P2PU Community Call
14 February 2013
All Hand Discussion
Topic: How to spark a research community at P2PU


Agenda
**We are hanging out here:  https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/2a14915b8256ce3fe67a8ea0da0eaf8d5e938e73?authuser=0&eid=110535027738331018997&hl=en-GB- join us!**

Attendees

• Bekka
• Vanessa
• Chris
• Billy
• Philipp
• James

Report Back from Staff (written notes, with time for questions/brief discussion on call)

• Progress
  • VMG: Badges UX
  • BK: It's all about the community stats today:
    • Communications: 
      • blog visits 
        • Jan 14-20: average 233 per day
        • Jan 21-27: av 273 p/d
        • Jan 28 -Feb 3: 495 p/d
        • Feb 4-10: 933 p/d
      • Newsletter stats:
        • End of Jan: 23% open rate
        • Yesterdays: 19% (and rising)
    • Course Stats: 
      • courses created since Jan 1: 27 (excluding tests, including drafts)
        • English: 19, Spanish: 5, Portuguese: 1, Swedish: 1, Chinese: 1
        • Tagged: 10
        • Reviewed: 1
    • Medialab Course week 1 kicked off
      • Live seminar broadcast as Hangout OnAir - worked well
        • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlQK5slr8O8&feature=plcp
        • Broadcast is the most complicated/complex part of this process
      • 8500 people in G+ community https://plus.google.com/u/1/communities/106132864609383396284
      • Interesting things:
        • Demand for self-grouping higher than expected
        • people are a little bit unhappy with our perceived lack of support for this
      • 24000 users, we grouped them this week, many people came in via the site, and others came in via the lifehacker article
        • "Friends" signed up earlier, we think they might be more invested in this, so we put them in smaller groups
        • The lifehacker people we think might be less engaged, and we grouped them in larger groups
        • there are 900-odd groups so far
        • Philipp: my group hasn't been great, only 3 introductions, but great music suggestions
        • Chris: my group has been great
    • There is a lot of awesome stuff happening right now. But it is very important that we don't forget about this community too. People are using p2pu.org, and they need to be looked after. 
      • Let's talk iridescent/technovation
        • Links to their courses:
          • "Communicate Your Research Without Jargon" https://p2pu.org/en/groups/communicate-your-research-without-jargon/
          • "Design an Engineering Activity for Kids" https://p2pu.org/en/groups/test-43/
      • Vanessa had a talk with iridescent this week - there are 2 arms - the technovation challenge and the engineering project which pairs engineering students with families, so that 
      • VMG is working with them on curriculum design for the engineering project, which will launch in Marh
• Priorities
  • Reports from inside the MOOCs
  • Berlin org report
  • Personal learning plans - next steps
  • VMG: Assessment Manifesto
  • VMG: School of Data regroup
  • VMG: Formative Evaluation/User Testing Webinar for DML
  • CSS Framework/Github documentation
  • Design and build the new python MMOOC
• Process
  • 
    
• Problems
  • 
    
• Ideas/Other
  • Open Science Course Sprint (School of Open) to happen on Open Data Day (check out the tweets on @p2pu)
    • OKFN/PLOS endorsement
    • Jack Andraka (billy says: if you don't know who he is, you haven't lived!)
      • 16 year old scientists, works on pancreatic cancer
      • http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnnosta/2013/02/13/mr-speaker-the-president-of-the-united-states-and-jack-andraka/
    • (Stephen Downes Hangout on Air
    • Getting some traction (awesome!)
    • Let's RT this -> https://twitter.com/p2pu/status/301463713469300736
    • What can we do to help?
      • Give feedback about the course
      • Intended to be community organized
      • Join on the day!!! (let's send out an email and reminder email and tweet) Yup, it's in the messaging calendar

Discussion

Research:

• Idea was to make P2PU a Research Hub
  • Recruit and support researchers
  • Share data with them
• Realized that this is a big job and takes a lot of work
• At the same time we've loved working with June (U o Maryland)
• So instead of building up this community of lots of people, we thought it might be more manageable to build relationships with 2-4 people like June
  • Research is designed collaboratively
  • Results help us AND are interesting research in the field
• Question -> To recruit awesome people, what should we do? How should we start it?
  • Talk/blog about possibility to collaborate on research
  • Reach out to Steven Downes and ask him for recommendations? [Billy will bring it up with him when they speak]
  • More cat pictures (where do we need to put them?)
  • Research with universities are slow to plan and fund
    • Working with students is easier
    • There are pros and cons of working with students
  • Characteristics of research relationship we like:
    • Design questions together  - this will be something that might be tricky - not all academics even know what their questions are. That's true, but those types of collaborations will take more time and have higher risk of not producing anything. Working with people who have questions makes getting started easier. 
    • Overlap between researchers' questions AND P2PU trying to figure out how to do what we do better
    • Needs to be easy, not require major funding to get started
    • No huge delays in getting started (moving from idea, to doing)
• Todo:
  • Invite June back to the call and ask him to do a presentation about the research he has done and findings