benrito
commented
9 years ago sharing some notes on the career development idea. mark and i sketched these out yesterday—very early but hopefully food for thought
offer: a career development program that has participants make real shit alongside a global community, learning skills which are represented in mozilla developer certificates.
how will i produce this service? developing rails to help people get involved in a variety of contributions to open source projects (Q/A, field research, user testing, localization, contributing code), writing on-boarding guides and curriculum, and tasking existing contributors with logging and mentoring people through bugs. finally, offer a set of credentials to represent to employers the skills and learnings. most of the infrastructure for this is built, but we need more social infrastructure and the credentialing system.
who are my customers? primarily technically-oriented young people (18 - 35) who want a job, promotion, or additional money-making channel. these individuals are comfortable but not skilled with technology, and have either job or a shitty job.
how many are there? [[we need to find out - in Africa alone, 10 to 12 million youth are entering the labor market every year, and the demand for employment far outstrips the jobs being created. the internet could be part of the solution]]
how do they make their buying decision? let’s assume that it’s not free for a moment. it might be. [[what do we know about how people pay for education? what do we know about how certificates come in as part of a resume?]] if people believe that a certificate will be helpful, and feels economically rational… they will pay to have the assessment done. but they will have to see the immediate and intermediate benefits. lots of pre-education and social marketing will be necessary. [[would people be willing to pay for 1-1 tutoring?]] [[how do people regard the mozilla brand?]] [[we want to do research on family-run technology training enterprises—what is the scale of this part of the economy?]]
how can i find out what price they’re willing to pay? direct interviews; look at current informal training and credentialing systems; understand the ways in which institutional alternatives are too expensive or not satisfying… additionally, are there people who would be willing to subsidize? can people bring their projects to mozilla u for people to create? are there bounties? are there secondary services like employer matching?
what is my competition? bootleg training centers; local incubators; universities; online courses and MOOCs
what methods of marketing, distributing, advertising, selling, and promoting my service? we can make this service (at least the base level) available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. it will work better if situated at an incubator or telecentre. participants arrive at a portal that displays all of the certificates that are available, and the contribution pathways that would make it possible to earn a certificate. there are people assigned to answer questions via forums and email; there are even office hours available. this is the main way people come to the service, and we anticipate a heavy word of mouth and social marketing component. [[depends on how we design the labor force; fair bit of volunteerism up front, but later on there may be incentives to recruit—i.e., get paid for mentoring or assessment]]. there could be integrated campaigns using other mozilla channels; i.e., tiles, push messages, local partnerships. finally, we will market directly to promising graduates of our own existing web literacy programs.
what are the initial capital expenses i must meet to launch the business? first we need to test this idea locally in a small number of markets. we need to commission an on-boarding curriculum, assessment methodology and credentials. we’ll also need an evaluation wrapper around all of this to inform the next phase. rather than establishing a subsidiary in the markets where this is required, it would be preferable to have a local business partner. all of this helps us test the market interest. in the next phase, we will have a better idea of our requirements, and it is likely that above the initial requirements we’ll also need new staff and more collateral.
what are the monthly expenses i can expect? we will need a contribution engineer, field leaders in each pilot market to recruit and monitor the initial wave of participants. these people will probably be working remotely or in a co-working space. lots of travel will be necessary to bootstrap. we can calculate an overhead too.
how will expenses change as volume of business grows? monthly expenses will grow very fast depending on the rate of new markets. the cost within a market is assumed to be fairly linear or potentially increasing returns.
lauradereynal
cecilepompei
Team: @laurareynal & Cecile cc @benrito