A new course on the new platform, giving P2PU a bit of its own medicine...  ;)

So far there has not been much discussion in "P2PU (the course)", but I can see great potential!  There is currenty more interaction on the P2PU Help Desk, which is an interesting cultural phenomenon (the Help Desk appeared in a blog post on the P2PU site, and has "official endorsement").  At present I'm a bit more interested in exploring what happens without endorsement. ;)

My imagination runs wild with dreams of the most awesome collaborative peer production system around -- but another part of my brain gets gloomy wondering whether the relevant discussions are actually going to happen, or not. Long term, it seems best to go with the optimistic view!  Even short term, "stuff happening" is maybe just a matter of learning how to use the bug tracking system and using it.  There's also a cool effort by Jessica Ledbetter to create a course to help people learn how to contribute to Lernanta (P2PU's new platform).  That should help make things flow along well too.  Anyway, development work is happening with or without massive community participation.

With all of this excitement and (potential for) interaction, I can't forget about the Planetary project where I'm one of rather fewer people making contributions.  Luckily I'll be meeting up with the rest of the developer group in person next week, which means I won't forget :).

More to the point, what I'd really like would be to find a way to make this all fit together nicely.  P2PU has the potential to be a great "general" example of peer production, whereas Planetary/PlanetMath is a wonderful "specialised" example.  Special and general cases seem to need each other (but for different reasons).  As one step towards at least bringing the two projects into contact, I've created a "Mathematics on Computers" course, which at present is mainly just a feed from the Planetary timeline.  I'll try to keep this "use case" for P2PU in the forefront of my mind (and engagement), since after all, I'm not paid to work on P2PU... ;)