Pippa Buchanan

After a year of working on the School of Webcraft project, it’s time to announce that at the end of August I’ll leave SoW as a formal organiser and make the transition to being a volunteer community member of both P2PU and Mozilla. That’s one of the things I love about open and free culture: you can leave a job and still remain a valued part of a community with a role in influencing and helping build the future of a project.

One of the challenges of moving away from a paid position in an open project is identifying how to define (and restrict) your involvement as a volunteer community member. One of my personal goals as I transition out of School of Webcraft is to play on my strengths and continue working with people. As a volunteer and newly arrived resident of Austria, I’m going to explore how P2PU members can use meetups as a way to connect with existing learners in their local contexts and introduce new people to the project. Of course, working on local meetups for P2PU has a secondary goal, which is for me to meet new people in my town and practise my German.

It’s going to be exciting becoming a community member and watching how the future of School of Webcraft works out. Over the past year, along with great colleagues at both Mozilla Foundation and P2PU I’ve helped build a community of passionate people who are excited about helping each other learn web development. During the next months, this community will continue to grow, but with new people helping organise it and working to make it easier to learn web development, by improving the tools and resources the School of Webcraft is built on.

Looking forward, the immediate goals of the Webcraft project will be to develop a core set of learning challenges that link up with the Badges project and provide learners with a defined pathway to building their first web portfolio. P2PU will also be working with the project to improve the core user experience of the website, making it easier for learners and experts to participate in the project and help each other learn how to make the web.

If you’re interested in being one of the new people helping to grow and improve the School of Webcraft (and greater P2PU) community you can of course join our discussion list and share your ideas. But I’d also like to invite anyone interested to apply for two of the paid positions P2PU is hiring for, a UX Designer and a Web Challenge Designer. You can read more about the positions here .