Friday, 15 May 2020

Institute of Adult Play ponderings

Sample Logo for an "Institute of Adult Play"
I've pondered for ages ways of encouraging / creating more work in the field of play and adults for myself and some friends. Something that could pull opportunities for us together and enable those that want to escape from their existing jobs, or to gradually do so at least. Some of them joke about setting up a fun-versity or play-versity as an antidote to their work at universities. But what about something smaller? So I was pondering some options...

Sample Logo (2) for an "Institute of Adult Play"

How about something that is a cross between a provider of training and a social / professional network for adult play people? An "Institute of Adult Play"?
There are such a wide range of people who work with play and adults, so the first thing it would do is pull people together - provide a platform for cross fertilisation of ideas, for sharing opportunities for work, and to generally share stuff amongst themselves.
The second thing would be to provide training - partly training for those play professionals, but also a way of providing training to the wider public / organisations. Members of the "institute" could provide training on a shared online platform (which spreads out the costs of providing it) as well as linking to training where we have to be physically present (when we can eventually do so again!)- hopefully that would mean people would do one course, then come back to do someone else's, increasing the work for all of us.

Sample Logo (3) for an "Institute of Adult Play" 
It would probably be a not for profit type membership organisation - with members paying a monthly or yearly fee (£5 a month maybe?!) which would let us pay for a membership platform with a virtual learning environment built in. Some of these platforms let you charge for membership, plus have the choice to charge for courses or offer them free for different membership levels, so could let people develop their own course(s) on the platform which we'd pay out for when people booked on the course. Or dish out the membership fee dependant on how many people had done each course? Or some other way of spreading the money!

This would be really risky to set-up. It'd need a small amount of seed money to set up as a company (maybe a Community Interest Company - a type of social enterprise?), but a much larger amount to run a platform / network.
Sample Logo (4) for an "Institute of Adult Play"
So I pondered a Kickstarter? If we risked a small amount of money to set up a business, it could be done in a way that it only started trading if the Kickstarter was successful, otherwise just got closed down again before it actually did anything. The Kickstarter would be a way of getting enough money to run the platform for a year, plus gauging if enough people were interested in becoming members to be worthwhile!

So... does this all sound completely ridiculous, or does it sound amazing and you'd all like to be directors and founder members? Should we take a gamble and try and set something up? Would anyone like to play along in running something like this? Let me know (preferably via Twitter...) @PlayBrarian with the somewhat long #tag of #InstituteOfAdultPlay

Monday, 23 March 2020

Play in HE zine 7

two zines on a table
We're up to zine #7 (out of a theoretical 10) posted out now, with the latest one being a special pandemic in HE edition... I'm not sure what will happen with the final 3 as they were meant to be produced and sent out over the next few months, which is likely to be peak time for the pandemic.

I'm also working from home, so expecting my paper and printer ink to last long enough to create about 250 copies of zines (plus extra bits and bats) might be pushing it to say the least... and I don't really want to be getting extra supplies in during peak pandemic!

So I might have to do just one print copy (the final one?) and a couple of electronic only versions? I'm not yet sure...

Anyway, the first 7 are all on the OneHE foundation pages for members (as they provided a small grant for the project). I still intend pulling the content together and sharing it for anyone else, but not until the end, which should be this summer at some point!