radical routes - Q&A (please help)
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Joe Corneli
Feb 5, 2020, 4:09:26 PM2/5/20
to Peeragogy, Raymond Puzio
I answered the high-level questions from the early pages of the "Radical Routes" book recently. I hope that these answers could be a useful entry point for newcomers -- however, more work needs to be done to make them really useful.
Ideally, send feedback before February 18th, when I will have an in-person meeting with folks at Nesta for a discussion of related points. People I will be meeting:
... So that's the immediate "audience".
~~
WHAT ARE YOUR AIMS? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE IN THE SHORT, MEDIUM, LONG TERM?
We want to greatly expand the reach of peer learning and peer production. The long-term vision is that peeragogy will enable billions of people to participate in a global knowledge economy [*]. Already, it is possible to learn a lot by participating in free/open source projects. However, that only works for people who have the skills, motivation, and resources to get involved. In addition, many people who are already involved in such work could do better work with ongoing redesign and upskilling. Peeragogy can support this by:
- DOCUMENTING the practical, effective, patterns that support peer learning and peer production.
- MAPPING the landscape of collaborative efforts, and providing a referral service and otherwise scaffolding inter-project collaboration to build synergies.
- PUBLISHING what we learn in written form, as a way to share what we learn, and also as a concrete collaborative project that we can use to 'learn by doing'.
- DEVELOPING new free software that can be used to enrich the open/online landscape.
- BUILDING new business models or other incentive structures that help expose the motivations for becoming involved in this way of working
*: Stephan commented in private email: "The only
way to have a knowledge economy is to make knowledge artificially
scarce, and I'm very much against that." OK, interesting. What we are looking at with the current state of the art is that production of 'fungible' knowledge is indeed scarce and highly centralized -- think about how things work at the tech giants versus how they work elsewhere. Brick-and-mortar universities are probably lagging behind the tech giants now, in technical fields. Of course, there are other kinds of knowledge -- e.g., traditional indigenous knowledge, practical know-how -- and so forth, which should also be considered. As Stephan was indicating, we need less scarcity here, not *more scarcity*. If someone learns something new, that knowledge starts out being *inherently* scarce (or, at least, inherently localized) -- not artificially scarce. So the challenge becomes: how to reward both discovery and dissemination of knowledge?
WHAT IS THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE YOU ARE SELLING OR PROVIDING?
We started (in 2012) with the Peeragogy Handbook. The Handbook is intended to be a practical, hands-on, "how-to" guide to peeragogy. It has been through 3 editions, with a 4th on the way.
In 2020, we plan to use this book as a textbook in courses of various size, ranging from small tutorials, to a medium-sized classroom-based course, and scaling up to a Massive Open Online Course with content produced by students in the smaller courses.
Future developments will branch out from there. In particular, one path forward would follow the model of London-based "Founders & Coders" by providing both free training and an opportunity to get involved in productive work on a consultancy basis. Founders & Coders provides software consultancy services. We could start to copy this model fairly exactly. We could then expand this to provide a range of other scientific and management consulting.
One long-term vision for peeragogy is to build a 'University' which is comprised of peer production projects, in which anyone can study for a degree, and engage in paid knowledge work. Building this will be challenging: for comparison the Manchester-based Cooperative University has been developing since 1912. However, by leveraging the internet and global collaboration, we may be able to make rapid progress and meet a growing global demand. [§]
§: We have discussed various ways to raise money to support the work we do, and I am starting to think that "service provision" is the best way to go about this, i.e., thinking like a business about what we can actually do for people. I have a company here in Scotland -- but having something set up on paper is not the same as actually doing service provision. How can we take this to the next level?
WHAT’S THE BENEFIT TO YOU, YOUR COWORKERS AND THE WIDER SOCIETY?
Participants in the Peeragogy Project have reported significant changes to the way they work, often leading to better outcomes in their 'day jobs'. Enjoyable collaboration in the project is also a key 'intangible' benefit, since we have been doing this as volunteers so far. Broader benefits so far seem to mainly be an impact on thinking about teaching and learning. Looking forward we hope to develop pathways for people to join the knowledge rather than to continue to engage in non-sustainable depredation of natural resources. Achieving a transition to a knowledge economy appears to be a matter of urgency, and we think that 'peeragogy' in one form or another will be essential to this transition.
WHAT ARE YOUR ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OR GUIDELINES?
Our overall ethics and philosophy involve being kind, assuming good faith, and being willing to experiment -- by working with different people as well as different technology, tools, and ideas. Peeragogy stems from 'paragogy' which means production in Greek. We try to learn in the process of producing real outcomes that are of concrete benefit to society.
WHAT ARE THE RESOURCES / SKILLS / QUALIFICATIONS NEEDED TO ACHIEVE YOUR AIMS?
We currently have a small and somewhat fluid volunteer contributor base, comprised mainly of skilled professionals. We have connections into wider networks (e.g., P2P Foundation, P2PU, Cooperative University, etc.). This has been enough to create several editions of the Peeragogy Handbook, but in order to address the aims mentioned above, we need to grow.
One key dimension of growth will be to improve the way we think about peeragogy, by making the Handbook more practical (by adding 'mini-handbooks' and more design patterns), and by putting peeragogy into practice more widely in our lives (e.g., by debugging work and career challenges using these methods).
In order to address the wider aims -- DOCUMENTING, MAPPING, PUBLISHING, DEVELOPING, BUILDING, above -- at a globally impactful scale, it will be necessary to build skills and gain other resources in each of these areas.
