SoSI micro grant proposal

[lila bailey]

Hi all,

 

We (me, Ali, Bekka, Alan and Lauren) had a call this morning about the SoSI grant proposal.  We all agreed their proposal looks great, we're very excited to see them get moving.

 

We chatted about a few things:

• SoSI will report back to the community on how things are going whent hey have things to report, like the working groups do - no specific deadline associated with milestones
• P2PU will be supportive and responsive when SoSI has questions/concerns, they should err on the side of overcommunicating with us
• SoSI is concerned about the technical platform, and will not recruit heavily from non-tech savvy crowds until the platfrom has improved - to this end, Alan will chime in on the dev list about what they need
• P2PU is OK with SoSI allowing some offline/private conversations to occur, but SoSI agrees to try to capture field notes and develop a human knowledge transfer (via community animators) to make courses open and able to be replicated by others

We agreed that we feel good about this proposal and recommend it be granted in the full amount requestes ($5,000).

 

If anyone in the shcools group has questions, concerns, thoughts about the proposal or this recommendation, please chime in soon.

 

-Lila

 

 

[Alison Jean Cole]

(Yay!)

ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison

[Philipp Schmidt]

Hey Lila:

Could you document this decision somewhere on the wiki: include a link
to the proposal (maybe create a PDF version that is "fixed") and the
public notes from the working group decision making process.

Two additional things from SoSI that would be useful:
* Define in a little more detail on how SoSI will report back to the
community. SoSI has done a good job sharing updates in the past, so I
am not concerned that will change, but since this is the first micro
grant we are awarding - we are defining a precedent for others.
* Define a few concrete goals - even if those are hypothetical. I
assume that the plan is to increase the number of courses? Is that
true?

By the way, setting yourselves the goal of success = sustainability is
very ambitious given that it's such a small grant. I would be careful
to connect this grant to a fully sustainable SoSI. If you can
demonstrate progress towards sustainability I think that would be
great - and could be done through:
* Increase in learners, courses, volunteers
* Additional funding opportunities
* Additional partnership opportunities
... etc ...

P

[lila bailey]

Hi Philipp,

 

I'll add this to the wiki - probably later in the week though as I'm slammed at the moment.

 

I agree that reporting back to the community is important, and we discussed this in detail ont he call. I told Alan and Lauren I didn't think it was necessary to edit the proposal to say that they would report back since they have indeed been good about doing so to date.  But if you think it's necessary to add it to the proposal or to the wiki page, then we can do that.

 

As for the goals of the project, they are outlined in the proposal as well.  There are some reasonable near-term goals (such as getting a community animator, etc.) and then some pie-in-the-sky visioning statements that are not really part of the the terms of the grant but show what they hope to do long term.

 

I also agree that " sustailability" is a loaded term and we don't want to imply that we expect SoSI to become a fully self-sufficient and financially independent entity by the end of the grant. My understanding of why that question was asked in the proposal template was just to get people thinking about how they would sustain community interest and a certain number of courses over time, not that these things would be achieved with such a small grant.

 

We should modify the proposal template itself if you think this is misleading or confusing as is.

 

-Lila

[Philipp Schmidt]

All sounds good. Thanks Lila!

Maybe Alan and Laura can take a stab at adding a little bit of content
to their google doc on what/ how they will report back on success (or
good failures) to the community. Just a few small bullets (no long
text / no paragraphs) please.

P

[Alan Webb]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delay everyone.  Laura and I were heading down the AshokaU Exchange last weekend and had a lot of prep work for that.  

There were a good number of faculty who are teaching social entrepreneurship at this conference who were wanting to understand this strange new world of online courses.  I hope we planted a seed in their minds that we are people they feel comfortable coming to and talk with about that, and we hope there will be some interest arising out of all of our conversations.  There was one person in particular who raised his hand in a session to propose an "Invisible College for Social Innovators," so we had a good chat about SoSI.

I have added the following bullet point to the proposal under dates/milestones. Do you all think this do the trick?

• SoSI will err on the side of over-sharing information on how things are progressing to the community.  We will maintain SoSI-specific communications in the Citizen Circles google group, but will also email informal updates (not newsletters, but emails and key need-to-know developments) to the broader community no less than once a session to the community listserv.  We will propose and hold calls as needed (e.g. while soliciting proposals for new courses).  When in doubt about who to share information with, we will ask Stian, Alison, Lila, or Phil for direction.

If not, let us know!

Best,

Alan

[Alison Jean Cole]

Sounds great.

ALISON
p2pu.org/users/alison