UCLA Epicenter for Action Research
The UCLA Epicenter for Action Research continues even though I have resigned as Faculty Director. UCLA’s MoU with?monday.com?provides for reviews around the end of each academic year. Even if UCLA and?monday.com?mutually agree to terminate the MoU, all existing users would have an additional year of free pro licenses. No new licenses would be issued.
Our current GSR and USR (aka student staff)?are funded through the current academic year and are available to support all users. Our Executive Director, Raffi Simonian, is expanding project-based learning to other enabling technologies [e.g., Cloud (AWS, Google), Data Science (Tableau), Project Management (PMI), Robotic Processing Automation (UiPath), Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce)]. He will also be supporting?monday.com?users in his current capacity until August, at least.
In January of 2022, I met with the Interim EVC/Provost and asked for support for the Epicenter. He said “No” and then revised his message to say that he would decide how much support his office would provide after seeing what others would provide. He endorsed our move to the Institute for Carbon Management (ICM) and set a meeting in June of 2022 to revisit the funding issue. The ICM stepped up with a commitment of around 25% of our base budget. Anderson stepped up with a commitment of around 12%. Private donors collectively stepped up with around 12%. I did, too. After showing this support, the Interim EVC/Provost still refused to pitch in, citing his interim status and a $40m budget shortfall. With the appointment of a permanent EVC/Provost I renewed my requests. Ultimately the new EVC/Provost denied my funding request citing the new labor agreement for the extra tightness of resources. He has also shown no interest in helping to find the next generation of faculty leadership.
My goal was clear: Long term, our university has had major impact on the state, region, country, and the world. What is missing is “today.” I wrote in?2017, “If we want universities to have an immediate impact, we need to engage today’s students in hands-on projects that confront real problems … The goal is to organize, prepare, and support students as they attack real-world problems -- and to do so on a large scale.” The Epicenter provides the information infrastructure to enable such projects and enable all of us to learn from them. Information infrastructure isn’t sexy but it’s the key to overcoming the diseconomies of scale we experience in small organizations and learning from our collective efforts. Student teams are the epitome of small organizations, as are many of the outside allies these teams help from community organizations to international NGOs. The MoU I helped negotiate between?monday.com?and UCLA provides that infrastructure at scale for free and allows UCLA to share that infrastructure with outside allies working with us on common problems. It’s built and already in use by over 1800 students, faculty, and staff in over 60 centers, mostly at UCLA, but also on 11 other campuses. Over 300 students in Anderson capstone teams are using the platform. That’s a fraction potentially a $50 million per-year asset. One of the next waves of big data will come from organizational memories. The Epicenter infrastructure is ideal for turning project records into systematic learning.
I resigned last Monday.
Thank you all for your contributions to what we’ve built together.
Cheers,
Lee