmented.
- Zuzel: Allowing people to create challenges and content individually may not be enough.
- Also, only having teams go through content would reduce the functionality of the site.
- Ali: Future - how are we going to help users understand this? Users create a course that other cohorts could use?
- Step-by-step flow that moves users through the experience
- First create your content
- Different entry points -> users who want to create a study group, users who want to create content, users who want to learn
- But cater to people who come with a more traditional approach in mind ("I want to run a course")
- Currently users are looking for content. Use that to help them discover courses/people. Attach the groups to the content - so users interested in content find other people to work with through searching for content
- Zuzel: what has been the feedback from one-on-one conversations? (Excellent question!)
- First version already result of one-on-one conversations
- General response fairly positive (and already fixed first obvious problems before sharing with community)
- What were major questions?
- Cautious about all content framed as "challenges" - reason for this is partly perception of what a "challenge" would be like. Digging into this more it turns out it's a terminology problem - the feature set / UX of challenges is actually widely applicable.
- Vanessa (hand):
- Think it's super important to walk challenge creator through both parts
- Seed groups? Should we start some to bootstrap so others see what it could look like?+1
- Example: CouchSurfing regional groups and topic groups
- Will be great to analyze several groups to see what aspects make them successful
- Zuzel: What has been Chloe's experience from helping users think about their courses as challenges
- recall the time we were at toronto we found people who had content that did not fit the challenge model/curriculum style (maybe because there was no product to produce by the participants) true, that was one scenario were the organizer wanted to create more of a study group (that could be a challenge without tasks- from a UX point of view)
- two approaches:
- help them design learning experiences that are engaging (pedagogy behind challenges)
- UX of getting people to set up challenges
- important to keep BOTH in mind and integrate pedagogy when creating the challenge in the interface
- Philipp: Should there be groups that are framed around other things than content? People from Minnesota (spelling?) ...
- Two possibilities:
- Groups are framed around learning things with each other - working through challenges "Taking a course"
- Groups have no link to content, e.g. "People living in NY" ...
- Surfaces people that I may find interesting based on a variety of factors
- Can't this one become the other and vice versa? There can be some fluidity. "All people interested in social justice in DC" becomes "racial healing study group" for a time and then back again...
- philipp: these two ways sound different enough to consider building out different use cases / features
- zuzel:11:35 +1 to philipp they feel different
- jessykate:11:35 yes, and i definiely feel like we should support looser study groups as well+1
- alan: use case for design thinking group is to get people in DC interested, using meetup for conversations, at some point a group within taht larger community starts a course
- philipp: not sure P2PU is going to be the best space to wrangle that larger community / they will want lots of things that go beyond supporting learning
- alison: let's be mindful of complexity in all of this. challenges allow rolling enrollment (and a fluid community forms around that).
- vanessa: large groups can be intimidating--small groups lend accountability, safety, encourage safe space for creative work
- open groups : allow more diversity i.e. team grows as time passes - could be limited if have closed cohorts
- Zuzel: Do people worry about loosing the collaborative aspect to the creation of content/challenges? (I think about this element, Zuzel)
- the scenario of alan in which a group of people get together because of an event or they location and then decide to create content and run courses around it will need colaborative creation of challenges/content
- philipp: is this not possible at the moment? only one content author for challenges? or can you have group editing rights?
- many organizers can be on a challenge (thats how they support collaboration by default), I don't think challenge creator are also allowing participants to edit the tasks
- you can currently make things group editable/wiki style right?? yes
- Jessy (with a full brain):
- but "couchsurfing regional groups" - is this a *learning* group? (agree! we don't need to support "any" kind of group)
- Devil's Advocate: teams can effectively be at any level, size or purpose and (without this being a design feature) effectively nested; I can be part of "P2PU Community" team and "DC Design Thinking Study Group" team at the same time.
- Devil's devil's advocate: need to tie community to learning - if that link gets too weak we are risking to loose focus
- still not clear if people would be able to have groups without challenges?
- I am not sure we want to do this right away (seems like something to look at in next phase)
- how do we facilitate content discovery and do some kind of similarity detection so we don't end up with endless very similar challenges (tags?), but still give people full flexibility to create whatever they want.
