Applying Open Leadership Lessons to Our Web Literacy Curriculum
When projects collide in the open, inspirational sparks fly
This summer we’re kicking off a critical web literacy curriculum development project with community members from around the world. Our team includes content developers from like-minded nonprofits like Hypothes.is and the LAMP, volunteer leaders from Mozilla Clubs, and community and portfolio managers from several Hive cities. We’ve started work in this open GitHub repo where you can track our progress and contribute ideas and resources to help us improve the work as we go. We want the work to matter to you; we need your help to get it there.
This project is really a mash-up of two previously distinct curriculum development efforts. The first is our ongoing work to build and curate a hands-on, participatory web literacy curriculum made by Mozilla staffers and community volunteers from around the world. You can see the materials we’ve assembled here and check out the skills and standards that inform them on our Web Literacy Map.
The second project we’re drawing from is the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS), a curriculum for community leaders who want to broaden and improve their leadership skills and working open habits. The OLTS uses a project-based approach to open leadership (leadership fueled by open practices) that fosters ongoing collaboration between project leads, contributors, and project communities. That project is in its second round of revision, and we look forward to sharing more of it soon. It’s the culmination of several attempts we’ve made to capture and share the specific practices and habits of mind leaders throughout our network and local communities enact every day.
A major focus of the OLTS is documentation. From road-mapping to event-reporting, the curriculum helps emergent leaders make their work visible for others to support, improve, and replicate.
We’re using the critical web literacy curriculum development project as a chance to dogfood parts of the OLTS. “Dogfooding” means testing your own work. Would you eat the dogfood you just made? Would you teach the curriculum you just developed?
Specifically, the OLTS guides the way we’re structuring our
- README.md file (a introductory document describing a project).
- contribution guidelines (a set of reminders about how to show up in a project).
- Channels of communication between contributors and with our communities.
As a contributor to the OLTS and project lead for the critical web literacy curriculum, I’m especially interested in how the two projects connect and can inform others in the future. I’m also especially interested in how this work can be of use to you. The OLTS is on the way, but you can see it applied in our critical web literacy repo.
If you’d like to share a response or ask a question, you can leave a comment in the repo by filing an “issue” using the tab at the top of the page.
All you need is a GitHub account — no coding skills required! Here’s a helpful guide to “Mastering Issues” on GitHub.
What I like most about this work is what I liked most about teaching: every day you have the chance to connect people to one another and the ideas and projects they carry with them. Working and aspiring to lead in the open are about surfacing those connections for everyone through a process of discovery, documentation, production and reporting that catalyzes change in people’s lives, communities, and habits as surely as it catalyzes change in you.
Let us know how we can support you in your leadership to teach web literacy and protect the open web!
