Grants/Open your organisation - Education Community Lab
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
Education Community Lab is 3-days workshop for open education activists. It will be focused on enhancing NGOs’ knowledge potential into open society. Thus, the aim of the Lab is to develop guides, methodology and tools that support third sector in implementation the open approach and CC licences in their projects. We start with recently published recommendation for open publication for the biggest Polish NGOs’ network. After 3 days of the Lab participants will gain practical knowledge on launching open project within their organisation and in co-operation with other NGO as well as know-how on developing open publication.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
The Lab will end with a guide on opening strategy for publications and projects in non-governmental organisations. It will be developed during the workshop as effect of discussions and collaboration among participants and trainers. We see it as supportive document and starting point for developing open policy for a particular organisation.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
It will be focused on NGOs’ and open education activists. In Poland there is still lack of people understanding the huge potential of open projects in educational field. Thus, the EduLab is addressed to people currently involved in open projects or belong to organisations which create educational materials in their projects as well as daily vocational actions and want to improve their public and common potential. Our aim is to create education community which can be seen as a supportive network that encourages others in implementation open solutions in the Polish NGOs’ field. Also this task should result with higher number of open publications made by NGOs.br />
Coalition for Open Education in Poland was launched for promotion open educational resources movement in particular. We have group of 10 active collaborators but to act widely on Polish educational market we need to gain support and start to collaborate with other organisations. Coalition has contact to them through personal relations as well as through seminars, conferences and events that we organise for wide pro-openness audience. Added value here is that in Poland there is no other organisation responsible for shaping and promoting open education in such complex way. In June 2010 we had realised workshop ‘train the trainers’ with aim to create a network of open education trainers in Poland.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
We want every participant to prepare strategy of implementation openness into his/her organisation. Our first indicator will be a number of institutions that changed their NGOs’ publication policy and public knowledge policy. Second indicator will measure a number of new open publications made after training, promotion and recommendations. Coalition will also evaluate and invite trained organisations to become active member of Coalition and open education network.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
We want to recruit 20-30 persons from twenty NGOs. We plan to set a common space (e.g. wiki) for our participants for ideas exchanging and collaboration on potential projects between their organisations.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
We want to achieve in Poland situation when growing number of NGOs will publish their materials on the Internet and open licenses, knowingly, and will encourage others to do the same. That model will help them become more transparent and increase the number of open projects (creating public knowledge) especially when there is commitment of public money. Training based on our recommendations for NGOs’ network should also increase number of high quality educational materials provided by NGOs.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
Members of Coalition have sufficient technical facilities to organise intended workshop. Our members can provide technical skills and technology which we want to use and teach about: community building and collaboration (Wikimedia Poland), accessibility (FRiR), educational resources and publishing technologies (Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska, Wikimedia Poland).
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
The biggest challenge will be to answer all the legal problems to our participants. We want to hire a lawyer familiar with Creative Commons, to explain the legal details of CC licensing usage. In Poland there is rather lack of specialists in this field, but among them we want to arouse interest in this topic. The big challenge is also changing the level of social awareness about openness and making a shift from negative or neutral attitude to it towards positive. We believe that step by step, with persuasive skills, we can achieve a lot.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
We can receive grants from various sources, including national organisations. Also our members have human and technical resources as well as own funding so the project will certainly continue. We intend to provide similar training annually due to the main objective of Coalition that was set in our mission.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
The network of open education activists and increasing number of open publication will spread the idea of open policy in local environment so that openness will be promoted within as much Polish NGOs as possible. We hope that positive impact on third sector will also be transferred on primary, secondary and higher education institutions.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
We will use all the CC licenses, examples of good practices in Polish and foreign resources, we need textbooks, guides and presentation about CC, both in English and translated. Also we would like to share Creative Commons personal resources or knowledge, especially in case of law and policy.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
We use social channels to communicate with our community mainly Facebook page and group, microblogging account where we put news from our blog, announcements and invitations for events related to open education. We have also set wiki for our trainers where they can collaborate on common projects.
Legal
Yes
