So what does health care have to do with “open”? Much more than you might at first think. Let me illustrate a few of the ways…

• Innovation requires risk. Intellectual risk, for sure, but perhaps more importantly, risk to your finances, to your family, to your future. To do something new and innovative, and especially to go against the grain, as so much of open science, open education, and other similarly motivated ideas run, is to take on significant personal and professional risk. In America, that risk to individuals is unacceptably high, given that it often includes foregoing such basic guarantees as health care. Health care reform means that we have lowered the threshold for action by the innovators of tomorrow. Don’t be afraid to take a chance, we’ve got your back.

• The grand challenges we face as a society – climate change, public health, energy security, to name a few – these problems are big. They are burly. They resist simple reduction into a controlled study here, an opinion poll there. To get a handle on these issues, we need data – lots of data. And we need collaboration – massive, distributed collaboration. And we need cooperation, even among competing interests, where the system positively reinforces activities the reduce the risks to society even as it improves the bottom lines of the businesses involved. Health care reform holds the potential to shift the focus from profit to care, from rendering tests to preventing disease, all of which requires greater openness, and greater sharing. Look for a revolution in public health research and outcomes in the years to come.

• Health education is desperately needed around the globe. Many institutions are trying to share their medical education materials more broadly, but the costs are high, and there are thorny thickets of laws regarding health records, medical images, and other patient-oriented data which impede sharing. People are rightly reluctant to provide personal health information publicly for fear that the insurance companies can use it against them. Health care reform eliminates this fear, thereby opening the floodgates for public health data and associated educational materials to be shared, adapted, and localized the world over. The era of educational opportunities, personal genomics, and patient empowerment is here, and openness is a big part of the picture.

There will be people who will try to stop all progress. There will be those who will try to exploit the complexities in the system and throw obstacles in our way. But we have to seize this chance to catalyze a more open and effective society, in education, in science, in everything. Our health care “system” is so broken, it’s hard to believe there any defenders left. But as with our education “system,” which is similarly dysfunctional, change has proven more difficult to implement than it is to talk about. How refreshing to see action in Congress instead of so many words. Yes, there is still room for vast improvement, but enough dithering. The future awaits, and it looks more open than ever.

Imagine that! Now, I’m all for people being able to pursue abstract, theoretical constructs and even to pursue careers along those lines. But the educational burden on people trying to do innovative work is unsustainable – the article mentions that the average age for first-time recipients of federal (NIH) funding is 42. Such funding is essentially a requirement for people trying to achieve tenure in the sciences, meaning that many smart people will train until they are nearly 50 years old before they either find out that they can make a career of their specialized knowledge and skills, or need to start over doing something new.

I suspect we will start to see more and more institutions like BGI. Indeed, I suspect that this trend towards more relevant and practical education will be accelerated by open education, which will eventually come to encompass not just the resources (OER) but also the support structures, mentors, and pathways to competency and accreditation. And I believe that these changes will save the liberal arts institutions, despite their best efforts to destroy themselves. Perhaps I will even see the day when our academic institutions return to their roots: encouraging education for education’s sake, supporting basic research and humanist inquiry, and catalyzing innovation and change not to support institutional aims, but to support the betterment of humanity.

A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to this infamous YouTube video of the Sasquatch music festival where, if you haven’t seen it, one lone naked dude starts an awesome dance party. I have to say, that after our inaugural workshop last week in Berlin, I think we’re past the point of three people falling over themselves. We were probably (definitely) in that phase during the pilot, where we stumbled through our courses, attempting to cohere and make sense of things, but without the glue to pull it all together. Even after the pilot and before the workshop, we sort of looked back and saw the different pieces and couldn’t quite put it together in our heads. For one thing, we didn’t know each other. Instead of a face without a name, it was more like an email without a face, anonymous @ placeholders populating our inboxes. Secondly, we knew we were scattered around the globe, which somehow deepened the mental disconnect. And finally, though we all had different reasons for volunteering, I suspect most of us had joined thinking it would simply be a fun experiment. Sure, why not organize a course online? It’s only six weeks of my time. An online book club? Sounds fun, and most importantly, noncommittal. If the pilot tanks (or even if it doesn’t), we can always pull out. We’re only volunteers after all. At least, that’s how I felt.