- by separating groups from content, we make remixing and tracking changes easier
- agree, just want to make sure discovery of existing content exists too
- Learn page will expose content, groups could be discovered by content
- jessy: we should not dilute the group feature too much (P2PU is not an arbitrary place for groups)
- content discovery: think this could be accomplished by folks joining more than 1 group at once? cross pollinate, give each other content they've discovered
- Phil - suggestion: let's test this first (beta tool?) with minimum feature set first and learn what we need from there (+1 alan)
- zuzel: i'm not sure what you mean by that - is it possible to simplify P2PU by supporting fluid groups
- John: Generic groups - if we don't support this at some level we're essentially saying every group must have at least one challenge. No longer separating challenge from g
- Would support a spectrum - some are tied to challenges, or could be totally arbitrary
- Not a priority to build generic groups right now
- Piet (not sure where to fit this in) - if P2PU is interested in building and sustaining learning communities, it should provide tools for individuals to plan that learning, track it, and see where it intersects with other people. those communities can revolve around the intersections: subject areas/interests, activities, backgrounds, all sorts of things. the question I see for P2PU is: which types of learning communities are you interested in supporting? only communities that revolve around create activities for themselves? what about supporting communities that do meta-learning: learning about how they learn and reflect on that?
- Alan
- Suggestion: it sounds like there's two discussions: 1) the design / building of the functionality, 2) the community roll-out and communication strategy
- Alan: Both need careful planning / thought (+1 philipp)
- Groups - Arbitrary / Specific only (please refer to the rich discussion above - under Jessy)
- Unify course/study group/challenge content into single pool
- i.e. courses and challenges are very similar and can be unified.
- Content objects (tasks, learning resources, etc.) can be reusable (e.g. SCORM)
- We are essentially talking about grouping people and grouping content, arbitrarily (not "arbitrarily") i.e. without restriction. people are free to congregate and mix content in any way they see fit.
- Groups can facilitate project roles, thats something I think we should encourage. So challenge creators should be intentional about group creation--they should have a sense of how they want groups to behave. (Why it's so important challenge creators *get* how groups work). (+1 and easier if there is a clear link to learning something together - there may be better / other places to just form affinity groups) Exactly Philipp--which is why challenge creators should suggest a structure to the groups. Does "structure" imply different features?
- challenges could facilitate team projects+1 check this project (find collaborators to build projects based on roles > http://t.co/1ZEXPfA8 (Chloe I love this! I always want to be paired with my opposite too!!!)
- John
- Discussion goal, do we want to move forward in this direction?
- General ideas around rollout plan.
- Fix challenge creation
- Create standalone groups (we need groups attached to challenges first - that's the use case we have to support)
- Remove "course" and "study group"
- More vague: Add curation features (lists)
- Next steps:
- I'll write a follow-up and send it to the mailing list
- Describe the main use cases - then build out features as a result
- Alison: @ John - I will help you add info to help desk/how-tos as these changes roll out
- Announcement
- Chloe is leaving us! Which makes us sad. But she has been amazing, and we thank her for all the work she has done at P2PU and our work
- P2PU Berlin Announcement - any questions/clarifications needed? [Bekka]
- See the Berlin etherpad for details (http://pad.p2pu.org/p/berlin
- jessy: has to leave! but noticed the app did not explicitly ask for what kind of support people need (accom. is there but not flights). might want to add that?
- Bekka: @Jessy: we decided to keep it open, as people have different needs. All volunteers will have accommodation if they need it and the Fellowship will cover part of the travel costs (and we'll be flexible on what that means on a case by case basis)
- Piet: The project list is *huge* and not prioritized. How are you going to deal with that? I'm interested in many things ... how do I decide what to spend the time on.
- Bekka: Will do more curating - so far just non-tech and tech categories
- Past precedent has essentially been based on who's willing to put in the effort / take ownership of certain projects
- scratch your own itch
- Philipp/ Bekka: We also want people to bring their own ideas
- Philipp: People need to take ownership of projects that they want to work on, we might connect them with a P2PU person who is a contact, but they need to know what they want to work on
- Move this to next week -> SWAG: we're going analogue, and getting P2PU pencils (so you can write your HTML by hand) but we need (approx) 42-character slogans/sentences: [Bekka]
- "P2PU Learning for anyone about almost anything"
- "Learn anything, with your peers."
General discussion and questions
- Anything else that just needs to be said out loud