Building a hothouse

Last week, I had a rare 45 mins with Mark Shuttleworth. He asked: what do you think the Foundation has achieved in the last year? I answered that it had 'stabilized and grown strong'. Which is true. After a few rocky years, the Foundation is now in a position to actually pursue big ideas like free textbooks and learning analytical skills p2p-style in a serious way. Yet, I knew my answer wasn't quite right. The Foundation hasn't just stabilized, its, well, this sounds silly, but ...

... it's turned into a hothouse of ideas, invention and activism. The hothouse image came up as we were brainstorming new metaphors for the theory of change. At first, I wrote this one off. But, reflecting on two weeks at the Foundation's Cape Town office, the hothouse image has stuck with me. It feels like that is exactly what we have built.

Amidst the clatter of the open plan office, sparky ideas constantly bounce off the walls. Over the course of just a few hours the other day: Andrew and Sam were debating the merits (or lack thereof) of the OLPC / Microsoft deal. Steve(2) and I were comparing South Africa's mother tongue education policies with the last 30 years of French immersion in Canada; and all of us were trying to figure out why the Lego mashup of Eddie Izzard's Death Star Canteen is so good (which is actually very important if the projects you're building hinge on contribution and creativity). The Foundation has truly become fertile ground for the exchange and evolution of ideas.

Of course, fertilizer on its own is just crap. Thankfully, the Foundation also has some promising seeds in the ground. Mark's Siyavula free textbook project has not borne fruit yet, but it's definitely taken root. He is now grappling with concrete issues like setting up an online repository, putting 1000s pages of existing content online and recruiting community leaders and volunteers to make this content better. Sam is at a similar spot with Kusasa, working through the practicalities of testing grade four peer-to-peer learning content in seven schools. And, new seeds like Steve(1)'s Village Telco are also going into the ground. Much is growing, and it is real.

What's most hot-house-y – and what you really only feel in the office – is the the ideas and the action really feeding each other. The fellows don't just write papers. The people running concrete projects don't just project manage. They dance together. Just think: Mark (creating free textbooks) is sitting across the room from Andrew (the intellectual property fellow) as he works on a competition bureau complaint related to educational publishing. The natural thing that happens is that they help each other. This is what is going on all the time, in subtle but quite powerful ways.

The bad news: you can't really see this from outside, which is not very hot-house-y. Fixing this is critical. We want people to take inspiration from (or take issue with) what we are doing. We also want them to contribute to (or simply rip off) what we are doing, even before our work has fully borne fruit. This won't happen until people can pick up and even join into the office vibe from outside. As a simple first step, we've agreed to compile all the existing Foundation blogs as the main feature on the front page a of our site. Much more is in the works.

Next time someone asks me what we've done in the last year, I'll have a better answer: we've built a hothouse. A very good one. True, it's only produced a few tiny victories so far (the Cape Town Declaration and South Africa's vote against OOXML at the ISO). But, after a week in Cape Town, I am quite hopeful that it's about to produce a great deal more.

PS. While I love the hothouse metaphor, I am still not completely convinced we should use it for the updated theory of change. Comments on this highly encouraged.