Some Lessons Learned by Facilitating a P2PU Course

[Lucas Cioffi]

Hi Folks,

The purpose of this email is to informally record some lessons learned from a "Local OpenGov Innovation" course I recently facilitated in P2PU.  The mission of the course was to find and peer-educate local organizers across the world interested in holding a workshop in partnership with their local government.  The purpose was to document and share effective opengov practices across all these locations; the opengov community is a loose network of individuals and organizations; this event was an experiment in getting them to collaborate.

Summary:

The bottom line is that the course was successful in teaching me about the ethos of peer-to-peer learning which we infused into the planning of the workshops.  The course was not successful in getting sustained engagement from its 24 participants, and I think I would do better in this area next time.

More Detail on Lessons Learned:

The workshops would cover transparency, public participation, and/or collaboration; they would all be held during the same week.  Originally the target was 50 4-hour workshops and we met with initial success.  We signed up 24 participants for the class and a total of 80 people through the class and also through existing Google Groups on the topic of opengov/e-gov.  

We primarily used the class for outreach to build that number of 80.  The class helped us reach people we never otherwise would have reached.

We learned was that 4-hour workshops were impractical because they required these strangers (who signed up from the course and the Google groups) to collaborate as teams for their city; the up-front promise I gave to participants was that participating in this course would not take more than 3 hours/week over a 4 month period.  

For version 2.0 of the plan, we scaled back to 2-hour summits so that individuals could plan the events with reduced logistics and not worry about collaborating as a team.  That would be possible within the 3 hours/week time commitment.

In this relaunch of the plan, we set the bar high and said we are looking for a minimum of 100 organizers.  We reached approximately 42 organizers in 12 countries, but not 100, so the plan was put on hold.  We had some partners but we needed to bring them on earlier so they could help promote the workshops and get to critical mass.

Tools We Used

• Our central hub: we used PBWorks' wiki functionality to present the most updated version of the plan (this was necessary because most of our participants did not come to us through P2PU and we needed to enable multiple editors)
• P2P class page for outreach and messaging
• GovLoop (a Ning network) for outreach
• Other existing Google Groups for outreach
• Our own new Google Groups for sharing knowledge across local teams; participation was very low here (links to the groups are on the wiki)
• Eventbrite to sign up the people who committed to holding an event with a Google Maps mashup embedded to visualize where the local summits would be
• BlogTalkRadio to broadcast the course live and recorded and to answer questions from participants from across the world in real time.
• Google Docs for collaborative multi-user notetaking during the radio broadcasts.  Many of the participants were confused by this element, so I would only recommend it for a tech-savvy crowd; last week I used this technique when facilitating NASA's Open Source Summit and it worked well there.

I held four of the weekly BlogTalkRadio broadcasts at 12pm EST every Wednesday.  The number of live participants ranged from 9-42.  According to BlogTalkRadio, the number of archived listens to the shows was 1,307 but that seems too high to me.

Most of the people who signed up through P2PU did not participate by calling into the broadcasts and only a handful signed up to be local organizers; nevertheless, these were great people we would not have found otherwise from some distant parts of the world.

I think the best model for a course would incorporate geographically distributed, in-person study circles that meet for 2 hours/week at a time that is convenient for them plus an optional 1-hour/week broadcast or conference call to cross-pollinate ideas from one group to the other.

By aiming for a critical mass of 100 cities and falling short, we were able to identify the many of the individuals and partners we need to relaunch this.  We will choose a date for relaunch once we have sufficient buy-in from a critical mass of partner organizations (hopefully soon!).  We will use P2PU again for the relaunch.

Lucas Cioffi

CEO, AthenaBridge Inc

Washington, DC

917-528-1831

[Alison Jean Cole]

Thanks Lucas,

Copying the larger P2PU community, because they are always interested in hearing about the experiences of others. (p2pu-community - see below!)

The first time leading a peer based course or study group, especially with P2PU, is a major learning endeavor in and of itself. We capture a lot of advice to help folks in the handbook (http://wiki.p2pu.org/Course-Design-Handbook), but often it takes experience to really learn how to make it all work. Often organizers find that leading courses over multiple weeks takes a lot of wrangling and communicating. Still, it sounds like your course, despite variations in participation and technical  hurdled went really well.

We'll be excited to see Local OpenGov Innovation run again. In the meantime, you should browse around the new platform (http://new.p2pu.org) and see what we're working on to make p2p learning environments easier to collaborate on. (Also read our blog post about why we're working on this: http://blogs.p2pu.org/blog/2011/03/29/a-new-website-for-p2pu/)

Best,
ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[Stian Håklev]

This is a great reflection, hugely valuable. Sounds like a very interesting and successful course, even though I am sure you are thinking about things that could be done better in the future :) (We are our own worst critics :))

It would be very valuable to post this on the wiki somewhere - I believe there is a space for course organizers' reflections... We don't want this to get lost in the abyss of the mailing list :)

Stian

--
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Alison Jean Cole]

I'd even love to see a blog post, if you're willing Lucas.

I will definitely add this here: http://wiki.p2pu.org/community-wisdom