I am probably one of the few attendees who has gone to all three OCP Summits in Palo Alto, New York, and San Antonio over the past year. One of the benefits of attending all of them is I get to see how OCP is developing and how it could be better.

Being Open means the OCP is open to suggestions on how it can be better. Many conferences/organizations that are organized around a rsearch analyst organization would not be as open and admit its mistakes in running its organization and events. This is the strength of an an Open approach.

Suggestion #1

During the afternoon there were great educational sessions on environmental issues, supply chain management, and site selection. I sat in these sessions and they were quite good. The disappointing part was how few people attended these sessions, even though the quality of speakers and content surpass what you would see at a data center conference.

Here is the Supply Chain Management and Site Management talk.

fbtechtalks on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

What I think is a problem is given the growth of OCP summits and how many people are new to the OCP process there should be an onboarding session for those who are brand new.

Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders.^[1] Tactics used in this process include formal meetings, lectures, videos, printed materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs and organizations. Research has demonstrated that these socialization techniques lead to positive outcomes for new employees such as higher job satisfaction, better job performance, greater organizational commitment, and reduction in stress and intent to quit.^[2]^[3]^[4] These outcomes are particularly important to an organization looking to retain a competitive advantage in an increasingly mobile and globalized workforce. In the United States, for example, up to 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in an onboarding process.^[5]

The educational session is a good one, and the audience that most needs to be addressed are the new people to keep them engaged with OCP. Address the new attendees as if they are new employess and develop an onboarding education series.

Suggestion #2

Late into evening party when things were quieting down a bunch of us were sitting together including Frank Frankovsky and we were discussing the OCP foundation. Then I thought what is needed is a fresh look at how to educate the masses on OCP.

How about if Facebook reached to Khan Academy's Salman Khan to create videos for OCP to explain what they are doing.

For those of you have not watched Salman Khan here is a video with Salman presenting at TED with Bill Gates as a guest.

How many more people would learn about data centers, servers, and the software that runs their services?

Now to give you an idea of the power of what Salman does, here is an excerpt of the transcript.

First the human interaction of a well done education video.

And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened --actually a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins.They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first, it's very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time, the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room.

Second is open up the content. share it.

The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world. And these are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. And someone wrote just on YouTube -- it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." (Laughter) And let's pause here. This person did a derivative and then they smiled. And then in a response to that same comment -- this is on the thread. You can go on YouTube and look at these comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day. Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'"

So my two suggestions to OCP are to

1) Have a session for onboarding at OCP events

2) Use Khan Academy as a fresh view to explain what OCP is, create videos, and educate the masses.