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Why should Design learn from Free Software, Open Source e P2P how to relate to a community?

Because Free Software, Open Source and P2P communities have developed some organizational forms and principles that can lead a community to self-organization, and potentially to high dimensions. In other words, they have developed an approach to community that proved its usefulness. For this reason, in other fields than software development, their principles and organizational forms have been adopted explicitly by many organizations; other organizations have not been explicitly inspired by Open Source and P2P but use some principles and organizational forms that come from them.

Moreover, as a consequence of their success, a general interest in community-based collaborative forms has been spreading: this has lead to the discovery of similar cases prior to the Free Software, Open Source and P2P phenomenon but that share some features.

All these cases (inspired by, derived by, prior to Free Software, Open Source and P2P communities) can be grouped (at least temporarily) in Open P2P Communities, i.e. communities based on an Open and Peer-to-Peer participation (I’m going to talk about them more in the future). They can be grouped temporarily in Open P2P Communities as they are evolving so fast that new definitions rise often (and Crowdsourcing and Web 2.0 are an example).

This success proves that community-based organizational forms are promising ones and that they can be adopted in communities with an high number of participants, building short and long collaborative networks, with high probabilities of spreading and achieving success in the society. They represent, maybe, the only participation-based organizational forms with an high scalability: the more the participants, the faster they can achieve success.

I think that these organizational forms and principles could be used to support and spread the activities of the Creative Communities (or any community). Moreover, user-generated content and community-based organization represents strong business opportunities (like YouTube, for example), and so redefining the role of Design could lead to more business opportunities too.

The idea is to bring Open P2P principles and practices inside the design process, and to use the design process to spread them throughout society. Open P2P organizational forms and principles as a design tool and as a design goal to support Creative Communities (or any community). There have been some initiatives trying to bring the Open P2P philosophy inside the design process (though we should study this more); but the proposal now is to use the design process to spread Open P2P philosophy throughout society too, at least where it could be more useful.

Now we know where Design can find informations and expertises on how to relate to a community. But a community is a complex entity, a real complex system. And if it has large dimensions, we cannot avoid its complexity.

How should we relate to communities, in a project, when they can have an huge number of participants? How should we relate to the complexity of a community?

And then, how should a designer relate to complexity?

In this situation, the same Free Software and Open Source communities could be useful…

(to be continued)

Tags: Community, Design, Free Software, Open P2P Communities, Open Source, Peer-to-Peer