The School of Social Innovation is designed to help small groups co-create their own social innovation courses. In this guide, you will find resources to help you create social innovation courses in a citizen circle format: small, local groups of three people co-creating a course and interacting with another small group conducting that course in a different community through Peer 2 Peer University.

Much like book clubs, citizen circles meet for several weeks (usually 6-8) and discuss pressing questions on topics like their local school system or socially responsible business.  Citizen circles also act, using their collective knowledge to do positive work in their communities through projects.   All citizen circles meet face-to-face, but SoSI offers citizen circle organizers an opportunity to convene and connect many citizen circles at once all over the world to cover a topic of broad interest (e.g. sustainability), following a similar learning plan at the same time in many different locations at once. 

Some other things you should know about SoSI courses, which do not necessarily apply to all citizen circles, is that SoSI courses are completely "open" by default, meaning that all materials used and created are Creative Commons licensed by default so that future course organizers or students anywhere in the world can learn from and build on your work and that courses are volunteer organized.   For citizen circles using closed resources participants may have to pay for to access, or for citizen circles which want to use paid organizers, coaches, or facilitators, SoSI may not be the platform for running your citizen circle.  If this is the case, please connect citizen circles at cocreate@citizencircles.com for alternatives. 

The Citizen Circles process is as follows:

1. Recruit two friends in the same community as you to build and participate in learning about a topic you are all passionate about.
2. Build your own syllabus using suggested resources, activities, discussion question, or previous syllabi, or create your own.  (Let us know if we can help you connect with leaders in your field of interest; we have a strong network with great partners like AshokaU, the Centre for Social Innovation, and the Transformative Action Institute.)
3. Help participants set learning goals for themselves and create or pick challenges participants can take on to demonstrate their accomplishments.
4. Participate in the Citizen Circles community google group to peer review and get the support of the community in planning for your course.

The SoSI process adds the following steps for citizen circle organizers who want to launch large distributed courses based on citizen circles for the world at large:

1. Create a portfolio on P2PU
2. Create a draft course on P2PU and ask for feedback from the citizen circles google group
3. Participate in P2PU orientation to get up to speed on best practices in peer-to-peer learning and tools
4. Advertise the course with us (we would like to write a blog post to tell your story and let our partners know that your course is looking for participants!)

This guide follows the general outline of the Citizen Circle process, with 5 corresponding sections:

Getting started on creating a citizen circle

SoSI FAQ

P2PU resources 

Submission and citizen circle support system