With the global COVID-19 pandemic continuing to interfere with social activities, people around the world are making use of online tools to communicate, work, and cope with challenges. This highlights the power of existing online tools, which could be much better utilized if more people knew about them, and knew how to make use of them. The Meta Design Challenge is a series of hackathons, making it fun for people in their local communities to learn existing free online tools for personal growth and empowerment. People learn best when there is a meaningful project to work/play on. Each hackathon proposes a challenge that can be collaboratively met by making use of free online tools. Thus, people learn the tools through meeting the challenge together. This is Project-Based Learning, which is a very effective and enjoyable way to learn. Participants are challenged to design their environments to collaboratively design projects – this is the Meta Design Challenge. With people collaboratively engaging in this way, we can meet the challenges facing us, big and small, individual, and societal.
The goal of this open-ended design challenge is to make it fun and easy for people to collaboratively and continually learn powerful and free online tools for creating and managing their own projects. This includes the following three sub-goals:
- Inclusive: Make use of free, open source tools with good online documentation and tutorials to allow anyone, regardless of skill level or economic background, to participate, enjoy, and learn. Future challenges can include creating documentation and tutorials in many languages, giving access to the same world of online tools to non-English speaking people worldwide.
- Secure and Safe: All participants have control over what they wish to share with whom, without sacrificing their privacy. One big advantage of free open source tools is that they are more secure, so peoples’ data remains secure.
- Universal Performance Evaluation: By participating in Meta Design Challenge hackathons, each person automatically creates their own portfolio, which they can share with others, if they choose to. So that everyone can know how well they are doing, performance can be measured in a universal way that makes sense for everyone involved. Individual contributions can also be included. Disputes about interpretation of rules, and their resolutions, can also be included so that others may benefit and learn for future projects. In this way participants' contributions create value for their projects, for others’ projects, and for society.
The participants include teams and individuals wanting to do the following activities:
- Constitution Creation: Participants will create their own constitution on how to participate, how to recognize and solve disputes, how to evaluate performance, how to accept and evaluate projects, and stating their community vision. This will be done on GitHub with Markdown Language, with each participant using their own authenticated user ID.
- Project Proposals: Based on the procedures in the above constitution, participants invite individuals, companies, and organizations to submit project proposals that the participants will then evaluate for a future hackathon.
- Project Execution and Monitoring: Accepted projects will receive a package of tools for execution of the project. Projects will be tracked and monitored by participants using free open source project management tools (such as OpenProject or MyColab) and version control (such as GitHub or GitLab). This allows participants to monitor their execution and effectiveness.
The first Meta Design Challenges are organized by a number of individuals and insitutions around the world. The founding member organizations include: United In Diversity Foundation, Council on Extended Intelligence (CXI – a global brain trust organization, co-founded by MIT and IEEE), and Piaget Institute. Any individuals are organizations are also welcome to participate in any of the above three activities.
The expected roles of the first few invited institutions are listed here:
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United in Diversity Foundation will be responsible of providing administrative personnel, initial funding, and operations for kicking off the above three listed activities.
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Council on Extended Intelligence (CXI) will provide advice and intellectual vision for shaping the participative design activities, data security and safety, ongoing refinement of performance and evaluation practices.
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Piaget Institute’s Project Management team is rolling out an online project management educational program in 2021. This team will provide expertise and educational assistance to help all participants to better utilize existing project management techniques and tools.
Many educational institutions, universities, high schools around the world are working with us. As time goes, their contributions will be reflected through Git's records and they will provide expertise and talent pools to conduct project management, and share skills and knowledge.
Also involved are local entrepreneurs in Bali, Indonesia, who are practicing data-driven food supply chain integration efforts to alleviate social impact during Covid-19. They will be amongst the initial trial members to test the waters.
The goal is to leverage the talents, technologies, and territorial opportunities using globalized data that is sustainable and self-adaptive.
The initial goal for testing performance of this program is to see how well participants can all be brought up to speed using shared and common data exchange platforms to conduct modern project management practice with mobile data services.
Once started in 2021, the proposed program will be conducted as a continuous online and in-person activity. A few dates will then be chosen to run in-person and online workshops for bringing participants up to speed with free open source digital collaboration and project management tools. Participants – both individuals and organizations – will all be using existing and popular collaboration tools, such as Git/GitHub/GitLab, as well as free open source project management tools, such as Phabricator and OpenProject. The goal is to elevate the digital competence/literacy of a wide range of participants, as well as enable a large population to be competent in organizing and exchanging resources using the already ubiquitous mobile and cloud-based computing resources.
The program will demonstrate the benefits of using existing free and low cost collaboration tools to alleviate pressing social pressures, such as food distribution, or finding and creating work opportunities. By enhancing the digital collaboration skills beyond Information Technology professionals, who are already familiar with working at home and remote collaboration, this program will enable a much larger population to be competent in delivering value through online and digital collaboration.
The program has the following three major milestones:
- Early 2021: two 2-day events that are separated by one or two work weeks, conducted at multiple locations around Bali, Indonesia, and other collaborating locations. These small hackathon events will serve as educational workshops for helping participants of any skill levels to start using the proposed collaboration tools. The evaluation metrics include but are not limited to:
- Install and operate Git for updating their projects and sharing data amongst their team members.
- Install and operate project management tools, such as Phabricator or Asana, on their laptop and mobile devices, enabling participants to remotely upload and observe the progress of all relevant project activities.
- Understand and agree to a set of project performance metrics. Participants will learn to read simple diagrams, such as project completion charts, Gantt charts, and other project-level performance info-graphics. The goal is to enable participants to become aware of these tools and how the information presented with these online tools can help them measure and monitor the overall progress of the projects they participate in.
- Conduct simple surveys of participants, and measure productivity increases or decreases.
- Propose a second wave project management learning event.
- Following the first two events: publish one of the proposed second wave project management learning event on GitHub, and invite the next round of participants for the next events.
This Design Challenge helps wide populations to benefit from existing digital infrastructures by utilizing free online project management tools and practices. The productivity of the workforce and of supply chain management can be improved through educational programs that are adapted this wide audience.
By putting existing online project management tools into a pragmatic operational context, many imminent social challenges can be alleviated with a minimum of technology and knowledge. One example may be: food supply chain managers working with farmers and delivery people to make food distribution more efficient. The same principle can be applied to many other areas of global supply chain. The key point of the Design Challenge is to offer a generic project management platform that enables better individual and organizational participation for the benefit of all. A great potential can be further realized through coordination on a global level of physical, information, and knowledge supply chains. The interactions required for these supply chains/networks can already be conducted using existing tools and methods.
The first phase of this program uses hands-on, enjoyable online and offline workshops/hackathons to stimulate interest, as well as open up awareness of, online project management tools.
The first phase ends in the seeding of the next phase, thus creating an ongoing, growing program that will benefit an ever-growing community.
Please leave comments in the project wiki: https://github.com/benkoo/MetaDesingChallenge/wiki.
Meta Design Challenge is released under the LGPL-V3 license.