Opening Up the Project: Kick-off Meeting in Vienna

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Kick-off-Selfie (Foto: Maximilian Heimstädt, CC BY)

Today, we held our inaugural project meeting in Vienna. For both of us this is our first textbook project, so our day started with a more general discussion on alternative propaedeutical structures of a textbook. After having skimmed some textbooks we use in our own teaching (e.g., Exploring Strategy), we decided to follow a modular rather than a linear approach as you can see in our basic structure (see Textbook-in-Progress).

Our textbook project is inspired by the master-level course “4Open: Open Organizations and Organizing Openess” that Leonhard had developed at the University of Innsbruck. We discussed his experiences and learnings from teaching this course (two times so far) and eventually decided to write an introductory chapter on openness as a paradigm, followed by six chapters with theoretical concepts related to openness, and another six chapters on empirical phenomena. Continue reading

Hello World!

We start this blog with at least three aims in mind:

Documentation: Working from two different geographical locations – Innsbruck in Austria and Witten in Germany – we use this blog as a log-file to keep track of our progress. We will document key decisions, reflect on problems we encounter, and first and foremost the content of the textbook itself (see “Textbok-in-Progress”).

Communication: This textbook should not just be about the process of organizing openness, but should also be an experiment in open organizing in itself. Through this blog we want to engage in conversation with students, scholars and practitioners early on. We hope to collect feedback and new ideas.

Access: Open Educational Resources should be accessible by anyone for any purpose and at no cost. Through this blog, anyone will be able to easily access and download the textbook in different formats (e.g. ODF, PDF).  As we progress, we also want to make additional materials like slides, training questions, and videos available via this blog