Commons-based peer production of training materials with agile and scrum

This document attempts to sum up and bring some clarity on the collaborative development procedures of GROWL and the need for having more agility in organisational processes and structures supportive of grassroots-based transformations.

This document is in progress - your contributions are welcome

If you want to take part and have no access to our sprint board, please e-mail the GROWL International Office requesting access

What is commons-based peer production and why do we develop training materials this way?

Our capacity to address the complex and urgent challenges that are presented in contemporary times depends on "abandon[ing] (...) ideas of ‘control and management” seriously by arguing that science should be the servant of outcomes framed in, primarily, societal terms, rather than the other way around" (Healy, 2011). I argue that precisely the same logic applies to education and the production of the knowledge related to the transformational processes ocurring in society and supporting degrowth.

"The increasing disciplinary specialisation of many in the academy simply renders specialists incapable of comprehending the systemic character of current problems and potential solutions."

A postnormal "education" requires not only the access to quality facts, provided by open access and open knowledge, but also the promotion of processes within and accross online and offline communities of practice. This is part of the idea of a commons-based peer production of training materials.

What is scrum and how do I take part in the process?

Scrum is a methodology of "agile project management", originally emerging and often used in the IT sector, among other businesses. Agile marks a departure from (and presents a critique to) the traditional way of project management (waterfall), where long-term goals, milestones and tasks are settled during a plane phase of a project. Scrum makes no long-term plan of the tasks, but rather relies on short-development cycles, each of this cycle bringing an increment in the product value (to the end user) as a whole.

In GROWL, we pilot the use of the scrum methodology in the production of knowledge and education materials in a not-for-profit environment. This presents several challenges, and we have a continuous optimization process, with a lot of trial and error.

With this we aim at supporting and stimulating the process of commons-based peer production across the (open) GROWL network participants. Postnormal times require postnormal and agile grassroots organisations and processes.

You can have a quick introduction to our scrum process (and tools), please check the attached presentation by @eleftheria.

GROWL related

Product vision

Building an open knowledge bank of learning materials, curricula and experiences based on the logic of commons-based peer production

Product roadmap

December 2013 - December 2014 - Development of core and contributed modules wireframes and repository structure January - July 2015 - First public release of modules July 2015 - Publication of printed book after August 2015 - Definition of new teams and release cycles

Proposed release plan

September 2014 - Module on Local Economic Alternatives

December 2014 - Degrowth core module

January 2015 - Mental Infrastructures module

February 2015 - Social Dimensions of Agroecology module

February 2015 - TTT module

March 2015 - Degrowth & Agriculture module

March 2015 - Solidarity & cooperative economy

April 2015 - Work in a degrowth society module

May 2015 - Community building module

June 2015 - Local policies module

July 2015 - Publication of book with all modules published up to now

? 2015 - Renewable energy module

Iteration - the scrum sprint

The objective of the iteration is defined by the team present at the sprint planning meeting, based on the combined effort capacity of the team, the story points estimates and the release plan.

GROWL uses 1 month sprints. The sprint planning meetings of GROWL happen every 2nd Tuesday of the month, from 10:00 AM (actually immediately after a short last months' sprint retrospective) to 5 PM CET. We are unfortunately still relying on proprietary tools for this: Skype and Trello.

Weekly

We have weekly scrums where 3 quick status update questions are asked by the Scrum master and answered by everyone in the team within a 24h time frame.

References

Healy, Stephen. 2011. “Post-Normal Science in Postnormal Times.” Futures, Special Issue: Postnormal Times, 43 (2): 202–8. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2010.10.009.