Dear Coderdojo, I resign
(Ph. Agnese Addone)
“Innovation isn’t just a matter of luck, eureka moments or alchemy. Nor it is exclusively the province of brilliant individuals. Innovation can be managed, supported and nurtured. And anyone, if they want, can become a part of it.” (from “The Open Book of Social Innovation”, by Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice, Geoff Mulgan)
Armando is a clever fisherman. Every day he goes fishing. One evening, while coming back home, he meets a poor man asking him for some fish because he’s hungry. Armando doesn’t give up and teaches him how to fish.
“Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime.”
I read this story when I was a little girl: it was written in a square, green book preserved in my home.
Armando had a red pair of boots and an uneven face, quite similar to a famous Italian actor of the fifties’. Armando was a kind of hero, to me. He didn’t choose the easiest way by supporting charity without reasoning. He seemed he had understood the reasons of teaching and the big value of learning, too.
When I read that story I was 7/8 years old. I had no idea I could have been a real teacher in my adult life, spending the whole working day with children, learning and teaching at the same time.
I had no idea I would have been the champion of a Coderdojo club.
But it happened.
It happened that I met all this by chance. There was a real network of people aiming to transform the education field. There was a “model” to learn. And it was open source, free, indipendent and suitable for all.
It was an immediate step: I jumped with no hesitation into a second working life, the one I have always dreamed about and that was happening to become real.
And it was made of workshops held here and there, laptops brought by everyone, snacks prepared by the parents, but also the cooperation, the sharing, the creativity that finally had a place, which is not too often found into the school system.
Everything seemed to be necessary to me: I needed to enter this dimension. As a teacher, I finally saw a place free from the mechanisms and the procedures of the school. Neither a classrooms to evaluate nor a clear team of teachers, but only a place where mistakes are considered to be a treasure and not a failure.
I have worked hard for more than 3 years, following a wonderful path that gave me a lot of satisfactions, joy, and success too.
But today it’s the day. Dear Coderdojo, I resign.
I have worked a lot in the trenches, and now I see that there’s nothing more to do. I spent a lot of time thinking about this decision: it took me more than one year, but I know that this is the perfect moment.
The life of a Coderdojo champion is wonderful but very busy.
Everyday you think about the club, the mentors, the activities to plan or already done. Everyday you think about the educational path you choose and share with all the other volunteers, but also about the relationship with the young ninjas and their parents.
Everyday you think about the best strategies and plans to face thousands of daily problems such as a location, or wi-fi, or devices and materials to use and to buy, and also how many children you will be able to involve in each session and so on.
Everyday the club is a part of your daily life, one way or the other.
This is exactly what happened into my life.
A Coderdojo champion acts this way wherever and whenever he/she lives: into a small or a big dimension, no matter if it is a small or a big town.
Of course, you also have the national dimension, where you establish relationships with other clubs, a place where you can ask for advice, suggest answers or activities, accept proposals and ideas from other clubs.
This is the real strength of the Italian net: the networking.
And it was possible because in Italy the Coderdojo network showed a great talent, especially between 2013 and 2014: we worked together to fill a gap that left each club isolated; we were able to build a strong and committed community, focused on an original educational value; we were able to communicate and spread working principles and methods, even if they were informal and not officially sanctioned by any school or university. The whole community has been well managed and coordinated since the day it was born and at least for its first year. Italy had a great impact on the Foundation’s choices, a long time before it started thinking about the establishment of the Regional Bodies.
But. Something has been broken whereas the community grew up: the big benefit of being a plurality was hurt by the individualism of some people aiming to emerge and gain personal visibility, thus transforming the quality base in a game of increasing numbers.
Yet the Italian clubs went on, with a clear and strong educational viewpoint. They refused the underlying logic that wants every child to become a coder, they chose each activity paying attention and care to everything, and connecting them with the activities of other important and open source communities, just like Scratch, Arduino or Linux, creating a great flow of materials and resources shared on many different platforms.
I personally gave much to the movement not only in Rome, but also in Italy and in some measure at an international level too.
It’s not a redde rationem, but I need to explain myself.
I went around the length and breadth of Italy helping the raising of several clubs and supporting their activities, and I cooperated with many champions, also by being the co-founder of the Italian Coderdojo networking, which I managed as long as I could or, at least, someone else wasn’t disturbed by this fact. I stood for the work of the Italian mentors and I talked about the movement for first in the established institutions. Maybe I did it unconsciously, but that’s the case.
Thanks to my constant activity of promotion, the name of Coderdojo was spread everywhere: from the Chamber of Deputies to the Senate up to the European Commission and more, also joining great events such as the MakerFaire of Rome. I gained respect among the communities of the Italian and foreign university professors, innovators and journalists; I cooperated with the Italian Digital Champion and also went around talking about the Coderdojo movement almost everywhere, including TVs, radios, theaters and national newspapers.
Thanks also to my dedication, the Coderdojo movement saw the birth of several new clubs here in Italy, and at the same time the activities of the Italian mentors and of the newborn community caused an outstanding social impact.
The institutions noticed that something new was happening: a lot of volunteers working, a lot of children taking advantage of this work.
We held a Coderdojo at the Italian Chamber of Deputies, another one at the Ministry of Education, and recently another one took place in the Roman Capitol.
