Join

Hack:
Demystifying Educational Operations by Open Sourcing Our Strategic DNA

By Aaron Anderson - Director of Strategic Organizational Initiatives at San Francisco State University, College of Business

June 24, 2010 at 10:29am

open source

business strategy

proprietary

shared

educational operations

Moonshots

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Increase trust, reduce fear

Reinvent the means of control

Summary

With the existing technology, it's very easy to establish a wiki location to bridge the gap between what we do internally in the operational side of university and colleges (as well as any other educational operation) such that we open source the strategic plans and direction of our institutions. This is much like unlocking the kernel code to software. That is, if we firmly believe that education is supposed to be good for all, why is it that we operate across the industry in a competitive and proprietary way. In fact, as Weick would say, these "secrets sever our systems." Might we not all benefit if we all shared our strategic approaches to how and why we do what we do? And, if it's a true wiki, we would welcome input and improvements 24/7 from people around the globe in the sense of something like Ubuntu does for Unix operating systems we work collaboratively to improve our institutions.

I wrote this poem a long while back that speaks to the essence of what I'm driving toward here

Secrets

The secret to education is
That there are none
And knowledge is best amplified
When shared
Proprietary wisdom
Is neither
And alone
We don’t improve

Problem

There is a tremendous amount of redundancies across all educational operations - particularly in the managerial ranks. Education across the board is notoriously a non-scalable operation - as in, the more students you have, the more expensive it is to run (e.g. you need more teachers, materials, classrooms, versus businesses where if you make more iPhones, the cost shrinks to make them). But really, if you examine the organizational design and function of most educational operations, they are remarkably similar. Interestingly, we all work independently, and in proprietary ways, to develop internal strategies and we keep the close to our vests, in the odd thinking that if what we do leaks to our "competitors" it will harm or damage our ability to retain good students.

My thinking is the inverse of this. Not only will we benefit by opening up the operational infrastructure of our institutions, but the whole of the industry will benefit. What's to say that we all don't win if we share and collaborate in an a macro way - across the industry, or for that matter, even with in the same university systems (for example, the CSU has 13 campuses, but we don't necessarily collaborate on our strategic and operational approaches to how we do what we do).

Solution

This is one hack that we can all do immediately, if you have the requisite freedom and authority to do so. Next time you are working on your organizational strategic approach and plan, build on a publicly available wiki platform instead of it instead of on some kind of intra net or proprietary system.

Next step is to publish it and open it up to the world.

Practical Impact

It is hard to measure the possible effect of this shift. I've personally built the strategic master plan for both my operation and the public school for which I am PTA president in a wiki space, but have been reluctant to actively broadcast this to a broader group. Moreover, I haven't given blanket permission for all those who are capable and willing to build up the master plans. Perhaps it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and give it a whirl. Only in the true acid test of real time will we know the full benefits or harm of such an approach.

First Steps

See solution

Credits

This is definitely not an original idea, but I have no idea if any one has given it a whirl with this kind of organization.

You need to register in order to submit a comment.