Considering the COVID19 situation rethink what to do with Mozilla funding

[jurra]

Original idea

Spend the money on an event including flight tickets, stay, and cattering, to get to know the mentors and facilitate a session to improve the curriculum.

Do you have other ideas on how we can make a nice event based online with this budget? What kind of event format could fit our purpose?

Here are some early thoughts:

• We could have a contest for a challenge of a design on a specific project
• We could host/incubate 3 projects in real sprints with well defined requirements and backlogs and people could a pply for that.
• We could plan a replication sprint to build and adopt specific open hardware projects, perhaps those that are more advanced in our program.
• Is also a good idea that, the least advanced projects get kits and components of the most advanced projects, in this way we support and incetivize for instance OTTO and UCI2.

[jurra]

Another thing we could do with the money is to use it to replicate existing covid19 solutions around the world

If there are already solutions that work, or are being tested, the smartest thing to do would be to replicate and optimize locally in coordination with local authorities, in contact with scientists and doctors. We could use the 15000 also to supply materials needed to replicate these solutions. Maybe we can investigate more how feasible this is and if it actually makes sense. A spanish physician was asking me if I could find and inform him about open hardawre ventilators

[jurra]

Use mozilla money for an event where:

Mission: Easy to find hardware designs to replicate and combat covid19 around the world
Documentation: https://github.com/CombatCovid/SPA-website

Activities:

• People document projects respecting a specific standard. I would use a static site generator that does all the heavy lifting and enables different languages. No need to configure or write javascript objects, etc.

• People replicate these designs. Money can go into bills of materials. For instance now in Cuba people are trying to find ventilators to replicate, the materials, documentation and ease of use is low, although there is a lot going on. We could make an effort in taking this projects and documenting them so that people can easily replicate them and test them.

• Software development? Some money might go into software development. I found a collaborator online yesterday to work on a nice SPA website that provides not just a list projects, but also guides, tutorials, etc.

[amchagas]

For this to work for me at the moment, I would have to completely switch from dedicating time to our program to this. Which is pretty much the same (in my mind) as killing what we are doing at the moment, for that reason I oppose using the money for this.

[amchagas]

Another suggestion would be to have this event where we improve the curriculum completely online as a series of meetings with all participants (mentors and mentees):

From Jenn's email

You are welcome to reallocate the money for things that make a virtual  
convening (or series of virtual events) possible.   
Equipment, conferencing software/services, stipends for speakers, or whatever you need.

Considering we can use this as "stipend for speakers" we could also think about paying people for their time (I'm thinking mentors mostly) as they invest efforts into this.
One of the reasons to propose this is that right now things are quite uncertain in terms of when things are resuming to normality, and trying to get as much done as possible to make the program better seems to be good in my mind. Not delaying the curriculum improvement will allow us to think about the next cohort when this whole ordeal is over.

[jurra]

I understand @amchagas that the priority is the curriculum, totally support that. Improving the curriculum is part of what we have to do on a daily basis, so I see that the cycle of improvements goes in my mind through the following steps:

• Finding what worked well in this round
• What things can be improved
• Finding out with rigour and detail what the mentees think of the program, as they are the main users of the curriculum.
• Find out also what feedback we got from the mentors.
• Log things that we already know we should incorporate to the program. Simple things like having a first cohort call with mentees.
• Based on all these, we then will change the aspects of the program that require it (org, format, structure and content)

Getting the above done, requires following up the program and finishing it with the best quality we can deliver at the moment. The event might fall into that process, for sure, but to do all that we don't need too many resources, except brains, time and dedication. If the money can compensate hours that makes also sense.

With the money issue here is the thing:
The contradiction is that sometimes you don't need money to do some things, on the other hand there are things that you can only do with money like buying hardware, or paying for work hours.