Then the P2PU workshop transpired. But before I dive into that, let me give newbies some background into what P2PU is, and what it’s all about (or at least, has become). I think Larry hit the nail on the head when he said that, “P2PU is the social learning wrapper around OER.” More elaborately stated, “The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.” It’s an idea that was dreamed up and shaped by five founders a year or so ago, that materialized into an initiative called Peer 2 Peer University, manifesting itself in both virtual (p2pu.org) and physical (p2pu.org/Team) forms. We launched the pilot with seven courses (seven+ volunteer course organizers, plus volunteers around tech and admin issues) on 09.09.09. The pilot ran for six weeks, during which time we saw a good number of participants drop off like flies. The majority of our participants had full time jobs, were full time moms or dads, or were otherwise engaged with non-virtual life. There was also the issue of multiple tech platforms (blogs, wikis, etc.) which not all of us or our participants were fully familiar or comfortable with. Basically, it was a true pilot, from start to finish.

So we learned a lot about what didn’t work, but how to transform that knowledge into progress?

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

Well, with one awesome facilitator to keep us on target and another one to keep us moving forward, we put our heads together and brainstormed our way through four intense days of workshop. We set the agenda on the first day in post-its–the Wall of Ideas–and then proceeded to take the wall apart piece by piece in break-out sessions in the days ensuing. Personally leery of group work, I was at first skeptical about these group sessions, where we were split off into three groups of four–how much could we really accomplish with three disparate group resolutions? How much consensus could we really reach? And wouldn’t we end up hating each other in the end having to work, live, and play with each other? (Especially me with my penchant for disliking most people upon first meeting?)

First impressions, even if they are unpleasant (which they weren’t), don’t last long when you have a group of truly genuine, intelligent, and like-minded people together in one space for four days. Maybe it was Berlin, or the uber hip design space we were working in, or the fact that we all cared about the basic innovative idea of P2PU (peers learning from peers outside the ivy walls of tradition)–whatever it was, and as cheesy as it may sound, we truly connected. There was not one person who came out of that workshop who was skeptical of what we had accomplished or where we were headed. Some of us may have started out that way, myself included, but by the end we were ready to change the world, or at least the unbounded universe of education.

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

It was amazing how much consensus we reached after the hours of discussion in groups and report-backs to the group at large, how much concrete progress we made in terms of objectives and volunteered tasks to achieve those objectives. I think the moment when I knew I was part of one of the most functional groups of people I have ever worked with was near the end on Saturday during the tech session. John got up after our report-backs for what we’d like to see created (because the idea of casual changes to an existing platform did not even cross our minds) and laid out a schedule of deadlines and feedback dates where this was all going to be implemented. My jaw dropped–really? Since when did developers ever set deadlines like this, and since when did those deadlines ever come to mean anything? Especially volunteer developers? I was floored. I think we all were, not to mention incredibly humbled by this collective vision that had somehow coalesced from our individual ambitions and presented itself to us unawares.

I may sound like a giant cheese ball, but I really, truly appreciated the presence of every single person I met in Berlin. Throughout the group discussions and individual conversations I had with people, not to forget the dinners and yes, not entirely sober dance sessions, I really got to know each and every P2PU volunteer as more than just an @ placeholder, and as someone who was contributing to some larger effort just like me, on an entirely voluntary basis. I think in the end that is the crux of P2PU, that it’s made up of and run by volunteers–people who are willing to risk their time and effort to realize a vision that may not be realizable.

There are various theories as to why this happens in groups, one of which we discussed over our last dinner–that a part of a person’s brain shuts off when she or he feels part of a larger group effort, essentially positing that some part of her nature is satisfied that was previously working to be satisfied (maybe?)–but theorizing aside, P2PU is a lot more concrete and unidirectional than it once was. We have a real agenda and a community vision, and we’re headed towards it. I’d say that makes us more than three people falling over themselves. We’re somewhere in between three people and the awesome dance party that erupts at the end. We’re in the growing stages, and I’m willing to stick around ’til the end, if there is such a thing.

Photo by kiyanwang CC BY-NC-SA

The conference itself was teeming with a variety of a different sort; the make-up of the audience (or perhaps the auditorium itself) strangely reminded me of a theater I attended back in Orange County. The crowd was a tad older, and certainly more formally dressed than the usual canvas sneaker and jean combo I am used to. And not entirely opposed to free culture folk, but certainly unlike, they were the paradigm of decorum.

WhippleHill services high schools in their online communication needs, and mainly because its founder, Travis Warren, went to one, it specifically targets private schools. WhippleHill is a for-profit, but like a lot of for-profits who offer services around next generation web technologies, pushing out open content and tools to their community only helps them. WhippleHill is a great example of the service model that is growing around open content and open tools, and I think it’s a model others should be taking note of, especially in this belly-up economy.

