The 2020 extra challenges for OERs and the value of community support
Has your social-oriented, independently-held, Global-South-based, open-licensed, creative content development initiative survived the year 2020? Then, congratulations! You — like us — deserve the tsunami-surfer honor medal.
The context in Latin America was already challenging for independent projects, but the pandemic just made everything worse. This was a very difficult time to keep things running, both financially and psychologically. To be honest, our project would probably not have made it if it weren’t because we are part of the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN).
In this article, I will tell you what being part of the CCGN has meant for me and the support we received from the Community Activities Fund to develop a virtual workshop to teach people how to build OER.
Ground Zero — who we are
We are Alquimétricos, a social startup committed to developing affordable open-source DIY educational toys. We are an international community of makers, designers, educators, visual artists, and communicators who design and share STEAM-oriented open educational resources (OER). Most of our revenue comes from live workshops and interventions we make at schools, cultural centers, art galleries, and the like. That means that our project was highly affected by all the lockdowns, closures, and social distancing measures put in place to fight the pandemic.
#1 — The importance of following newsletters
Thanks to being part of the CCGN community, we are always receiving news about cool OER-related events, calls, and opportunities. Being part of the Open Education program, we got to know about Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW), a UNESCO-funded project in which we took part in the 2020 OER developed initiatives. We got months of mentoring, the opportunity to showcase our project globally and help to bootstrap our Alquimétricos 101 free online workshop. Nothing like a bit of pressure coming from the outside to help you document your work.
#2 — Networking is everything
Attending the CC Summit in 2018 and 2019 and getting in touch with the Big Open community was a one-way ticket. I was soon joining more and more advocacy newsletters and making geek friends around the world. This led me to join GOSH (the Gathering for Open Science Hardware) and traveling to China in 2018. That led to an invitation to join the Mozilla-funded Open Hardware Leaders (OHL) program. This was, again, more mentorship and help to empower Alquimétricos as an open-source-hardware project and collaborative community.
#3 — Converting face to face workshops to virtual events
All the activities we had planned for 2020 were canceled due to lock down and closures. This meant a change in plans to run hands-on workshops.
— Why don’t we publish the workshops online?, one genius asked.
— Let’s crowdfund the whole thing!, Soon the bets were raised.
With a combination of desperation, naiveness (or maybe just deep conviction), we embarked on the adventure of crowdfunding an online course teaching how to make Alquimétricos at home. We should have published a well-documented guideline long ago, and this seemed like a good opportunity to work on it.
We called the project Toys for quarantine, and it soon became a motto for the campaign. We worked a lot, we raised some funds (although less than what we expected), and we learned a great deal. To date, we finished most of the expected rewards, and we are close to canceling our debts with the supporting community. This happens to be mainly people affiliated to our areas of interest: open-source activists or professionals, or Creative Commons activists who happen to know Alquimétricos from the CC Summit and who have a dollar or euro-based salary. That’s what we call an insight!
#4 — Our Guardian Angel: The Community Activities Fund
The crowdfunding itself would’ve never allowed us to develop the whole Alquimétricos 101 free online workshop. It barely paid for the communication campaign itself, even when it did help us expand our audience and fulfill some secondary goals of the project. But it didn’t meet our expectations. Crowdfunding campaigns have a huge overarching cost on pre-production, daily management, and post-production.
For the Community Activities Fund, we proposed to create an open platform with step by step instructions on how to make your Alquimétricos at home using simple tools and recycled materials.
You can access the free online workshop platform at http://alquimetricos.com/cursos/alquimetricos101. Available in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.
With this money, we created and published a free digital version of our methodology. Doing this also helped us define a whole language to produce the subsequent content units.
#5 — The secret ingredient: Convergence
In the end, we were able to achieve more things in 2020 than we expected. We started the year focusing on the OHL program, re-engineering our community vision, policy, and structure.
Toys for quarantine spirit was clear, but not its content structure. Our mentors from OE4BW and the surrounding OER community were the perfect soil and validation for our concept growth. We were lucky to have a bunch of Ph.D., UNESCO-grade tutors, who insisted on the key points and encouraged us to think it well from scratch.
The combination of the crowdfunding communication efforts (which CC and other community partners such as Wikifactory itself helped a lot to amplify), along with the CCGN CAF grant fueled the production of our most ambitious content package and print+audiovisual definition ever.
Our year is far from closed. We still have much to do, including re-focusing our fundraising efforts through our new profile at Patreon.
But revisiting these turbulence-filled months and finding that so much was done makes us feel that the ride was worth it. We‘re ending this year with a lot of gratitude towards not only an institution but to an amazing bunch of peers, the CC people. Support is everything when things go difficult on so many fronts.
Fernando Daguanno is a maker, self-taught designer, educator, and artist born in Buenos Aires and based in Rio de Janeiro. He founded Alquimétricos, an international community that designs and shares open-source toys as tangible STEAM OERs.
