What is the invitation to play?

[tannerwelsh]

How are players invited into the Game? Is this part of enrollment?

Principles razor

In order for an issue to be marked as passing, the proposed solution must be aligned with our principles. Check off the principles that this solution is consistent with.

• [ ] Cultivate a learning community.
• [ ] Prioritize scale over quality
• [ ] Align incentives
• [ ] Build a team game
• [ ] Trust people's intentions and potential
• [ ] Enable self-organization & self-determination
• [ ] Map feedback loops
• [ ] Optimize for agility
• [ ] Simulation not preparation
• [ ] Sustain the tension between individual and collective gain

[omoju]

Invitation to Play

 Anyone can join the "Admission's" game by simply filling out a game Admissions form. We will work extensively with our community partners to ensure we have a solid sample of individuals who are historically underrepresented in software engineering.

Once persons have demonstrated interest in joining the admission's game, they are given access to Learners Guild online chat platform, where they can start building community with other potential Aspirants.

Metaphor

The "golden ticket" conceptual metaphor from Charlie and the chocolate factory has been suggested as a cognitive framing of the invitation to play. We want our Players to feel like this is a very special, VIPesque, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in an exclusive experience that is designed to transform their lives for the better. Everything about the invitation should have the feeling of luxury, aspiration and exclusivity around it. By the time Aspirants become Players, they would have known that they earned their place in their respective pods.

Pod formation

All potential Aspirants are told that Learners Guild will have to slots opened for Pods by a certain date. For example, all potential Aspirants will be informed that the Oakland guild will be taking applications to fill two pods scheduled to launch July 2016.

The rules are simple:

• Only teams are allowed to apply to become pods. However, anyone can apply to play the game.
• In order for teams to apply, certain criteria must be met of all individual team members.
  • These criteria are the criteria set for by this document as "Talent Requirements."
  • Teams have a better chance of gaining acceptance if they not only meet the non-negotiable talent requirements, but also have skills and traits to conform to the nice to haves.

GamePlay Hackathons

Learners Guild and/or its community partners will host gameplay Hackathons where individuals can come together, and go through challenges together. The challenges are designed to help individuals learn more about the LG game as a sandboxed, community learning incubator. Some of the challenges may be designed by our community partners to solve some present need.

[kbishay]

Re: Golden ticket - I like that idea a lot, and it seems true. I Would just want the metaphor to end around the speciallness and the luxury, but this is something they're going to earn through hard work, so it's more akin to joining an elite sports team really than winning a lottery.

My biggest pain-point to date is the self-organizing principal behind pods. I'm not sure what we're achieving here. We're adding so much chaos, exclusion, group-think and group dynamics, survivor mentality, and for what? What are we gaining? I don't see the big plus.

I have many ideas about how Pods should form but basically I think that, at least in the beginning, we should either form the pods for the players or give them clear instruction on how they form. But leaving it up to the law of the jungle and group inclusion/exclusion feels so stressful and unnecessary to me

[jeffreywescott]

To counter @kbishay's opinion, let's remember that these learners are going to be entering into a financial arrangement with each other. As such, we should absolutely not assign them to pods. They should only choose to be in a pod with people that they believe-in / trust to work hard in and complete the program.

I agree that this is hard, and will require a lot of facilitation, but we should not shy away from this. The risks are too high. Also, we need to optimize for scale over quality, and having an "enrollment" team to assign pods just won't scale the same way.

[shereefb]

@kbishay and @jeffreywescott I think you both make valid points here. We have a separate issue #13 (who is responsible for pod formation) that addresses this, and IMO blocks this issue. We can't nail down the invitation, if we haven't decided how pods are formed.

[shereefb]

@omoju I agree with Karim re: golden ticket. It's more of a draft pick (although sports metaphors are highly gender biased, so I would find something else)

I'm marking this issue as blocked by #13

[omoju]

@kbishay @jeffreywescott @shereefb I hear you all. Once we have nailed down #13 we will revisit. For now, I am going to move my cognitive cycle, to chewing the fat on issue 13.

[tannerwelsh]

Should be documented, but the work has been done in Enrollment