Matthew Bishop, who is with the Economist in NY, took issue and responded on his blog Philantrocapitalism..

Both posts are worth reading. I very much like the idea of philanthrophy as risk investment in areas that are important and maybe don’t attract typical risk capital. The Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, which helped start P2PU, is an excellent example for risk philanthropy. But ultimately I fall on the side of Peter Buffett. And I feel the criticism focuses too much on the window dressing, and not enough on the core of his arguments.

For example, the point he makes about “one hand takes, the other gives back (to feel better)”. Mr Bishop suggests that is not the case and lists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to make his point. But even looking at Microsoft, there is a direct link between keeping computer software artificially high to extract rents from African governments, and limiting how many potential innovators in Africa were able to use computers in the 90s. A more philantrocapitalist approach might have been to co-design the software to be more suitable to users in developing countries, implement more flexible pricing schemes, and build capacity in Africa for software development. All of those initiatives would have slowed the growth of MSFT and reduced its profitability, but they would have given African innovators a leg up – towards solving their own problems today.

I can think of many other examples where this is the case. The financial cost of international remittances is a transfer of wealth from the poorest (who are sending money home to their families) to some of the richest (the owners of the banks). Rather than praising some of them to then give back money, we should push them to do things that reduced their income now – and create opportunity for poor people to solve their own problems. Another example are telecommunications companies who by extracting rents from fast growing African markets, are effectively limiting access to the Internet. Oil companies who use any and all means to get access to natural resources in West Africa. All of this is much more complicated than I make it out in 2 paragraphs. Clearly it is not simply the work of some greedy foreigners.

However, it is an important enough point to pay attention to for those interested in understanding and improving philanthropy.

Here is my nutshell summary of the panel:

Research suggests that introducing an extrinsic reward (in the form of a badge) will decrease existing intrinsic motivation. We also know and understand that many other factors can provide intrinsic motivation for learning. In order to avoid lowering participants’ desire to learn, we should therefor focus on understanding and increasing the development of the intrinsic motivation and refrain from introducing extrinsic rewards.

I am glad to see people like Mitch and his panelists add their thoughtful voices to the conversation. He is right that there is a risk that we get badges wrong. And he is right that the hype around badges may lead to the development of poorly designed badge systems that will at best not improve learning, and at worst hinder it.

But I believe that there is more to badges than their role in motivating learning. And that through careful design choices we can try to avoid the negative impacts he describes. After all that’s what his team at Scratch is already doing – experimenting with aspects of rewards that are not that different from badges, such as showing points for discussion forum participation and counting remixes.

The issue is not, “badges or no badges” The issue is how we can design badge systems that foster great learning practices. We will learn a lot more about how these systems work in the next year as the DML badge competition projects kick into implementation, but for now I would suggest two simple design principles to get us started in the right direction:

1 – Use badges to define roles rather than as rewards. In many learning communities users take different roles. Mitch actually mentions the importance of taking roles within a community like Scratch, but he sees roles as separate from badges. I believe that by recognizing roles – for example a mentor role – through a badge will signal to a new members of the community that mentorship is a valued practice within the community, and helps  them identify those who can help with problems and questions. And finally it may encourage users to strive to become mentors themselves. So rather than give badges as rewards they can help diffuse awareness of roles within a community.

2 – Anchor badges within community. The relationship between issuer and recipients will influence perceptions and expectations around badges. Badges that are woven into the fabric of a community of learning will be perceived less as extrinsic motivators, but as representation of core practices within the community. When the badge recipient feels ownership of the design of the badge, because she fully considers herself a member of the community that defines and issues the badge, the badge can provide an effective marker of learning pathways that help the learner to orientate herself within the landscape, and can act as a marker and pointer for new members of the community following in her steps.

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

http://p2pu.org/node/5618/forums/9614

I wont’ go into a lot of detail on the content of the readings, but they deal with community behavior observed among baboons in East Africa, where norms fundamentally changed due to an external influence, and remained robust over time. I take away two starting points from the radiolab programme for our discussion of open governance.

• New and fundamentally different community norms can emerge suddenly (and by accident) and don’t require slow evolutionary processes.
• The new community norms thus established, can remain robust even when new members join the community, who are used to the traditional norms and behaviors.

The question of norms and values, and how they are conveyed to new members of a community are important for all organizations, but more so in open communities. There are at least two reasons for this. Open communities show higher levels of fluidity in membership. New participants constantly join communities, and others leave, and there are usually few opportunities for formal “orientation”. Different from traditional firms, norms and values are not fixed by hierarchical power structures and rarely questioned. On the contrary, the community constantly engages with them in action and discourse.

All communities have norms and practicies (“the way we do things around here”) even if they might not be clearly articulated or expressed. And even if they are articulated somewhere, they might still not be obvious to newcomers. As in the baboon example newcomers join a community with their own set of values and behaviors, and with expectations regarding the community norms, and might lack interest or skill to observe and adapt to existing community norms. The baboons required a “mentor” to help them figure out what was different. Interestingly, for the baboons this mentor’s role was mainly to comfort the new joiner – rather than lecture or instruct them on how they should behave.

The set of questions this raises for me, is related to the strategies that open communities will take with respect to newcomers. Are these strategies designed to make new joiners feel comfortable and at ease, and does that work in open communities as well as it does for baboons? (I realize I am moving on increasingly thin ice here – “Schmidt calls open source developers apes?” – I am not doing that!)

If our hypothesis is that communities will take different strategies to convey prevailing norms, and that they react differently when norms are questioned, or attacked, it would be interesting to look at a few examples in a little more detail.

I am glad to say that on the P2pU-community mailing list, we have seen a lot of the good baboon like behavior. When new joiners introduce themselves, or are introduced by an existing subscriber, there is usually a flurry of emails responding to their interests and just saying “hello – great to see you here.” I hadn’t thought about it in these terms, but I think those first messages go a long way towards making people feel at ease, and appreciated and as a result there is little risk they will act defensively.

At the same time, we’ve had a few occasions where community members sent short or terse emails that sometimes cut discussion short. I received messages off list from community members who stated they weren’t replying to emails that seemed negative and not constructive. As a result I kept a eye on messages from the person who had been sending these emails and would have contacted them off list if the same dynamics had continued. Fortunately, the tone of the emails was mostly related to stress that had nothing to do with P2PU and evened out after a little while. For me, it was great that the community had a self-warn system where individual members would first flag a potential problem off-list. What we haven’t had to deal with is to resolve this kind of conflict on the list, and that will be a real test.

I am running out of time here, but I remember a Google Tech talk about dealing with difficult developers joining an open source community and it would be useful to go back to the talk and compare the suggested strategies, to the “make them feel comfortable” approach discussed here. Has anyone else seen this and might still have the link?

Great week 1 and it’s a challenge to keep up the reading and writing. But learning doesn’t come for free!