Thanks Mel! What follows is some additional background, stuff that needs to be done moving forward, the budget, a proposed future structure and thoughts around a POSSE retreat around the Boston area in mid-June.
As some of you have experienced, working with the current group within Red Hat charged with POSSE’s budget is a struggle. to get us to the current state of an acknowledged intention to provide a budget of $35k has taken numerous emails and between 10-15 calls to Singapore on my end alone, and likely similar efforts on Mel's behalf. The good (but as yet unofficial) news is that it seems this will move over to a new division sometime during this RH fiscal year. Leslie Hawthorne is one of the new hires for this new group. While the Comm Arch and Education stuff is not officially embedded in this group yet, their goals are related and such a move would make sense. Fingers crossed. Moving Forward in the Interim In the meantime here is the lay of the land we were given by the current administrator. 1. There must be a cumulative report/business case document created to cover POSSE’s accomplishments to date and its plans moving forward to achieve funding for next year. This document should be completed to be handed to whoever will be responsible for POSSE’s budget going forward in December. Mel and I don’t have an issue with this, it’s needed not only for Red Hat but also for TOS' own research into POSSE’s effectiveness and to allow us to seek additional/alternative funding for POSSE going forward. 2. Whatever POSSE’s schedule is moving forward, it must be designed to well accommodate international school years, not just US (one of the reasons for the long view of our given proposed calendar in Mel’s email) While RH is willing to give POSSE’s budget to an external entity this year, this may be a one-year exception. Personally for POSSE’s sake, I hope this is not the case. Red Hat’s March to March fiscal year, with $ that vanish at the end of the year if unspent, has made it difficult to run the whole site CFP process and promote confirmed POSSEs to academic institutions in time for summer for US schools. The plans detailed in Mel’s previous emails are the ones we believe will allow POSSE to be most successful in reaching academics moving forward. The Budget: You’ll note that the $35k mentioned is a little less than the $40k from last year. It also doesn’t reflect the fact that Red Hat had Mel and Sebastian running administrative parts of POSSE and teaching some of them as well, so there were probably another $20-$35k worth of “invisible sunk costs” put into POSSE to make it run that we done have now. This point was made repeatedly to the current RH group, but no success this year in getting more $. In the meantime, to get any budget at all, we made commitments to RH and to TOS/POSSE as per earlier list traffic to do infrastructure work, create a significant report, etc. So, here’s what Mel and I have come up with as POSSE To-Do’s for this summer… 1. Revision, restructuring, etc of existing POSSE materials and on-line information. This could be done as part of the TOS wiki or could be done as something stand-alone that TOS links to. Up for discussion as to implementation. 2. Creation of some other tech infrastructure, registration databases, etc to allow POSSE to run more efficiently in the future with less hands-on work of the type that Mel and Sebastian have had to do in the past. 3. Creation of at least one draft, and ideally a final draft, of the report we’ll need to give Red Hat in December. Mel will be lead on at least the first two of these as she knows the stuff best and there may still be some stuff in her head we need to get out of there. She’ll be relying on the rest of the POSSE community to help get these things done, especially on item #3. The goal is that by the end of the summer she should be able to walk away from POSSE entirely if need be and still have it have a future and run smoothly. This will also enable us to change POSSE’s relationship to Red Hat in the future if need be. First use of those budget $ will be related to infrastructure and transition. It will pay Mel for her time getting this done after classes are over for her. It will hire some student staff from RIT this summer to get the work done, where Remy Decausemaker can supervise them and make sure it’s solid. (Note: Remy is paid by me and RIT full-time for my FOSS efforts and his supervision will not come out of the $35k from RH for POSSE.) Second use of the budget will be for deployments themselves and for a part-time student during the year to work with POSSE deployment sites, assist with reimbursements, and promote POSSE across social media. I’m assuming we’ll have at least $20k for POSSE deployments, and probably more. If the summer does cost all of $15k it won’t be out of line with what Mel has estimated those “hidden administrative costs” were over previous years. If the summer work doesn’t get done, there is no future short-term future of POSSE. The good news is that when all that work is done we’ll then be in great shape. We’ll have a solid infrastructure, and a process and calendar to announce the POSSE site CFPs in October at FIE and full schedules of POSSEs at SIGCSE for summer 2013-2014 POSSE season, and going forward afterwards. J Proposed POSSE Process/Organizational Structure. For this transitional (and hopefully on-going) method of POSSE planning/organization/operation Mel and I propose a three-legged stool… A. POSSE Organization: This group would act as a board that oversees POSSE in general and handles things like the annual CFP process, matching POSSE faculty to POSSE sites, deciding the finalized schedule, etc. A subset would be engaged as the applications committee for a given year B. POSSE Sites: These approved sites handle their own site logistics, admissions process (their approved applications got to applications committee for sign off) faculty transportation and housing logistics, etc. C. POSSE Administration: Deals with reimbursements and infrastructure issues. If RH returns to their normal POSSE process, this goes away. If at some point down the road POSSE becomes its own 501c3, this also goes away. For the moment, this serves a useful function and gets certain advantages by being attached to a university lab structure (FOSS@RIT now, if this continues long term, perhaps other universities take turns) in terms of existing infrastructure, RH and others being able to "gift"the $ and write them off, etc. There’s a lot to discuss here, and in the other sections above and so… POSSE Retreat? Mel and I both believe that it would be extremely beneficial for people with a deep and abiding interest in POSSE to get together for a day, or half a day, to kick all of this stuff around, firm up the details, build a spine for the report to RH, etc. One opportunity is for us to get together in the Boston area. I need to be in Boston the evening of 6/13 and the day of 6/14 to present at the New Media Consortium Conference at MIT. I can stay later and get together with people 6/15 or 6/16 or possibly come in to town earlier though I’ll have to change some other plans to do so. Timing is good as it could essentially kick off all the work for the rest of the summer. I’ve got a doodle poll posted at the link below, with the Yes, No, If Need Be options to asses people’s ability to do this. Mine are essentially yes for Friday the 15th and Saturday the 16th, no for Thursday the 14th and if need be for the earlier part of the week. http://www.doodle.com/6z3z2zsd9yzvyi9n Thanks for all your time and attention to all this. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
