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 (51)
(more…)

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.

(more…)

Here are more resources on the Open Money concept, technologies and projects.

These are the tags I use on delicious to store and organize all the links about Open Money and Local Currencies:
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+money
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+open_money
http://delicious.com/openp2pdesign/open_p2p+local_currency

Some Twitter users you should follow:
http://twitter.com/openmoney
http://twitter.com/metacurrency
http://twitter.com/newcurrency
http://twitter.com/thetransitioner
http://twitter.com/fer_ananda
http://twitter.com/jfnoubel
http://twitter.com/flowplace
http://twitter.com/myrfa
http://twitter.com/zippy314
(more…)

Beside Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Manufacturing, there is another path the Open Everything phenomenon is taking: Open Money. Although the Open Money projects are in their early steps, they represent a very important strategic and metadesign move in order to enable the spreading of community-based open and p2p organizational forms.

The open money project aims to create the global infrastructure, tools, governance mechanisms and platforms that will give communities the capacity to create their own currencies with just a few clicks and thereby liberate their wealth potential.¹

We should note that these examples of Open Money can be understood as metacurrencies (and here comes the Metacurrency project), because Open Money projects are the design of the rules and artifacts needed for the design of a community’s own currency. Open Money projects will be for sure an important part of any platform for Open P2P Design projects (that are metadesign projects of open collaborative systems).

Here is a great video (with subtitles available) from the Wall Street Journal that clearly explains the Open Money concept and other similar projects:

Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms. Every community (associations, companies, cities, regions, states, professions, interest groups, etc) will be able to create their own currencies for their own marketplace.²

And here is another video (with subtitles) about the Metacurrency project:

Notes:

1. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]
2. http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money [↩]

01. Net-Map: a social network analysis toolbox

Net-Map is a visualization and facilitation tool developed by Eva Schiffer that can be very useful for design processes for/with Community/Locality Systems.

Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes. By creating Influence Network Maps, individuals and groups can clarify their own view of a situation, foster discussion, and develop a strategic approach to their networking activities. More specifically, Net-Map helps players to determine

• what actors are involved in a given network,
• how they are linked,
• how influential they are, and
• what their goals are.

Determining linkages, levels of influence, and goals allows users to be more strategic about how they act in these complex situations. It helps users to answer questions such as: Do you need to strengthen the links to an influential potential supporter (high influence, same goals)? Do you have to be aware of an influential actor who doesn’t share your goals? Can increased networking help empower your dis-empowered beneficiaries?

Basically, Net-Map is low-tech tool for developing social network analysis within communities. It is a tool that: (more…)

After the first post and second post about Open Architectural Design at MIT, here you can find a thesis about the MIT Open Source Building Alliance Operation (OSBA) developed by Kalaya Kovidvisith at MIT and submitted on June 2007: “Open Source Building Alliance Ecology. The Internet Framework for Consumer Driven Participative Design”.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to apply a theory of Open Source to building industries, and illustrate how the augmentations of Internet services can improve the usability of Open Source for the design-build architecture.
This thesis proposes then HOU.SYS, an online community for the Open Source Building, as an alternative approach for a participative platform in mass customization of small housing and its related products, technologies and services.

This thesis reexamines the basic assumptions of how building products are distributed through the Open Source environment. By analyzing the impact of e-Business and Internet technology driving community participation, the integration of (1) four online Business models: Dell, Open Source, iTunes, and eBay, and (2) the advent of mass-customization through the revolution of Internet technology, Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) for architecture and architectural product design and development will be established. The results of this evaluation identify the effective factors for the Internet augmentation framework to achieve the usability of Open Source for the design-build housing industry, and reinforce the changing relationship between home buyers, architects, and manufacturers prior to making a final housing product.

And from the conclusions:
(more…)

Max Barret,
Social Circles

Everyone

A Venn diagram, drawn with light, showing
the 5 different sets of social databases I use:
Hotmail.com contacts, Facebook.com friends,
Myspace.com friends, MSN messenger
contacts and those in my mobile phonebook.
A total of 259 people.

via | manystuff.org

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.

(more…)