I saw this one when it popped up. The thing which really got my attention was “For that role, we would probably forgo fundraising experience in favour of strong online communications skills”.

The challenge, from what I can see wearing your hat, is the same as any initiative which HP OER might fund = How to get these kinds of people to collaborate, and share the learning, in real time. There are plenty of good communicators spread around the HP funded traps.

We’re starting to see some movement in the telephony space now.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/82141_call_for_telecom_industry_ecomm/
A lot of what your advisory board are suggesting might become possible as Web designers and SIP engineers start to focus on global groups rather than National institutions (or even Global ones like Wikipedia).

So if HP would consider sponsoring some forums to complement this blog it might help to encourage the kind of “strong online communication” that Wikipedia’s global groups and many others want. Something like a social site for fundees, and potential ones. E.g. sitepoint.com without the ads. (It would save you having to report things second hand).

Perhaps we could add something like OER radio. (a la http://wikipediaweekly.org/)

I’d also be interested to know how one goes about putting together a joint funded initiative between HP and this foundation.
http://www.robertsonfoundation.com/?page_id=4

Just popped in to see if anything was happening. Samo, samo, eh?

Look, is there a chance you might use this space to work through a few ideas for funding. It’s getting a bit tiring to see that so much money is spent on the production of information (OER) and so little consideration is given to improving the communications between the global groups buried inside institutions.

I was just reading this blog; about Michael’s idea for global uni phone system GUPS). It won’t seem very interesting until you understand Michael is responsible for Gizmo, which is a SIP (session Initiated Protocol) version of Skype. So GUPS should really really be called GUMMS = Global Uni Multi Media System.

Even that might not seem very interesting until I mention that the Internet has its own telephonic country code, (+87810) which has never been developed to provide for a global infrastructure.

“Popular social networking sites like facebook and Bebo are changing the human fabric of the Internet and the way we interact with each other.MySpace, with over 200 million visitors, has become the digital equivalent of hanging out at the mall, coffee shop or bars. Users load these sites with photos, news about music groups and detailed profiles of their likes and dislikes”.

The missing component is something that links all the different groups together, allowing users to connect to friends on other social networks without having to continually change or migrate themselves”. Interested?

I was going a bit bats after reading “we welcome your feedback, comments and discussion” at the top of this doc, and having nowhere to go. http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf

Do you think we could try and attempt to bring all the discussion which goes on on all HP’s OER initiatives together? Blogs are one step and good as a way to respond to a report. But as John says in the doc, we have a “successful disaster” on our hands. “a teacher now has access to 100 elementary calculus courses’ (and a thousand blogs). We need incentives and mechanisms to promote creation and access to fewer instances of the same course but with more support material, more commentary, more examples, etc”

I wouldn’t even say we need “more commentary”. We just need a way that, when HP/OER funded communities put a doc or report up, people are directed to a forum where a conversation can take place, and be followed if you come in a bit late. You’ve seen John D from OCWC attempt a forum, but because the incentive is for each silo to produce “me too” content rather than collaborate and produce a course together, we end up with so many half baked (institutional) pies rather one good quality pie, baked by a global (subject specific) group.

In short, we need a community hub(s). http://docs.moodle.org/en/Community_hub

It might look something like this COP forum, which is about 250 on Alexa’s top 500. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
So long as each funded initiative is ‘incentivated’ to use it as a place to share what going on in their silo, I’m sure we might see the beginnings of a culture built around global communities rather than institutional repositories.

At least that’s what we’ve found.
http://www.wikback.com/forums/
(PS This hub is only 3 months old)