- DOCUMENTING : We need to reach into other projects and understand patterns there (e.g., looking at open data on Wikimedia, Github, Stack Exchange). The 'Peeragogical Pathways' document outlines six month pilot, for 1 person at 50% time.
- MAPPING : We need to expand our knowledge of relevant projects, and our ability to contribute something to them. We previously tried to build a 'Peeragogy Accelerator' but this didn't have a major impact. The 'Peeragogical Innovations' course reboots the ideas of the Accelerator, aiming to serve students. We might benefit from further investigation of how others (e.g., some governments) are investing in free/open projects.
- PUBLISHING : In addition to rigourously improving the content, we need to expand our marketing approach if we want the Handbook and other resources to be widely read.
- DEVELOPING : While some of the current participants in the project have software experience, we are not currently offering any software consultancy. We likely need to develop our concrete skills in this area further, as well as incorporate additional 'business development' experience.
- BUILDING : One recent thread of speculative discussion concerns DAOs as a way to incentivise participation in peer learning and peer production, but this is only one strategy. It may be useful to take a 'multiple capitals' approach (possibly in collaboration with the Oxford-based company X in X).
HOW MANY PEOPLE AND WHO? PAID? UNPAID? VOLUNTEERS?
There are about 30 contributors to the Peeragogy Handbook so far, currently < 10 people regularly active in the project discussions, all volunteers. As indicated in the breakdown of 'DOCUMENTING' and 'MAPPING' above, we would be in a position to bring in money to support some of our activities, assuming we could find paying customers (e.g., Nesta, Tufts). If the process of scaling up Peeragogical Innovations as a tutorial -> class -> MOOC works well, we might expect hundreds or even thousands of participants over the next few years. Many will be volunteers (students), but some may want to join a consultancy.
Participants in the Peeragogy Project have reported significant changes to the way they work, often leading to better outcomes in their 'day jobs'. Enjoyable collaboration in the project is also a key 'intangible' benefit, since we have been doing this as volunteers so far. Broader benefits so far seem to mainly be an impact on thinking about teaching and learning. Looking forward we hope to develop pathways for people to join the knowledge rather than to continue to engage in non-sustainable depredation of natural resources. Achieving a transition to a knowledge economy appears to be a matter of urgency, and we think that 'peeragogy' in one form or another will be essential to this transition.
WHAT ARE YOUR ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OR GUIDELINES?
Our overall ethics and philosophy involve being kind, assuming good faith, and being willing to experiment -- by working with different people as well as different technology, tools, and ideas. Peeragogy stems from 'paragogy' which means production in Greek. We try to learn in the process of producing real outcomes that are of concrete benefit to society.
WHAT ARE THE RESOURCES / SKILLS / QUALIFICATIONS NEEDED TO ACHIEVE YOUR AIMS?
We currently have a small and somewhat fluid volunteer contributor base, comprised mainly of skilled professionals. We have connections into wider networks (e.g., P2P Foundation, P2PU, Cooperative University, etc.). This has been enough to create several editions of the Peeragogy Handbook, but in order to address the aims mentioned above, we need to grow.
One key dimension of growth will be to improve the way we think about peeragogy, by making the Handbook more practical (by adding 'mini-handbooks' and more design patterns), and by putting peeragogy into practice more widely in our lives (e.g., by debugging work and career challenges using these methods).
In order to address the wider aims -- DOCUMENTING, MAPPING, PUBLISHING, DEVELOPING, BUILDING, above -- at a globally impactful scale, it will be necessary to build skills and gain other resources in each of these areas.
- DOCUMENTING : We need to reach into other projects and understand patterns there (e.g., looking at open data on Wikimedia, Github, Stack Exchange). The 'Peeragogical Pathways' document outlines six month pilot, for 1 person at 50% time.
- MAPPING : We need to expand our knowledge of relevant projects, and our ability to contribute something to them. We previously tried to build a 'Peeragogy Accelerator' but this didn't have a major impact. The 'Peeragogical Innovations' course reboots the ideas of the Accelerator, aiming to serve students. We might benefit from further investigation of how others (e.g., some governments) are investing in free/open projects.
- PUBLISHING : In addition to rigourously improving the content, we need to expand our marketing approach if we want the Handbook and other resources to be widely read.
- DEVELOPING : While some of the current participants in the project have software experience, we are not currently offering any software consultancy. We likely need to develop our concrete skills in this area further, as well as incorporate additional 'business development' experience.
- BUILDING : One recent thread of speculative discussion concerns DAOs as a way to incentivise participation in peer learning and peer production, but this is only one strategy. It may be useful to take a 'multiple capitals' approach (possibly in collaboration with the Oxford-based company X in X).
HOW MANY PEOPLE AND WHO? PAID? UNPAID? VOLUNTEERS?
There are about 30 contributors to the Peeragogy Handbook so far, currently < 10 people regularly active in the project discussions, all volunteers. As indicated in the breakdown of 'DOCUMENTING' and 'MAPPING' above, we would be in a position to bring in money to support some of our activities, assuming we could find paying customers (e.g., Nesta, Tufts). If the process of scaling up Peeragogical Innovations as a tutorial -> class -> MOOC works well, we might expect hundreds or even thousands of participants over the next few years. Many will be volunteers (students), but some may want to join a consultancy.
Howard Rheingold
Feb 5, 2020, 4:27:32 PM2/5/20
to peer...@googlegroups.com
Really great work, Joe and the Peeragogy community.
Howard Rheingold
follow on Twitter: @hrheingold
My complete works: rheingold.com
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what it is ---> is --->up to us
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