Wikipedia, every subreddit and half of open source are maintained by volunteers doing unpaid janitorial work under rules nobody wrote down. Twelve weeks doing that work for real: editing, moderating, arbitrating, and handing the mop on to whoever comes next.
What you will do
You will pick one volunteer project in week 1 — English Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, a subreddit, or an open-source repository — and contribute to it every week until week 12. Real edits, in public, under your own name, alongside people who are not being marked.
You will be reverted. You will take it to a talk page and wait for a stranger who owes you nothing. You will argue a deletion and then close one. From week 7 the cohort writes the rules for a sandbox community of its own, hands half of them to a bot that has no judgement, and staffs the queue on a roster until the end of semester. In week 11 you audit what those rules actually did. In week 12 you write the handover note and give the whole thing to next year.
Who it is for
Postgraduate students who have already worked somewhere, because half this course is a labour question and it lands differently once you have had a job. No technical prerequisite: if you can read a diff and write a paragraph, the tooling will not be what stops you.
It suits you if you have ever maintained something nobody thanked you for. It will not suit you if you want a course about social media strategy, growth, or community management as a profession. Nobody in this course is building an audience.
The shape of the semester
- Newcomer weeks 1–3
Read the room before you touch anything, then make one small true edit.
- Contributor weeks 4–6
Get reverted, argue it properly, and find out who decides what exists.
- Steward weeks 7–9
Write rules, enforce them against your classmates, and design the rota.
- Handover weeks 10–12
Strikes, forks, bots, and leaving without taking the reasons with you.
One thing before you enrol
This course puts students into communities of real people who did not volunteer to be coursework. There is a contributor undertaking, you sign it in week 1, and it is the shortest and most binding document in the course.
Read the undertaking before you decide.
Where to go next
Shifts
Twelve rostered Shifts, and what leaves the room at the end of each.
The Log
A real entry from the 2026 cohort, annotated — the spine of the course.
The Sandbox
Last year's ruleset, the config that enforces part of it, and why each rule exists.
Assessment
Four items, 100%, and why the shift work is worth less than it should be.
Lectures
Twelve weeks of the argument, two of them with slides.
People
Sixty-three thousand edits, eleven years of road surveys, one topic ban, and a bot.