If anyone can work up a crowd, I should have guessed it would be Clay Shirky (or someone like him). Shirky elicited much laughter, and I definitely recognized anecdotes from his book whereupon I had LOL-ed. The one that got the crowd in particular was involving high school students’ myspace or blog postings, which usually revolved around such “banal” subjects (Shirky’s words not mine) like the thumb fishing app for the iPhone (personally, I did not know such an app existed and so found this post rather interesting). The title of the one student’s blog post was “Gone fishin’ ” and displayed an image of the iPhone with the app in the background. Underneath, it read, “I have been spending way too much time on this” or something akin to it. Now why would she (it was a she, and a fashion student in this case with a (not-so-curious to me anyway) fascination with Hello Kitty phone covers) post something so banal? Shirky asked. It’s simple; she’s not talking to you.

This, he continued, is what high school students discuss at the food court in the mall. If you’ve ever listened in on one of their conversations, it is filled with banal subjects like Hello Kitty phones. But you are obviously the weird one in this case, for what are you doing at the mall listening in?

Funny, and hilarious by some standards, but I had read it before. So what piqued my interest was his pizza-by-the-slice analogy (if it was in his book, I missed it). Maybe I’m just a foodie, but I found it a very apt example of what can happen when you get large groups of people together. Basically, Shirky grew up in the Midwest, where he worked at a pizza joint that only sold whole pies. (Myself having worked at a pizza chain in the OC recognized and sympathized with this situation.) Upon a visit when he was 16 to New York City, he was astonished that their pizza places not only sold pizza by the pie, but by the slice, and he wondered how this was sustainable. Well it turns out that NYC pizza joints have the pizza baked ahead of time, a novel concept, and simply reheat each slice when sold. From this he gleaned that the city has enough people willing to purchase pizza by the slice, which is what makes this type of marketing strategy sustainable. “When you get really large amounts of people involved, improbable events become certainties,” he concluded. “You can’t predict in advance how things will happen, so you have to provide tools to allow things to happen.” Baking the pizza prior to purchase was this sort of tool for pizza joints; it not only saved time but gave people more options. In turn, it allowed a kind of business (pizza-by-the-slice) to flourish that would not have otherwise done so.

Shirky is the master at anecdotes, and dropped a few more gems into the bucket before retiring to answer questions from the audience. I won’t go into detail about them here, for risk of running too long like my last post, but I would urge any and everyone to read his book, Here Comes Everybody. It puts the world into enlightening anecdotal perspective, and you are bound to catch yourself uttering a lot of “Mmmhmms” throughout. Anyway, now that I’ve done my part in promoting book sales, I wonder how long it will take before he decides to make it available online under a Creative Commons license…

“Loss of control is already in the past.”

This was the response Shirky gave to an audience member who asked how he should deal with parental and faculty concerns about the use of new media tools. It was also, coincidentally, the meme I went with for my own presentation, where I emphasized that it is up to us to educate our youth with a different approach to copyright law, because kids are going to keep doing what they are doing anyway—namely, what the Recording Industry Association of America calls “piracy”. The world is changing has already changed and we need to do our part in dealing with it rather than flogging a dead horse.

I presented to a full room, and even spied people lingering in the doorway while I was giving my talk. I thought my voice would give (I did croak a few times, and friends have told me I have an “adorable” little lisp…), or that my Macbook would suddenly shut down (as punishment for using proprietary software), but other than a little projector-laptop miscommunication in the beginning, things went pretty smoothly. Surprisingly, I ended with fifteen minutes to spare for questions, which were not all filled up. It’s always hard to gauge an audience who doesn’t respond with wild exclamations of support, so I wasn’t sure if they “got it” or not. But after the session, I had quite a few people come up to me, and there were general smiles and thank you’s all around. Jen, who deals with the WH communications end of things, told me it was all the rage on Twitter, and that one fellow had even mentioned how he was going to integrate Creative Commons education at his school. This made me happy. Teaching kids about CC is probably one of the best ideas in terms of copyright education. I only wish I was the one who came up with it. But as the sentiment goes, what does it matter, if you can build upon that idea and make it better. My favorite session member was one woman who sat smiling with attention at the very front. After I had finished packing up my things, she thanked me and remarked, “I have so much to learn!” I wanted to tell her—so do I!

In retrospect, I think Travis’ suggestion over a phone call some months prior is what helped with preparing for this crowd. By this crowd, I mean members of the majority of the education population who know almost nothing about copyright law, much less Creative Commons. He told me to “start at the beginning”, and I really took that advice to heart. Having started in the middle of things myself, when the open movement was already in full swing, I was really grasping at straws for a while. A lot of talks on CC will gloss over its origins and the history of copyright law—but WHUC 09 made me realize how important it is to linger on these details. Showing people the history behind Creative Commons, namely what led to its necessity, is pretty much identical to showing them the importance of “open”.