UPDATE: Text below has been updated slightly to reflect the current plan as of November 2011. Small changes have been made, but the spirit of the original idea has been preserved.

Throughout the first year of working on Mendicant University, we grew faster than anyone could have expected us to. We managed to make it a whole year without a formal plan, growing and changing organically as we worked on finding our way. But with the growth came the growing pains, and a couple months ago we began to worry that if we continued at the pace we were going without at least some minimal planning, we'd burn out.

It took us several weeks to regain our bearings, but now that we have, I'm happy to announce the plans we have for next year. What follows is just a summary, but it should give you a glimpse into where we plan to take things.

• We are changing our community service exercise in the core skills course so that it is now mandatory, but more open ended. Students will be able to select from a list of open source projects and community mentors and then are expected to make a small contribution to the project they choose. This will give the students an opportunity to contribute to an existing open source project in a supportive learning environment. This new requirement will effectively double the publicly visible impact of our sessions, as students will still also be releasing their own individual projects as open source.

• We are reducing the number of core skills courses from six per year down to three. The next three sessions will be held in September 2011, January 2012, and May 2012. We may or may  not reduce the class size from 15 down to 12, but September will run with 15 seats open. There are many reasons why we need to reduce the number of core skills sessions, but the main one is that it is the most labor intensive course we have to run. In addition to being a huge commitment for the students, it takes the effort of two instructors, three alumni mentors, and a visiting teacher to bring folks through this session. We want to make sure that we focus on quality rather than quantity, and reducing the number of core courses is one way to do that.

• We plan to greatly expand and extend our mentoring program. Eric Gjertsen and Shane Emmons are still working on a plan for exactly how we will go about growing the program, but our goal is to be reaching a much broader audience of folks who could use a code review or some guidance about what they should be studying and practicing. This will hopefully counterbalance the reduction in core skills courses, as many folks will still be able to engage with Mendicant University even if they're not formally taking courses here.

• We are increasing the number of courses taught to our alumni. We plan to run web development sessions, software design sessions, and several pilot sessions as well. Pilots may include technical writing, statistics for programmers, and possibly a session on Ruby in the industry.

• We will be doing an increasing amount of projects with our alumni, some public facing, some meant to help shore up Mendicant University's infrastructure. However, it's very likely that within the next year you'll see our students and staff working on projects of high importance to the community, on an as-needed basis. (EDIT: As an example, we've done a Ruby documentation drive and a social good hackfest in October 2011)
  

These changes will hopefully lead to a more sustainable, stronger program. It isn't quite as ambitious as what we shot for in the first year, but it's solid and I think we'll be able to make it all happen. Our goal was to come up with a plan for our second year that would make sure we'd still be here in our third year, and I think this will do that. Have a question about where we're headed? Just ask in the comments section below.