In May 2010, openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community. It took a lot of work to change the website, but now we are ready to start (even if some functions and contents will be added in the following weeks).

01. openp2pdesign.org, so far

As you may remember, the openp2pdesign.org project started in March 2005 with my Master Degree Thesis in the Faculty of Design of the Milan Polytechnic. Therefore, for the first year (March 2005 – April 2006) openp2pdesign.org was just a work in progress and it did not really exist yet, I was producing the first source code.

As since back then the concepts of Open Design and Open P2P Design were in their early days and there were very few opportunities to develop them further, I started openp2pdesign.org in order to provide a space for collective discussion and further research. It took then form of a website towards the end of 2006, opening the 2007 as a multilanguage blog, “Open Peer-to-Peer Design. Design for Complexity” in English, Italian and Spanish.

Since then openp2pdesign.org has been a blog, but while the multilanguage option proved to be very useful for international recognition, it slowed down posting and other projects: writing the same content three times takes a lot of time. With the number of projects and collaborations growing, the publishing of contents slowly shifted from the blog to Twitter and Facebook. In 2005 it made sense to write a thesis, in 2006/07 it made sense to start a blog, in 2008/09 it made sense to move the discussion into other social networks.

It makes sense now, in 2010, to get back to the blog and to redesign it as an open source community. During the past 5 years, the ideas behind Open P2P Design and openp2pdesign.org proved to be really interesting with growing international success, from Italy to Europe and Asia. Further researches on Open P2P Design can take different directions and subjects, so there’s enough room for other people to come in and have an active role in these researches. It is time now to open it to other people, as a way to make the project bigger, to help great people show their knowledge and experience, and as a way to facilitate the emergence of a social system dedicated to Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems.

As many of you have seen it in my recent presentations, the name of the website is officially openp2pdesign.org, stressing the difference from the Open P2P Design methodology (and as a reference to the inspiring neubauten.org project).

02. openp2pdesign.org, a strategic project for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems

While Open P2P Design is a methodology, openp2pdesign.org is a strategic design project for enabling research and projects for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems. The tagline has changed too and now it is:
Metadesign for Open Systems, Processes, Projects.
Studying and enabling Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems since 2005.

What is a strategic project? A brief definition of strategic design is:

the integrated body of products, services and communication strategies that business and social actors conceive and develop to obtain a set of specific strategic results.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, just think about Make Magazine; it’s more than a magazine, it is a complete strategic project that offers:

• Make Magazine
• Maker Faire
• Books
• Make: television
• Make Controller Kit
• Craft Magazine

This means that Make, as a strategic project, offers all the Tools, Knowledge and Systems you need for developing DIY / Craft projects. We have therefore Metadesign projects offered within a whole Strategic Design project. openp2pdesign.org is going to about Metadesign projects for enabling Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems offered within a whole Strategic Design project.

03. openp2pdesign.org, the core group and the collaborative activity

Right now, openp2pdesign.org is made of a core group, some of the great people I’ve found during these years and that have experience and knowledge about Design for Open, Collaborative and Complex Systems and at the same time they know how to collaborate and share. They are Miae Kim (South Korea), Federico Weber (Italy), Mauro Costa (Portugal / Spain), Roger Pitiot (France / South Korea).
During the next months, we will design the collaborative activity of the open source community of openp2pdesign.org; and yes, we are going to use the Open P2P Design methodology for this task. You can track this process in the meta.openp2pdesign.org page. Once this collaborative activity is stable, we will open it to the participation and everybody will be able to join us and be part of it.
We hope it will be ready by the end of 2010, meanwhile the blog will work, and you can follow our projects in it or subscribing to our newsletter on the Contact page or here below:

03. openp2pdesign.org, the new website

The whole website has been redesigned and restructured; even though we kept the multilanguage posts, now English is the main language. Everything is more or less ready by now, just expect contents and functionalities to be improved or added. Heres’ the new structure:

1. About
   A page about openp2pdesign.org and how it works.
2. People
   The profiles of all the people involved in openp2pdesign.org.
3. Project
   Past and current openp2pdesign.org projects.
4. Blog
   The blog, with the old posts as well.
5. Wiki
   The wiki, for collaborative writing, future books and projects.
6. System
   Links to other people, projects, companies, institutions part of the Open P2P Design ecosystem
7. Source
   The source code of openp2pdesign.org, here you can find all the files you can freely download: Press files, Texts (Books, Papers, Guides), Tools, Maps, Presentations.
8. SVN
   The WebSVN interface to the openp2pdesign.org subversion repositories. Here you can browse the repositories used in our projects and workshops.
9. Twitter
   The stream of our Tweets, as with Twitter we can publish more informations than with blogging.
10. Contact
    The contact and newsletter page, where you can send an e-mail to us or subscribe to openp2pdesign.org newsletter in order to be informed about our projects and updates.