SoSI 2012 Vision and Microgrant Proposal

[Alan Webb]

Dear P2PU Community,

There are some really exciting possibilities for the School of Social Innovation which have been brewing slowly over the last few months which I want to share with you and, hopefully, invite you to collaborate on with us in 2012!

In Berlin, I presented a new vision for SoSI in 2012 which included:

• Launching peer-run courses at conferences.  There are a lot of advantages to this strategy which we have learned about over the last year and a half of experimenting.  I have explained in more detail in the proposal below.  I invite any of you to join me who are also interested in pursuing this strategy also so that we can learn from each other as we experiment.  Please let me know if you are, in response to this email, and I'll loop you in on those conversations.  I have started tracking possible conferences at which to begin to experiment with this strategy here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoU5Z8p_DphkdF9WMEpNVGtKZDdUV2llNUFIY09oYVE.
• Running adaptable courses that can be run in many nodes around the world all at once by lots of small teams, each on their own.  We envision that these can be designed once, launched with great fanfare (preferably at a conference), actually joined and run by small, local groups, and run in perpetuity through regular launches which would incorporate the best remixes of the last round.  While doing this will take both some experimentation with new types of organizing practices and tech, we've put a lot of thought into both of those things (see the mockups we've been developing: https://nighttrain.mybalsamiq.com/projects/p2pu-hubdcdesignthinkingcourse/grid) and are looking forward to start experimenting.  Some of the topics that show promise to launch courses like this in 2012 include:
  - Design Thinking for Social Innovators - to be launched at Open Education Week in March as a collaboration with Hub DC.
  - Engaged Learning in Education - to be launched at the Ashoka U Exchange in February.
  - Humanitarian Engineering - possible collaboration with two graduate students at OSU.
  - Civic Hacking - a do-over of an awesome former course in Brazil, and a possible collaboration with a Alison Jean Cole and an economics professor at Hampton Sydney, helping participants demystify their legislation process and learn how to "hack" it (design and propose citizen-designed legislation).
  - A few new courses on co-production and alternative currency with TimeBanks USA.
  - A possible relaunch of Social Innovation in Education with The Future Project this summer.
  - Pimp My Social Life - a possible collaboration with Neeru Paharia when she arrives in DC in May.  The name's too good to reveal the contents yet. :)
  

Those of you at the workshop in Berlin suggested that these were worthy strategies to pursue and suggested a microgrant to help me give these projects a nearly full-time level of effort for about the first half of 2012 which I think they will require to be really successful.  Therefore, as requested I have prepared a microgrant proposal enumerating some of the strategies above in more detail, to help you weigh in on whether you think P2PU should pursue this microgrant: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kC2IonIYNr8I-vG0XyjP24vs-Ugg29YakwO-s-lMx_o/edit

If you have any questions or discussions you want to raise to have about this proposal, please feel free reply to this thread publicly (or privately to me if you prefer).  I'll also be happy to hold a call on this any time, or discuss it on the community call that week is anyone is interested.

What's that you ask?  How can you get involved?  Well that's easy!

• Participate in courses!
• Propose courses!  If not, you can also review topics and content as they develop.
• Suggest conferences and make introductions!  See our lead tracking document above.  Join us if you’re eager to work with us or go after other conference opportunities and share what you learn.
• As I said, I’ve attached some mockups of possible directions the tech platform could develop to support these projects and possibly many other types of courses we're all running.  I have been discussing these offline with John, Chloe, Phil, and some of the partners we have in the pipeline but now I'd love to get community feedback too.  This is not exactly what will end up being built, obviously, as this was more of a visioning exercise of what could be possible.  Either way, as we do build towards some version of this vision, we may end up organizing some additional tech sprints to implement some of our “wishlist” ideas we've come up with... and when we do we would love to have you involved!

I greatly appreciate this community's support for SoSI and am really looking forward to 2012!

Appreciatively,

Alan