Time to work on our microgrant? Fwd: [p2pu-schools] SoSI Microgrant Application

[Maria Droujkova]

Hello,

Some of our classes are going, we are learning from the process and thinking about the future. Please let me know who will be interested in working on a micro-grant.

In particular, we discussed the following roles:
- Build stronger bridges to parent educator communities
- Integrate with existing for-credit courses (and now OER University)

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alan Webb <alan...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 5:29 PM
Subject: [p2pu-schools] SoSI Microgrant Application
To: p2pu-s...@googlegroups.com, citizen...@googlegroups.com


Hi everyone,

After much deliberation, Citizen Circles believes we have a solid proposal of work for helping get SoSI on the road to long-term sustainability after more than half a year of great leg work and idea sharing by all of you on this email.  We are submitting this proposal to discuss your offer to consider SoSI for microgrant of $5,000 to support our effort to complete the objectives within the proposal.  Thank you kindly for your offer and we look forward to discussing the proposal:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JcGhYiWJ0-yaaYxQ8XQRqSEgMxnu52Rx88IC7QnkrpM/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPPRtMsH

We would like to propose a call next week for any interested parties to discuss any questions or concerns the community has before proceeding to a decision, by whatever mean you deem appropriate.  We have additional questions we would like to cover as well.  Please indicate interest in joining this call by 5pm EST (GMT -5) Friday and feel free to propose topics for the agenda.  We will then schedule a call and circulate an agenda that works for the group interested.  We are also welcome to any back and forth of questions by email prior to the call.

We are looking forward to completing this work!  Thanks again for all of the work- really impressive, entrepreneurial work by all of you, and on constantly shifting, experimental ground- helping get the School of Social Innovation of the ground!

Sincerely,

Alan, Laura, and Jeff

[Joe Corneli]

If I remember correctly, we were thinking of having a school-wide
discussion --- if it is too much trouble to do this synchronously,
maybe we can just include replies in this thread.

In particular, I think it would be good to *brainstorm* some more
about the possible ways to spend funds. That should include not just
budgetary items, but some idea of the actual funding mechanism.

For example, in the world I'm most familiar with (PlanetMath), $5000
USD is not a small sum -- it could pay for one summer internship
(Google Summer of Code), or it could pay for lots of cheaper
programmer hours, or it could be half of the "baseline" operating
budget for the organisation for a year.

In short, it can be tricky to figure out just what to spend money on
in a volunteer-driven organisation.

From a brainstorming point of view, I think the problems I've seen in
my courses indicate fairly fundamental difficulties. I have a pretty
good idea of a way to address them (with the Planetary project and the
stuff about problem solving that I'm working on in my Ph. D.) but what
is less clear is how this could be integrated in with P2PU/SoMF.
Perhaps this is something we could hire a summer intern to work with
me on. $3000 to $5000 price tag, similar to an NSF REU project or
GSoC.

For that matter, another long-standing project would be to work on
becoming an NSF REU site (would be an awesome way to get money on a
long-term basis...)! I did a couple of those programmes and they had
a significant positive impact on my life. I don't know how easy it is
for a non-accredited institution to host such projects, but I think
it's not unheard of. SoMF teaming up with Webcraft or P2PU as a whole
might have the credibility to pull it off.

Whether or not that idea itself is good, I think it is worthwhile to
follow the SoSI lead and think more about ways to invest that build
long-term "sustainability". For that to work we need to know what
things are going to look like on an ongoing basis.

Joe