Submissions/Bootstrapping the Wiki Way with the Peeragogy Accelerator

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 8004
Title of the submission

Bootstrapping the Wiki Way with the Peeragogy Accelerator

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

presentation/workshop

Author of the submission

Joe Corneli and Dorota Marciniak

E-mail address

holtzermann17@gmail.com

Username

Arided

Country of origin

USA

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Goldsmiths College, University of London

Personal homepage or blog

http://metameso.org/~joe/

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Peer learning and peer production have now reached a critical mass, delivering flagship products like GNU/Linux and Wikipedia. The patterns, plans and methodologies that make these projects work so well are still a topic of active research. At the same time, a wider free/open world would like to build similar successes in other domains, including education and business. Internet access and a whole host of resources and tools enable participants and observers to learn, connect and create together, independent of formal institutional affiliations, in ways never before possible. But if we think about the challenge of creating a well-functioning free/open alternative to the university system, or building an entire economy around free/libre/open principles (as with the FLOK project in Ecuador), then it is clear that much remains to be done.

Our contribution is to build a practical collaborative infrastructure -- the Peeragogy Accelerator -- to develop the knowledge and skills that upstart peer groups can leverage to realize their dreams. The project coordinates and coalesces contributions from globally distributed members with diverse backgrounds and operates worldwide. We take an “open” approach to technology, and do not limit ourselves to one set of tools. Rather, we build synergies across projects, and co-create a context for mutual bootstrapping. The Accelerator builds on the experience we accrued working together on the Peeragogy Handbook for countless hours over the last two years. It gives us the opportunity to refine what we've learned in practice. We publish the Handbook using the most radically open license, CC-Zero, but other projects in the Accelerator choose their own licensing strategy.

The Accelerator is not a traditional startup or startup incubator. Different member projects require different kinds of bootstrapping: in particular, some of them need business models, and some of them don't. But they all face an organization problem: "How to get all these potential contributors to work on a project together, how to integrate their contributions and control their quality?" (Benkler, 2002). Benkler highlights several possible solutions: "reintroduction of limited market-based or hierarchical integration, iterative peer production of integration, and technological clearance" (Benkler, 2002).

The session will begin with a talk that narrates the history of the Peeragogy project and describes our organizational solutions, focusing on the development of Peeragogy Accelerator's sustainability model and our design pattern catalog. These are tools that you can use right away to give your peer projects a tune up. We'll introduce the projects that are currently being Accelerated, and use the second half of the time-slot for discussion of further team-ups with and among attendees.

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests


Interested attendees

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  1. Paolaricaurte (talk) 21:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)Add your username here.[reply]
  2. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 17:02, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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