Quarterly Report LMDWG Q3 2019

Owned by Bobbi Muscara
Last updated: Sept 10, 2019
5 min read

Working Group

The Learning Materials and Working Group goal is developing open source training material (licensed as specified by the Hyperledger Charter) to educate people interested in expanding their knowledge of Hyperledger and its projects. The working group will consult with other Hyperledger working groups, Hyperledger team members, and the project maintainers to identify training needs and develop strategies, as well as, material to address those needs. The output of this working group will be targeted towards both technical and non-technical audiences.

Working Group Health

The Learning Materials working group has maintained a core group who are dedicated to increasing membership.  The newly designed Wiki page's  makes it easier to on-board newcomers. The Resource Library is currently the main source for learning materials and documentation for projects.  We continue to collect documentation that the community is generating and store it in the library. The Task Sign up / Team Members page serves  the dashboard for members to pick up some project work or sponsor a task.  The group completed the edits for the new EdX course "Blockchain for Business" that went live in July and are scheduled to edit the Sawtooth technical application course early this Fall as well as the Indy-Aries-Ursa (IAU) course due in October. We are assisting the Special Interest groups by supplying templates, for example, White Paper templates for Telecom and Public Sector, and Use case template for Healthcare.  The LMDWG is working on a community Survey, with the help of the TSC,  to collect information for the Resources Library as well as to gain contact information from Working Groups, Special Interest Groups, and project maintainers. We developed a project for the Meetup Groups based on a Social Impact  summer project . The Hyperledger Princeton Meetup group with the help of the LMDWG group created a project using a checkpoint format and a Sawtooth platform to change the local charity giving model. 

Issues

  1. Membership - Increasing membership is our focus, our calls typically have 5- 6 individuals. We hope for increased traffic to our wiki page after the community spotlight on the Working Group. We have redesigned the Wiki home page to make on boarding easier. With guides to explain "Getting Linux login, Joining calls, setting up Wiki Pages and sponsoring a task we have created a user friendly environment for on boarding new members. We created a survey for the members of the LMDWG in an attempt to generate interest and better understand membership demographics.
  2. Resource Library - the LMDWG has a goal to collect community documentation and create a Resource Library to house all community documentation. The Resources Library can serve as a portal for people interested in learning more about Hyperledger or for those involved in a project to easily find documentation. This will serve as a location for community members to access templates and graphics for developing projects as well as a place to store these final documentation projects.  We are currently working on the USE CASE template and have completed the white paper template.
  3. Survey: An opportunity exists to Survey the projects, working groups and special interest groups to determine a contact person, get list of current learning materials created and gain an understanding of the future documentation needs. Would like to add polling questions from TSC and have the LMDWG manage the polling process.
  4. Best Practices for documentation Developing Standard /  Best Practices Badges  for all Learning Materials. The Marketing department has a call on 9/11 that should give us information that will help in develop standards for documentation.
  5. Glossary: Creating KEY TERMINOLOGY to be used in all documentation. Creating common definition for the community to use when creating learning materials and documentation.  We are in the process of gathering current community definitions and compiling them on a wiki page where we will come up with the community dictionary (approved by TSC before publishing). 
  6. Graphics - The LMDWG has a unique situation to supply the community with standards for graphics and logos that is easily shared for creating documentation. To satisfy the numerous requests by the community we created a wiki page ( under development) to access approved graphics. We hope to gain information from the marketing department.
  7. EdX Update - The LMDWG edited the LFS171X course,"Hyperledger - Blockchain for Business" was during the summer for the July release date. We set up a wiki page to manage the EDX courses we edit and specifically  for the LFS171x. We are looking forward to  the Sawtooth application courses and the Indy-Aries-Urse (IAU) course this fall. 
  8. Github Update  : we have no information on the EDUCATION repository on github. The current directory holds outdated information and it needs to be updated. We have a new resource on our team (Ravi) who is interested in this project but we need direction and a goal for the GITHUB repositories. 


Overall Activity in the Past Quarter


We hold our Bi-weekly meetings consistently with agendas, minutes and recordings posted to the Wiki page.  The vice chair resigned due to personal reason and we are creating a survey for the community to locate a new one.   We are seeing an increased interest in the group and we have geared up for new members by updating our Wiki page.   This quarter we completed the edits on the Edx course LFS171x that went live in July. We created the templates for whitepaper and use cases and are working closely with the Special Interest Groups to supply the guidance needed for documentation development.  We created a structure to manage a community wide survey and are in the process of developing questions for each survey (1. Projects 2. Special Interest Groups 3 Working Groups) .  The work for the Community Glossary  began by creating a wiki page to store definition and we have started gather the common terms used.  The LMDWG was active in the Hyperledger Meetup project to create a white label program to guide the Meetups in creating a social impact blockchain project."The Giving Chain" and the D2R application was a huge success ( www.bcprinceton.com/project-day ) and will be a featured demo at the Big Apps Blockchain Day October 3rd in New York City.



Planned Work Products

  • Survey - With the approval of the TSC the LMDWG would like to create and administer a community wide survey that determines the needs of the community. With the survey results, we will develop a system for community communication.  
  • Resource Library - To create a Resource for the community to easily access documentation and learning materials. 
  • Best Practices -Continue to create templates for the community. Complete the template for use cases and complete the Graphics Library. 
  • To use the Meetup Summer project example to create a Meetup Project for the Hyperledger community to create something of Social Importance. 

Participant Diversity

Since interest in the group has increased, we are actively seeking new leadership and members.  Recruitment has begun with in our group and we are reaching out to the marketing department for assistance in getting the word out.  With the exposure on the Hyperledger website we anticipate new interest in the group. We plan on getting the Projects, Special Interest Groups and Working Group involved through understanding their needs better with the survey.

Additional Information

Special thanks to the community for the spotlight. We hope this exposure will drive our new member to our Working Group. It is a privilege to be a part of the Hyperledger community.  https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2019/09/05/community-spotlight-meet-bobbi-muscara-hyperledger-learning-materials-development-working-group-chair.