[peeragogy-handbook] Workbook

[Joe Corneli]

BACKGROUND

(There weren’t any comments from the MetaCAugs/Augment reading group on
the Workbook.  Probably because I forgot to include it in the reading
list until the end, and people had run out of steam by then!  Oops!)

RELATIONSHIP TO MINI-HANDBOOKS

But I think the Workbook is going to be key for our revision strategy.
It’s as close as we got to "mini-handbooks" in v3, i.e., small practical
exercises.  Since this is a core part of our revision plan, I suggest
that we have a "mini Reading Group" where we mark up the Workbook with
further comments and revisions.

The source doc is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z95kjugeRWxHR526sSHlbVeiEubj-VyCdotozXXnHEc/edit

(Perhaps we should devote the first upcoming Writers Workshop session to
this task.)

RELATIONSHIP TO QUICKSTART GUIDE

We also have several versions of a quickstart guide.  The quickstart
guide focuses on joining & participating in the peeragogy project
itself, but we’ve discussed that at least 50% of our effort should be
towards helping people use peeragogy in the context of their own
projects, with minimal overlap with the peeragogy project.  So, the
Workbook might reflect the quickstart guide, but help people translate
the ideas to their own contexts.

RELATIONSHIP TO "DASHBOARD" FUNCTIONALITY

We’ve recently renewed effort around creating a "Peeragogy Dashboard":
https://github.com/Peeragogy/Onboarding-Project/wiki/Dashboard-Initiative

The way I see it, people who are participating in the project could use
the Workbook to build their individual (or group) project plans; and
then they could use the Dashboard to track progress on these plans.

I imagine a paper-based version of the workbook saying something like:

"You’ll need 3 blank pages of writing paper to complete this exercise,
and you should set aside X amount of time for that.  The result will be
a personalised Peeragogy project plan, just for you."

(In order to prototype this, people in the project may want to create
their own plans.)

CONTENTS OF THE WORKBOOK

What might go into such a personalised peer learning plan?  What are the
kinds of actions and interactions that people might want to practice and
learn together?

To answer these questions adequately, we should gather evidence from
across the history of the peeragogy project — probably with particular
attention to PARs, since they give a good bottom-up source of
information on the kinds of things people have actually been doing.

We could also add a top-down version of the exercise.  With OGM, we
recently did something similar, trying to synthesize an answer to the
question "Why do we exist?" (along with some sub-questions).

https://forum.openglobalmind.com/t/giant-wholeness-egg-redux/497 (1)

As a way to get started, we just pulled out some keywords from a free
discussion, like these verbs:

 access, meshing, aligning, steward_ownership, trust, mingling, weave,
 transmission

Then we organized them into a "Wholeness Egg" (i.e., a set of
proto-patterns); see output here:

https://forum.openglobalmind.com/t/ogm-workshop-group-1-output/413 (2)

We could certainly do something similar for Peeragogy; and/or we could
recommend this as one of the exercises for people to do in their own
Workbooks for their own projects.

But, maybe the questions from (1) aren’t exactly the ones that people
should be asking, so let’s try to refine this further.

We can get some further clues from our thinking about the kinds of
things people might want to track.

CONTENTS OF THE DASHBOARD

First iteration:

- Just listing things like Patterns, PARs, People

Possible future iterations:

- Making connections between them, e.g.,

  - PAR A documents *progress* towards next steps of Pattern X.
  - PAR B documents the *creation* of a new pattern Pattern Y
  - ... other things?

- Other kinds of updates like:

 - New podcast
 - "Recent changes" to the Handbook (presented in a nice format)
 - Commits to relevant software projects
 - Comments, mailing list posts, anything else we can feed in by RSS?
 - ...

RELATIONSHIP TO SCRUM/KANBAN

For comparison, Kanban is useful in a “project” context — but it seems
to be used primarily to track *execution* on projects that are already
reasonably well defined.  Whereas the Workbook is about a process of
*defining* a new project.  This is ‘philosophically prior’ to execution,
clearly!  So, the Workbook should play a philosophically very
interesting role.

RELATIONSHIP TO THE ‘QUANTIFIED SELF’ MOVEMENT

There are lots of tools out there for tracking *individual* activities,
but fewer for tracking *collaborative* activities.  This is one of the
clever things about a peeragogy dashboard: it’s orientation towards
group projects, collaboration, and eventually, networks of interacting
projects.  It may in some cases ‘bottom out’ in tools for keeping track
of individual progress (where people want to use those).  This warrants
further investigation.

I’ll leave it there for now, but I think there will be lots of
interesting things to discuss as we get this in motion.

-- 
Dr Joseph A. Corneli (https://github.com/holtzermann17)

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