One week after being in Helsinki, I went to Cáceres, for the Creative Cities in Imagination Society: 5th Congress of Creativity and Innovation where I gave a workshop about using the Open P2P Design methodology in cities in order to experiment with social and economic innovation starting with citizenship creativity. I have to say that I was struck by the perfect organization of such a big event, in region that I’ve been told is the poorest of Spain!

You can find my presentation, in Spanish, here.

As I had very little time for the workshop, I decided to use it to explain the Open P2P Design methodology to the participants instead of trying to do something. I had also prepared a short guide/toolkit, written in Spanish, for developing Open P2P Design projects that I published online on Issuu and Scribd and that I gave to the participants.
You can also download it from the Source section: Open P2P Design, co-diseñar una actividad colaborativa abierta con/para una comunidad y su localidad (223)
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After the first post about UrbanLabs, and the second one with the slideshow I presented there, I’m going to talk now about the methodology we adopted within the groups, and how they self-organized.

01. Methodology: Open Space Technology

We adopted the Open Space Technology:

Open Space Technology (OST) offers a method to run meetings of groups of any size. (“Technology” in this case means tool — a process; a method.) OST represents a self-organising process; participants construct the agenda and schedule during the meeting itself.
[...]
OST meetings have a single facilitator who initiates and concludes the meeting and explains the general method. The facilitator has no other role in the meeting and does not control the actual gathering in any way.

Here you can find more resources about Open Space Technology:

• http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm
• http://www.openingspace.net/openSpaceTechnology_method.shtml
• http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/does-open-facilitation-favour-groupthink/2008/10/06

It is therefore a design methodology based on self-organizing groups, and we can consider it as a real participative design methodology. And as I was the facilitator (or enabler) of the Group A about Collaborative Activities and Open Innovation, I hade the chance to test it and learn a lot about such participative dynamics.

I’ve already said that the event was a collective experimentation that goes on in the future, a collective learning process about designing collaborative projects. It was an event where really everyone learnt so much: organizers, facilitators, participants. Maybe because it was its first edition, or perhaps because social systems always generate new networks and situations every time. In fact, with this methodology UrbanLabs became a self-organizing Community with open and peer-to-peer processes: an Open P2P Community with a marketplace participation. What we tried to do was facilitate the participants self-organize in groups in order to start designing projects and building new networks.

I’ve already explained the methodology within the slideshow I presented, here I suggest you some videos in order to understand it more easily.
What’s important about Open Space Technology and its roles and laws, is that it is a tool to make the most of the workshop groups’ scarce resources (time and participants) in order to let all the participants find their own way to participate and enjoy the event.

Here’s a video of an Open Space unconference described in three minutes:

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After my first impressions, here is my slideshow I used on the first day of UrbanLabs. I was given the possibility to held a brief presentation before the participants in the group proposed some projects and then started to gather in order to talk about those projects.
We all were not sure about presentations, because we had so little time for the groups, but I tried to give this presentation (and it was my first presentation about Open P2P Design in Spanish) in order to give the group a starting point and a direction for the projects.

Maybe it was too long, maybe it was too rich of inputs, but a lot of people gathered to watch it and participate in the group (it was one of the biggest groups of UrbanLabs): this means that people are very interested in Open Innovation now, and especially in methodologies for enabling Open Innovations such Open P2P Design is.

It has two sections: the first is about understanding Open P2P Communities (analysis is the first step in a design process) and how to approach them, and the second part is about the methodology adopted in UrbanLabs, but I’d like to talk about it a little more in another post…

UrbanLabs08_Grupo_A_presentacion_Massimo_Menichinelli.pdf (1.7 Mb in Spanish)

Do you have any suggestion about it?

(…to be continued)

A week after UrbanLabs 08, I can finally write a post (the first of 3 posts) with my general impressions about it while I caught the flu!
It was an event that I’ve been waiting for since several months, and that by its nature it was very quickly between so many changes in language between Castilian Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian!

I would have liked very much to participate to such an event even if only as simple participant, and I was invited as a facilitator! For this reason I’d like to thank Ramon Sangüesa, Enric Senabre and Josep Vives for the opportunity they gave me, for the hospitality and for helping me in the role of facilitator.

One of the best things about these events is always the opportunity to know a person who is behind a blog or an initiative known for some time only in the web. It’s very hard to write about all the people I met there, in addition to the organizers reported above, but I try to point out some of them here.
First of all the other facilitators (albeit with some of them we met very briefly because everyone was so involved with the event): Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, Boris Mir, Juan Freire, Carlos Guadián, Roc Fages.

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And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.

The aim of the event is to think and propose new projects, practices and usages for cities and citizens, based on existing examples of appropriation of information technology and communication (ICT) and of innovation originating from social demands. The interaction between digital technology, digital culture and citizens’ space provides opportunities for citizen action affecting many different areas and open up potentially more creative and innovative participatory dynamics. These innovations can be translated into new opportunities for socio-economic development and local cultural as well as for strengthening civic networks and their mechanisms of participation in urban governance. The local objective, therefore, from a global perspective and tools.

The news that gives me great satisfaction is that Ramon Sanguesa invitated me to participate as a facilitator for Group A, Productive collaborative innovation: concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field. So this will be a very important opportunity to confront, share and experiment the themes of open innovation for communities and cities through the role of facilitator (enabler).

