Open education at Ubuntu Live

Yesterday I presented on ‘Open Sourcing Education in South Africa’ at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland. The main idea was to start making links between that Shuttleworth Foundation and the Ubuntu community. I also wanted to test out some language from the Foundation’s emerging theory of change. Some quick learnings:

Learning #1: the ‘creating a new generation of innovators and leaders’ topline messaging from the theory of change is working well. It helps people quickly understand what the Foundation is striving towards, and also that it is primarily focused on South Africa. The link between this goal and the program areas (education, telecom and intellectual property) is tougher for people. And, the link to the Foundation’s values (open, collaborative, leveraged) is even tougher. We need to push a bit harder to make these links clearer and more compelling. Then we’ll have sparks flying.

Learning #2: I also tried out some language around an ‘ecosystem approach’ to open sourcing education. Basically, I just showed the links between projects like TuxLabs, Free Textbooks, Kusasa and our open education networking efforts. People seemed to get this as well, which isn’t surprising given the fact that every keynote speaker talked about ‘open source ecosystems’. Anyways, the ecosystem metaphor did seem to be useful in helping people see how different initiatives supported by the Foundation connect.

Learning #3: geeks immediately get the Kusasa idea, which isn’t true with other audiences I’ve talked to. I gave a very high level picture of Kusasa’s plans to develop a way for students to learn analysis skills through computer programming and modeling. One guy made the link to efforts he’d championed to use logo in Indian schools. Another talked about the inventiveness – and the hacking around the educational system – that might emerge once students have a ‘learn and explore’. Once Kusasa takes off, there is likely an army of geeks in the Ubuntu world who would want to help it grow.

Possible link: It sounds like the Edubuntu project in Andalusia has a major component where students create educational content. It would be worth digging more on this to see if there is something here to link into the open educational content work that the Foundation is needed.

Overall, a useful first time out presenting about the Foundation, with good reflections on what to do better next time. You can grab the slides or listen to the audio file if you want to know what I said.

Undefended territory

My favourite Ubuntu Live slide so far was Stephen O’Grady’s Sun Tzu quote: “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.”

O’Grady intended this as a reminder to the Ubuntu community, highlighting the upside of taking unclaimed territory (e.g. simple, clean, easy-to-use window on web applications). However, it also raises some questions for those working on open (source) education. Should we go for big policy change, or  can we create educational materials and apps that are so good that teachers just use them?

I dug into this question a little bit with Mark Shuttleworth and Jeff Waugh over dinner. Mark’s opinion: you can only do the educational end run strategy if you ‘hit it out of the park’ with something like Wikipedia (is this Curriki?). My sense is that it’s still possible big leaps through smaller (or maybe the word is ‘narrower’) wins, as long as the idea is at once radical and useful.

If it works, Kusasa might be exactly this. It’s fun. It doesn’t look like anything else in education. It breeds curiosity, inventiveness and collaboration. And, it meets a real need: stronger analysis stills amongst students graduating from high school. It could be one of those things that teachers and students ‘just use’.
Having slept on it, I am now thinking that policy (slow and incremental) and end runs (fast and radical) don’t need to be an either / or proposition. In fact, they probably work together well in yin / yang-ish sort of way.

Radical approaches like Kusasa can work in positive tension with initiatives like Free Textbooks that are targeted at the current mainstream of education. While this interplay is already at work in the Foundation, it might be useful to think about it more consciously … and to open up to a few more radical change bets in the coming years. It shouldn’t all be about policy change.

Stewardship, networks … and listening.

Sitting in last week’s ‘learning from networks’ workshop at the Centre for Social Innovation, Jane said something like: “I know I am doing well when the people I work with come up with their own ideas for Santropol Roulant, and then run with them. That gets them smiling and energized.” Colette quickly jumped in: “What you are talking about is ‘agency’. You know your network or your community is working because people are doing things based on their own agency.” This little exchange was a huge gift.

I have always seen stewardship as one of the most central values of leadership. I believe that good leaders – especially network leaders – are focused on serving and inspiring the people around them. If you are helping people meet their own goals, you are most likely helping to move the community or the company along in a useful way. Yet, it is tough to explain this to new network leaders that I work with, and even tougher to explain what to look for to know if you’re being a good steward (I know that I am not always one myself).

