Best proposal I never submitted…

At my new job at MIT, I floated the idea of better linking together OpenCourseWares (OCWs) that would build on some of the work that we did at COSL, along with an opportunity in the National Science Foundation NSDL Program. OpenCourseWares have been very good at coming together to meet and talk about their experiences (i.e., OpenCourseWare Consortium), but much of the conversation has been about publication practice and supporting existing and recruiting new organizations with tools and technology. All important issues. One of the challenges that a number of folks have been talking about is reducing the barriers to technical interoperability between OCWs, interlinking OCWs, and adding tools and services to use and reuse the content that’s been published. So I suggested a proposal that would be a good step towards a broader integration/interlinking of OCW content and with tools and services.

I managed to get a number of organizations and partners interested enough in the proposal to make the decision, yes we’re going to submit a proposal. I even managed to get another organization to agree to be the lead and direct the majority of the proposed work :) . So I went about writing the proposal for them, identifying a set of partners, working with them to understand how their needs could be met with the proposed work, and trying to describe in a coherent way what we wanted to do. Great, at the beginning of last week everything was finally coming together. And the draft was even “remarkably coherent” (according to outside readers). I had done a very good job (I hoped) of describing the background and need for the proposed work. It was all coming together. But…

Then we had a meeting last Tuesday… For organization reasons, the partners we were working with (who shall remain nameless at this point :) ) decided we shouldn’t move forward :( . We discussed some organizational challenges with how the operations would work out and couldn’t figure out a reasonable resolution in the day or so remaining to get a version in for review at MIT (MIT was going to be a subcontract on the proposal). What we discussed is that it might take too much political capital to make the proposal successful. /sigh As of Tuesday afternoon…after about two weeks of writing it was looking like I had “written the best proposal, I never submitted”. :(

Come Wednesday, a turn around. We changed our minds and decided we were going to move forward, with a change of lead institution (to MIT), a reshuffling of partners, a change in budget… The problem, basically the whole thing had to be turned in by last Wednesday late-afternoon/ Thursday early-morning to avoid an “exception” to the “review and submission” process at MIT. With a bit of luck, and a late night, we managed to get everything done and together well enough to be a mostly complete submission for review. And after another fire drill on the due date, we finally managed to get the proposal submitted.

So a “happy” :D ending after all. Now all we have to do is cross our fingers and hope it reviews well and we get funded.

(And yes, this is finally a work/professional related post! There might even be more.)