Can open education learn from open software?

This is an excerpt from a 2-part inquiry (1, 2) by (Jan) Philipp Schmidt, cofounder of the Peer 2 Peer University.

It has interesting details about the peer governance and culture of open source communities, and how this might be applied to an open education projects like the P2PU.

Philipp Schmidt:

“As open communities grow, governance becomes a (fascinating) challenge. If you want to scale, and P2PU does want to scale, you need more people to feel ownership and take responsibility. That can be scary for the people who started the project, because how do you retain focus as more people with more (and different?) ideas arrive, and how do you preserve a sense of common values and culture?

I spent some time investigating how open source communities deal with issues of governance to see if we can learn from their experience. There is a great video on poisonous people in open source communities, which touches on a lot of issues that are relevant to governance of P2PU, although I think it’s better to frame the topic in a positive way. Rather than fighting against poisonous participants, it’s really about creating a healthy open source community. The video is long, but worth watching if you have an hour over lunch or so: http://sites.google.com/site/io/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people

The difference between decisions and discussion

It’s ok to have different levels of responsibilities, but communication has to be transparent and open. People often think the essence of open source is that anyone can do anything. That is far from true. Open source projects generally have clearly defined levels of quality control and responsibility, and processes how participants can gain such responsibility. Usually, only a small group of developers has the right to “commit” new code into the core application. Other developers can submit their proposals for new or improved code, but these suggestions are reviewed before they become part of the application. Usually the developers who already have commit rights can grant similar rights to more people, effectively promoting them based on their contributions to the project.

While the core group is trusted to make decisions on behalf of the community, all discussions and deliberations that these decisions are based on, happen in the open and anyone can in fact add their voice and opinion. This is fundamentally different from traditional organization, where typically the people who make the decisions discuss them amongst each other, and then announce certain developments to the wider community. In open source projects these discussions are open to all. This provides a constant check on the decisions of the code committers, because there is no room to hide bad decisions, and it turns the role of accountability on its head. In open source, the ones who have special responsibility become accountable to the community, rather than the other way around. The only discussion that remains private, is the one focused on promoting new people to higher levels of responsibility – in order to avoid embarrassment to the individuals.

There are some important differences between software and P2PU. We don’t have the focus on a single artifact (the software code) that everyone works on, and which has to function together. The closest thing we have to software code are courses, which are typically designed by one or a few individuals, and which don’t rely on each other to function as a whole. One way we could map the concept of a core group of “committers” would be in the form of course shepherds. Only trusted community members, who have earned this extra responsibility can “commit” a new course to P2PU. I can see lots of complications with an approach like that for P2PU, but it is an avenue worth exploring.

A lesson from open source that is easier to implement right now is the opening up of discussion and deliberation. Currently, P2PU has three tiers of conversations: the founders discuss organizational questions that are mostly focused on keeping the P2PU machine running so that the community can do what they would like to do. This includes things like organizing the next workshop, the need for a non-profit organization (or not), etc.. Increasingly the main conversations are migrating from that small group to what we call the P2PU gang mailing list, which brings together people who have made a significant contribution (organized a course, helped us with licensing issues, advised on technology, etc.). We currently rely on recommendations from this core group to add new people to the list. And finally there is the broader P2PU community that would include all of the above, but also participants in courses, and potentially outsiders. We don’t currently have a space for this wide open conversation, but it is something we are building into our new web-site.

General rough consensus works

Another misconception about decision-making in open source is that all decisions happen by voting. In fact, one quote from the video that really stood out, was “If you see a community that is voting all the time, something is very wrong”. During our Berlin workshop we adopted something called the “(emerging) general rough consensus”. In all group discussion we had one note keeper, who would at the end of the discussion, list all the points that the group seemed to have consensus on. Disagreement was encouraged and if one person flagged an issue as needing further discussion then we either discussed it more or noted that no general rough consensus could be found. It sounds complicated, but worked like a charm.”

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