The intention of the six groups is to enable spaces for conversation, discussion and planning for specific projects related to each of the six subjects. The objectives of the Group A are:

• to work on collaborative innovation for civic-based and business-based projects;
• explore the concepts of open innovation in the social, technological and entrepreneurial field;
• explore the open and collaborative design; see how the concept of the culture changes after the collaborative and innovative “digital culture”.

Before the event, the pages of each working group the contextual framework and potential contents and projects that may arise, as well as initiatives, are developed in the pages of each working group. Each can be edited by its facilitator and other people interested in attending the working group, while broadening the discussion in the respective discussion page.

Other good reasons to follow this event are the presence of Michel Bauwens from P2P Foundation and of Juan Freire.

Registration is free for the first 100 seats, and then, for organisational reasons, there are still 50 seats reserved with a registration fee of 50 euros. And during those days it will be possible to follow the conference through videostreaming on the website.

I hope you will participate in the website and in the Citilab!

A complexity culture, especially in the design field, has to pass through the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity too.
Therefore, projects that derive from concepts of complexity, even if just superficially (and so are not complex nor systemic projects) are important for their ability to spread in society an aesthetics of complexity.

Such a project can be complexcity, designed by Lee Jang Sub and hand-made produced by the Spanish enterprise Granada Design.

This project is an exploration to find a concealed aesthetic by using the pattern formed by the roads of the city which have been growing and evolving randomly through time, thus composing the complex configuration we experience today.

I perceive the city’s patterns as living creatures that I recompose to form an urban image.

This project which started from Seoul where I was born and have grown in, is expanding to other cities all over the world.

Lee Jang Sub

In this project, the complexity is a mere decorative expedient: the shape is Euclidean and two-dimensional, the function limited to pure decoration and the production-distribution-consumption system is extremely conventional. Therefore, it is not a real complex project, but the dissemination of an aesthetic of complexity (and in this case, the complexity of a territory), passes necessarily through such initiatives.

via | mocoloco

City Hacking #02: Design Pubblico (by esterni)

Barefootpaths

In cities that are no longer communities, where estranged citizens go through the same paths every day and hardly ever get closer, design pubblico promotes another way of living collective places together, a conception of “public space” as opposed to the preeminence of “private time”; first-hand visions instead of tele-visions; and democratic projects instead of oligarchies. Just in free or freed public places this collective revolution will be set in motion.

Catalogue (in English)

Catalogo (in Italiano)

City Hacking #01: Urban Cup Holder

The aim of the urban cup holder is to encourage people to reinterpret street settings and claim them as their territory, instead of just using them as a means of passage from A to B. The cup holder is easily clamped with one hand to posts in the street, then used as a coat/bag/umbrella hanger and a drink holder. In turn, giving the user a feeling of control and creating a more personal space, a temporary territory.

via | swissmiss

Los pequeños detalles pueden cambiar las formas en que utilizamos la ciudad. En este caso, un pequeño soporte transforma un lugar de paso en un espacio de relación, lo convierte en un verdadero espacio público. Un excelente ejemplo de como el diseño de lo intangible puede transformar la ciudad.

via | Juan Freire

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

I said that Open Source and Peer-to-Peer could be applied to design for a locality…and Matías Echanove and Rahul Srivastavache are trying to adapt the principles of the Bazaar described by Eric Raymond to urban planning.

1. Necessity is the mother of invention: What do residents need? It is not for planners to guess, but for them to say.
2. No need to reinvent the wheel again: Lets see what works in here and elsewhere and expand on it.
3. You don’t really understand the problem until after you start implementing the solutions: It doesn’t have to be an all out “redevelopment”, we can start small and keep building knowledge from that.
4. With the right attitude interesting (and unexpected) issues will come up and make the plan & development better.
5. Letting go: Lets not feel proprietary about the plan, or rather let other people feel proprietary about it as well. Our common goal is to have the BEST/optimal solution, and everyone has something to contribute.
6. Residents should be co-planners and co-developers: They are the biggest assets of planners and a lot of time and attention should be spent to cultivate their active participation. We don’t need to be design or planning genius, but rather to find the best way to activate the collective intelligence of the residents.
7. The plan should be publicly accessible on the web and in the planned area itself: with updates every weeks so people are part of it and can react immediately. Listen to what people (everybody) have to say and immediately incorporate it. It can always been modified along the way.
8. If we have enough people looking at different aspects of the plan, any issue can be recognized and addressed quickly: Finding the issues is the biggest challenge. Once we found it someone will have an idea about how to solve it.
9. Finding an efficient way to get people’s input is more important than input itself.
10. If residents are treated as the most valuable resource of the plan, they will become the most valuable resource of the plan.
11. Being able to recognize good ideas from others is (almost) better than having good ideas oneself.
12. Realizing that our concepts are wrong might lead to the most striking and innovative solutions.

Por otra parte, dado que gestionar ciudades y territorios consiste en realidad en gestionar personas, es si cabe más importante que en el caso del software que el proceso se desarrolle de un modo colaborativo dando participación a los propios usuarios que de este modo pueden convertirse en actores del proceso. Ciertamente, la planificación actual, por ejemplo en España, está muy alejada de estas ideas, pero deberíamos pensar por las razones de esta discrepancia. Posiblemente estén más en los fallos del sistema actual que en la supuesta utopía del paradigma del bazar.

(via | Juan Freire)