User:Charles Jeffrey Danoff/Peeragogy Spring 2019 Meeting Notes

Following the vernal equinox we held four meetings discussing peeragogy, which is our way to describe how peer learning and production work. In an effort to drink our own champagne, we're implementing our wrapper pattern by creating this meeting artifact you're now reading: "Someone involved with the project should regularly create a wrap-up summary, distinct from other project communications, that makes current activities comprehensible to people who may not have been following all of the details."

If you have any questions about these notes and/or the project in general dear reader, please reach out by emailing [mailto:peeragogy@googlegroups.com?Subject=URL%20Encoded%20Subject&body=Body%20Text peeragogy@googlegroups.com] or using this resource's talk page!

March Meeting
When we last met in December, we defined some 2019 first quarter goals:


 * Write a blog post (no more than three paragraphs) on a learning topic they find interesting and relate it to peeragogy
 * And/or if you don’t have time to write, you can proofread,
 * Meet again in March to share work and outline next steps, and
 * Keep in touch via our public email group.

Aside from the fact some of our writings exceed three paragraphs, I feel like we made good progress towards our Q1 goals. Lisa published a Medium blog post 'Peeragogy: An Introduction (draft)', Joe wrote a draft of a new article on our PubPub instance, I compiled a submission to the Anticipation conference, we met in March, and we sent some emails to the public group (including introducing a newcomer to our fun world).

During that March meeting our discussion topics included: The community organization chat reminded us of the community lifting itself up by its bootstraps story we quoted in our first paragogy paper :
 * Siblings
 * Paola's research and exciting upcoming presentation
 * Simplifying buddhism and applying it to modern times (similar books read by Joe & Lisa)
 * Quote about time for change
 * Community Organizers: animal management advocates ManuMitra in Nepal being more helpful for accomplishing dog management than traditional hierarchical aid organizations

"A. T. Ariyaratne’s essay on Rural Self Help, one of the foundational writings of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka 6, begins:

'Nobody needs to teach rural communities about “group effort” and “self-help”. [...] The real question, therefore, is to examine what are the constraints that exist inhibiting the expression of their group effort and self-help qualities designed to improve food and nutrition levels, clothing,shelter, health, sanitation, education and cultural life?'

We approach peer learning in a similar spirit: it is something we all know how to do, but can’t always do well. Intuitively, there are bound to be difficulties for a group of peers studying a subject together, outside a traditional classroom or without a teacher. Indeed, peer learning is different from other forms of group effort, the proverbial “barn raising” for example, in which the persons involved can be presumed to know how to build barns – or at least to know someone who knows, and stand ready to take orders."

Coming out of the meeting, we defined some action items:
 * Meet in April
 * Review manuscript in progress doc and add links to more work
 * Collect success stories

April
We did not progress on collecting success stories, but we met on the 14th and people added their links to the manuscript in progress. It was an exciting meeting because we had a newcomer join for the first time in a while! He told us he was working on open source software and getting social entrepreneurs to collaborate with one another instead of individually working towards disparate aims.

We listened to him and then someone brought up Jane Gooddall and her work on human behavior change. Echoing the Ariyaratne quote, it was less about Non-Governmental Organizations coming in to impact change and never leaving; it's most effective processes are when they work with locals to start the change and then hand it over.

We also answered his questions about peeragogy. To frame the discussion we went read aloud from Lisa's peeragogy introduction, including a discussion of this anecdote about how people define teams differently:

"But it hit me a little bit later when I was driving home. We were working from two different definitions of team. The Chivas definition was one in which all members were actively engage and empowered. We were all expected to be proactive problem solvers (and we had worked to give them the tools to be good problem solvers). We succeeded not just in building the team but our vision worked even relative to other teams around the league. Her definition of team was a top down definition of team. While, within the organization, participation was encouraged, for her and others immediately around her, this was not their working definition."

Additionally we discussed how her use of the couch metaphor is helpful to outline a possible return on investment for two people investing their time peeragogically:

"Take two people and a couch. Individually they cannot move the couch on their own. Only when they work together can they move the couch. If they work together well, they will be able to move the couch effectively and efficiently. So, when you have two people who work well together, you have the benefit of both of their talents separately AND you have the benefit (plus alpha) of things that they can do together that they could never do on their own. In a very real sense, 1 [plus] 1 [equals] 3 or [equals] 4 or [equals] 5."

After the meeting, near the end of April, we received word that our submission to the anticipation conference had been accepted. Our next task was to revise the abstract before May 30th.

May
Drinking more of our own bubbles, in May we had two meetings where we hive edited our abstract. If you're not familiar, hive editing is something we used to do a lot where we all jump on a video call with a document open in a web based word processor (e.g., Google Docs or Etherpad) and write together at the same time. It is a lovely combination of fun and productivity!

The abstract went through a lot of changes and was the better for it by the end. We were proud of the revision and look forward sharing it at the conference! At the second meeting there were more hive edited improvements and a discussion of different ways the work could be presented. It's a piece of fiction including a narrator, so someone suggested it would be fun to have each of us play a different role. Some people would be in the actual room and others could join remotely. There was also a thought of asking someone in the audience to join to make them feel included.

We're open to more ideas though, what do you think would work best, reader?