On October 5, Creative Commons and P2PU convened community advocates and policy leaders from the various “open” movements to lay the curriculum framework for the School of Open. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a community initiative that will provide online educational resources and professional development courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Participants gathered the day before for a convening on an Open Policy Institute, which will be blogged about separately in the coming weeks.

The meeting/workshop was extremely valuable in identifying existing needs around education and training on open policy, open education, open access, open science, and open culture. It was also a lot of fun! The full agenda and raw notes are at the etherpad, but here is a brief overview.

First, in pictures:

We broke out into groups and thought long and hard about the one person we’d really like to help as part of the School of Open. Who would actually come to take courses about “open” and what would they want to learn about? What questions would they have? The result was a set of detailed user scenarios spanning from Marcie the researcher working for a legislator to Maggie the wannabe rap star, from academic Professor Lovenchalk with questions about losing control over his work to elementary school teachers with questions about CC and copyright, and even to “optics nerds” on Wikipedia. You can check out all the user scenarios at Flickr. The folder of user scenarios will continue to grow with each workshop.

Based on our user scenarios, we outlined course ideas, potential partners, and existing resources. Course ideas included: Crash course on the basics of open for government officials; How to ensure that my film can be shared; Rights info and tagging for (cultural) curators; How to integrate Wikipedia authorship in your academic workflow; Intro to Open Textbooks; and OER for faculty: what’s in it for me? More courses outlined at the pad.

Everyone was excited for the potential of the School of Open to support existing efforts and demand. And we want you to join us! Whether you’re part of the CC, P2PU, Open Access, OER, free culture, or any other open communities, the School of Open exists to support your education needs. We are aiming for an ambitious (but not impossible!) official launch date of February 2013, with at least five facilitator-led courses and five peer-led courses. Help make this possible by joining in course development efforts!

Where do I start?

1. Go to http://schoolofopen.org and get familiar with the project. What course do you want to take or build?
2. Join the discussion and introduce yourself and your field of “open” interest: https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open. See if others are interested in building it with you. Someone might already be developing the course you want to create.
3. Register for a P2PU account at http://p2pu.org.
4. Start creating! You can create directly on the P2PU platform or use http://pad.p2pu.org for collaborative editing. Just make sure to email the list or the Project Manager (that’s me) with a link to the working draft so we can help.

We will be holding several virtual meetings (eg. webinars) to support course creators, so stay tuned for those!

For those of you who just want to receive key updates and find out when the School of Open officially launches, sign up for our announcements-only list.

The School of Open is being run as an open community project — which means that you can help shape its direction and drive it forward. Find out more about that here.

Also see: School of Open builds community at the Open Knowledge Festival