Who You Calling a Jesse?

The Other Committee

The Other Committee is an idea to create an ad-hoc committee in higher education that represents a group of people that explore, build, and deploy new solutions to problems in higher education. This committee does not exist to be confrontational, it exists to give creative and entrepreneurial staff/faculty/students a place to share ideas and strategies with like minded people. This committee requires its members to be completely open about what they are doing and how they are doing it but will allow for commercialization if the founders of the idea/solution so desire.

Why start this committee?

Exploring creative solutions to common problems is not something that can happen within the normal structure of an organization without degrading the idea as it goes through the process of committee approval. Higher education allows for a certain amount of entrepreneurial flare but often the solutions aren’t fully explored as institutional inertia delays deployment or development or the evolution of an idea. We need to shorten the time between iterations of ideas and this is one way it could be done.

Are you talking about technology solutions?

Primarily the Other Committee will focus on technology based solutions but the committee recognizes technology solutions are something that is devised only after you have defined the problem, not before. Some example areas of interest:

• Real Project Management — Agile/Extreme, practical, etc.
• Co-working spaces instead of offices
• Open data intiatives

How will you work?

The committee will have a google group that is open for anyone to join and meet once a month to pitch solutions and offer peer review/input. Format and location TBD.

We will offer a template Memorandum of Understanding that, for the cases it makes sense, will define the relationship between your solution and the institution. A key requirement is that your home institution retains the right to access the source code but under some restrictions.

Service Level Agreement templates will also be made available.

Next Steps

On the todo list:

• The mission, vision, and values of the Other Committee needs to be defined.
• Documents required (MOU, SLA, etc) need to be drafted
• A website

The idea is still being formed, leave a comment if you are interested.