Thanks to the patience and perseverance of the daily actions of each club, the Italian network was able to create an area of subsidiarity where the school was still absent, thus pushing the institutions to create a specific National Plan for the Digital School. In its first formulation, in fact, the Plan draw on the themes stated publicly several times by the Italian proponents. It’s a shame to me that nobody considered it appropriate to give Coderdojo credit for a moral authorship. Neither officially nor unofficially.
This was happening at a time when the Coderdojo Foundation still didn’t take any initiative to manage some basic processes when you experiment so widely the social innovation.
I found out some crucial processes along the years.
The most critical of them is undoubtedly its sustainability.
Coderdojo is not a sustainable model. Each champion and mentor had to deal with several daily problems. On one side, we accepted everything in order to start the activities, to carry them on with continuity and satisfy the requests of our local communities; on the other we had to be creative in finding answers day by day.
The sustainability within the Coderdojo movement was made and is still possible by the people that work in there, by the champions asking the volunteers to give their free time to a workshop or an event. It was made possible by those who create an high innovative educational model that had an impact on the public institutions and also by those who tackled economic problems by means of the contributions paid by themselves or looking for sponsors.
There’s another process never managed effectively: we can call it control.
Nobody has ever checked if the clubs were truly operating and not fake, but not even the respect of the code of conducts, especially for the commercial type clubs that have been very often on the verge of discrediting the work of a large number of driven volunteers. The only form of supervision I saw was the logic of numbers: a bunch of times we’ve counted our numbers, both in Italy and in the international networking. Coderdojo measures its success and branding by counting its numbers: how many locations, mentors, little girls, adults, women and so on…
But one needs to look beyond numbers, and so I wonder how is the quality controlled?
Who’s paying attention to the activities of each location, including the smallest? Who’s taking care and supporting all the national communities? In Italy we tried to act this way for more than one and a half years with Coderdojo Italy, but later on everything stopped when I decided to stop caring about it personally. This happened because I’ve been accused of taking it personally and exploiting the national networking. Nowadays the coordination structure is trying to restart with a lot of trouble. Few months ago there was a first start, but then it stopped. It’s the Italian way: we are used to hurt ourselves, and we are very good at that. If someone or something seems to be virtuous there will always be someone ready to bury the virtue, or trying to take the credit for it, or again blaming each other, instead of trying to build something good together. For now, let’s see what happens this time.
Another lacking process to me is an action preventing child abuse. It’s a paradox, because this is a movement primarily addressed to children.
This is a theme that I would have included into the Charter, in the code of ethics signed by each champion when he/she’s opening a new location. If you are a movement claiming a strong ethical feature, you won’t forget something like this. We prevented abuses, nothing has happened, but why don’t state clearly the right position on this important issue? Irish clubs are required to have a Child protection policy, but how about the nations lacking any specific legal obligation?
Coderdojo has its own Committee who’s supposed to handle this specific theme and much more than that, but still it isn’t able to define itself and its area of action.
Last but not least, another critical process is to me the naming of each club and the resulting acceptance of it.
About two months ago, I had to face a process that I believed was well-defined at my expense.
I was wrong. It was not a well-defined process. No, it’s as good as any. It’s a quick procedure that seems to be bureaucratic but it’s tragically accidental.
And so I lost the name of my club: it was given as a gift to another club in an awkward way, with astounding explanation that sounded shallow to me.
Now, the loss of the name of my dojo and the fact that I had to discuss and ask for explanations was the hardest moment of the past three years. It was the last straw.
That name was not only the name of a location or of a town. It was the history of a group of people, my personal history within the movement, the story of the activities I carried out with the belief of acting according common and shared thoughts. That name has given life to ideas, activities and an informal educational thought that was far from any kind of contamination with the school. That name has its own ethic code, some clear educational choices and a community made of children, parents, mentor and friends that supported and believed in us over the years.
In the end, the most valuable thing you have is your name, your identity. To me it was a symbol, a start and a goal.
Well, nobody protected this name. I just assumed that it was going to be like this but I was wrong, since the Coderdojo Foundation have considered the matter in a different way.
Yet, whereas I have been an activist of the movement for years, I thought I’d be protected. I thought the name and the value of the activities carried out in our town and country would have been protected.
It wasn’t like that at all. Either my personal activities or the identity built up over the years were enough to protect my club, and the Foundation wasn’t able to give me any adequate answer.
Now I’m no more a Coderdojo champion: I said goodbye both to the team of Roman and Italian mentors, and also some of the mentors I have met abroad. I told my network I’m no more inside the Coderdojo movement.
Now I know I am no more inside this network because I decided it. I don’t identify myself anymore into a movement that didn’t regard an appropriate processes management as fundamental over the years. Processes that appear fundamental to me in order to protect each volunteer.
We lived the golden season of the Coderdojo movement, and at a certain point some of the clubs showed the real strength of the innovation, also by sharing beautiful and very important situations.
It was the biggest and happiest experiment of digital social innovation of the world.
But the social innovation is made by people, not by numbers, dear Coderdojo Foundation.
Everyone has an identity and you have to learn how to give respect, protection and safeguard to each of them.
From now on, I’ll just be watching.
With the idea that “be cool” is the best thing you may say to a child, and that it is the most meaningful motto that children and youngsters can ever exchange.
The rest, unfortunately, is up to grownup.
Ad maiora,
Agnese
English version by Francesca Meloro
