My free online school, Mendicant University, has a lot in common with a startup environment even if we're headed down the nonprofit path. In particular, we share an endless amount of interesting ideas, a lack of available time to implement them all, and a goal of reaching some level of sustainability before the money we've scrounged up runs out. The more ambitious our plans become, the more I see what a hard job it is to start something. While the title of founder is something I originally gave myself just to be a bit facetious, now that Mendicant University is starting to become a real thing, I'm having to earn that badge.

As an entirely volunteer organization, we are always limited in resources. What this means to me is that any student or staff member who has decided to lend a helping hand needs to be working on the things that will help make sure that Mendicant University will still exist a year from now. There are a thousand interesting things we could be working on, in fact, last week's RbMU summit at RailsConf probably gave us enough ideas to last us all a lifetime. But in that lifetime of work, the question remains: What can be done today that will help make sure that we will be here tomorrow?

I don't have an answer to this question just yet. But what I do have is maybe a strategy for helping to find that answer. It's something that should be familiar to object oriented programmers: Do one thing and do it well.  If the single responsibility principle works so well as an organizing principle for software systems, perhaps it will work for human systems as well. I even know the one thing that Mendicant University can do well, though it's far from surprising: We're really fucking good at teaching.

Yes, it's true that now that we've been around for almost a year, we're going to need to start treating this like a real organization and not just one of my experiments. That means we'll need to think about ways to engage the public, we'll need to consider fundraising options, we'll need to continue building up our infrastructure and do all the extra behind the scenes work that any medium sized organization needs to do. But the important thing to remember, throughout this all, is that all of this serves exactly one goal: to create an environment where high quality, personalized, experience based teaching can slingshot smart and interesting people into doing awesome stuff for the world.

So no matter what it takes for us to get there, that's what we'll be doing. What is the one thing you want to do well?