Jane and Colette’s quick exchange gave me what feels like a clear and simple way to talk about this issue: stewardship is a network leadership technique, agency something to watch for (or a metric) that tells you if you are being a good steward. Here’s a little diagram that I drew at the time …

You can see this diagram as a yin yang symbol, showing your (servant) leadership and the agency of network members as a dynamic and creative tension. Or, you can imagine it as a cycle where you pour all of your energy into sparking and encouraging initiative within the network, and then see the initiative from the network give you the energy you need to continue with your work of stewardship. In either case, a lack of agency or initiative within the network indicates that something is out of balance, and that your leadership approach needs to be tweaked.

If you haven’t done network leadership before, this may sound like abstract boohucky. However, I know from the telecentre.org experience that things are going well when our telecentre activist partners are running ahead with their own ideas, organizing their own events and creating their own services. We saw this very much with the formation of the Bangladesh Telecentre Network over the past year. In contrast, when it feels like we are pushing the telecentre activists we work with or they are participating only because we pushed and prodded, then it’s clear that we are not working effectively as stewards. We saw this to some degree in the early stages of the Training Commons in India, although it has now turned a corner.

As telecentre.org moves into a phase of building up more and more network leaders from the ground to play a global stewardship role, I am going to try out this simple diagram to see if it catches. I will let you know if it helps.

PS. Huge thanks to the Centre for Social Innovation and the Millennium Scholarship Foundation for organizing a great event on listening to and learning from networks.

Open source chamber of commerce

The open source chamber of commerce is one of the few ideas really sticking with me from last weekend’s Open Cities Camp.

The concept is simple: create an association to network and promote open source businesses in Toronto (or wherever you live). The members could be big (Google) or small (the Linux Caffe), focused explicitly on open source (a Linux support company) or just use open source (a phone company or a bank), work on software (Mozilla) or on other kinds of ‘open’ (why doesn’t Lulu.com have a Toronto office?). The common thread would be that open source plays a central role in the work of all these companies.

Why? To focus and build buzz around the significant volume of open source activity that is quietly (and disconnectedly) happening in Toronto. The number of companies, projects and research labs focused on open source is growing in this city, yet they are spread out a thousand nooks and crannies. There is no sense of community, no sense of anything bigger. Of course, that’s totally okay on one level. No need to invent community, especially when most people are tapped in globally. However, there is another level where staying disconnected locally represents a missed opportunity to make Toronto a better place to work on open source.

This ‘make Toronto a better place to do open source’ impulse was the thing that originally got me talking about open cities in the first place. The event last week had people taking the idea in all sorts of crazy and fun directions. Yet my interest in open cities still centres around the idea that there is a huge economic and cultural opportunity around becoming a hub for open source business, research and culture, and that a number of cities around the world will soon start actively wooing projects and companies in this space. We already see this in other industry sectors, with cities actively trying to attract and cluster businesses in green energy, biotech and so on. Why not do this with open source? And why not Toronto?

Of course, there are a number of good answers to ‘why not Toronto?’ Our colleges and universities focus very little on open source (with the exception of CDOT at Seneca). There are no big name open source or open content companies headquartered here. And, the idea that open source represents a huge economic development opportunity – or even an interesting topic of conversation – is totally off the City of Toronto radar. We don’t have a buzz or critical mass around ‘open’.

Or, at least, we didn’t. The buzz factor is slowly starting to increase. CDOT’s annual Seneca at York open source conference is building a name internationally. Open cities made a connection and got some attention from 70 people spending a day talking about how ‘open’ impacts their work. Places like the Centre for Social Innovation and SIG@Mars are talking about open source as a potential driver of social invention and innovation. We’re building some buzz, slowly.

The Toronto Open Source Chamber of Commerce (or whatever it wants to be called) could be one way to amp up this buzz, and to engage business more actively in promoting Toronto as a good place to work on open source. Getting it started – and making it useful – wouldn’t be hard. The Chamber of Commerce could: convene a few open source focused barcamps; run occasional networking breakfasts / lectures when key open source people are in town; build volunteer teams to use open source to help local charities. It could start small, and grow if there is traction. The only way to find out is to try.

PS.  David Eaves and I are thinking about doing a session on the Open Source Chamber of Commerce at the Seneca FSOSS conference in October. Ping us or comment here if you are interested in being involved.