XLP-Manual Chapter 4. XLP for Mission Designers
The job of a Mission Designer is to design the mission for Mission Executors, then deploy it and guide them through it. Typically a Mission Designer has been an active Mission Executor in the past.
Mission Designers put together:
- Constitution: Defines the goals of the mission, and rights and responsibilities of Mission Designers, Mission Executors, Sponsors
- Logic Model: Defines the context, goal, inputs, activities, outputs, effects, and external factors of the mission
- Mission Specification: Specifies the mission clearly
This process generally takes a month or so, since extensive planning is required.
It is highly recommended to ”eat your own dogfood” while preparing the mission - namely us- ing the XLP methodology itself (logic model, constitution, etc) to govern the mission design process, with the end goal of having students produce their own logic models, etc, as outputs of said mission. For that reason, MD’s should become familiar with how executors execute XLP missions since designing an XLP mission is itself an XLP mission.
Kick-Off Meeting
Sponsors, Mission Designers, and support stuff should come together to ensure mutual under- standing of the XLP mission preparation process. Upon setting up the Digital Publishing Container, the team can use tools like Phabricator to assign tasks and deadlines.
Digital Publishing Container
Each learning community uses digital publishing tools (like MediaWiki) to publish their activities and results. These tools are contained in a Docker container which lets users access them online. MD’s should coordinate with technical support staff to ensure these containers are de- ployed and fully tested, with a regular backup system in place.
Constitution
The constitution is a living document that lays out:
- Which entities can engage in an XLP mission
- The purpose of the mission
- Responsibilities of participants
- Rights of participants
- How to change or amend the constitution (typically via git or other version control systems)
Mission Designers write their own constitution which ”overlays” the XLP Meta Constitution. Check an example constitution for reference.
This constitution is supplemented by a smart contract. Whereas the constitution provides the framework, the smart contract handles the specifics. The constitution is the overarching set of rules, obligations, privileges and rights for the membership of accounts, while the smart con- tract is one defined and created by the parties involved in a particular digital publishing work- flow or creation. That is, every account is to be governed by both this overarching constitution, and a smart contract which defines the specifics of one’s work in the XLP.