A brief recap: 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 while 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. During the following years, the project has become quite successful, with workshops, lectures or panels in many countries, including Italy, Spain, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico. Meanwhile, I also moved to Helsinki to further investigate Open Design and Open P2P Design in the Media Lab of the Aalto University – School of Art and Design.

But now, the most important thing I want to share with you in this post is this: if you remember, in the old post I mentioned, I wrote this:

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:

What has happened since then? Well, everybody has been very busy, and the participation of the new members has been really low (4 posts in 1 year and half). Meanwhile, other people joined the project but unfortunately still 99,9% of the work was done by me. Information has been scattered among this website, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and other external websites. This project needs then to rearrange all the resources that it has been mapping during these years, and to do it in a really collaborative way (so far, there were some technical limitations that prevented many people from entering).
Even if busy with many projects (some of them still have to appear on this web!), I’ve been researching and testing how to improve this website and make it really an open source project. After many tests, finally the moment has arrived! If you go to meta.openp2pdesign.org, you will find that the redesign process has already started, and if you want, you can join it. We will use Trac and Subversion software (as in the development of many open source projects) and the Open P2P Design methodology for designing how openp2pdesign.org project will work as a community dedicated to a set of collaborative activities. There is also a mailing list for discussion about the redesign of the project here:

http://lists.meta.openp2pdesign.org/listinfo.cgi/discussion-meta.openp2pdesign.org

If you want to understand better the tools and process that will be used, have a look at this recent presentation:

Here are few things to keep in mind about the openp2pdesign.org project and its redesign:

• as in many open source projects, with this project I need to “scratch an itch” i.e. map and studying resources about designing collaborative, open and complex projects; we can further discuss about this, but this is the starting point;
• ideally, the redesign process will never be completed: it will always be possible to modify and improve the project;
• content published on the website will be released as open content or open data; however, this does not mean that absolutely everything will be open: we will discuss together what shall be more or less open and which licenses to use (for example, the work I’m doing in the Aalto University can be open only to some extent because I have to follow existing rules and dynamics);
• it doesn’t need to become a big project or to develop very quickly: it needs to be a good and useful project for understanding better open, complex and collaborative design (quality is preferred over quantity);
• you can join the redesign process, or wait until the new website will be up and running to join it; in any case, the best thing is to follow openp2pdesign.org and learn a bit about Open P2P Design;
• the redesign process is also a way for further testing and refining the Open P2P Design methodology itself, I hope you can help me in finding bugs or in proposing suggestions.

One more thing: but what it is supposed to be openp2pdesign.org? It is not a start-up (at least not yet): the idea is to have a common space for studying how to design open, collaborative and complex projects, and to do this in an open source way. It is a place for anybody interested in find resources, tools, knowledge about design for open, collaborative and complex projects. But of course, if you join the project and help with the redesign process, you can help us in redefining also the project.
You should be interested in openp2pdesign.org if you usually ask yourself these questions:

• What does it mean to develop an Open Design project, or to develop a collaborative design project for a community or complex system?
• Where can I find the closest place for developing Open Design projects
• Where can I find tools and resources for developing projects for complex social systems?
• Where can I find a place for discussion about designing for communities and about co-design?
• Where can I find the closest place for fabbing an Open Design project?
• (and many other questions… you can leave a comment suggesting related needs!)

As a conclusion, blogging now will be less important until a new platform will be developed. If you want to participate in the process, go to meta.openp2pdesign.org or send an e-mail to meta [at] openp2pdesign.org asking for a Subversion (SVN) and Trac account. If you don’t want to participate in the process but want to see / use the new website / community when it will be available, just subscribe to the newsletter and we will keep you updated. In this project, open doesn’t just mean something that you can download for free, but that we welcome any participant in further improving this collaborative effort, so we will be happy if you join and help us!

Just after my participation in the Maker Lab at the DMY Berlin 2011, I finally had the chance to meet and interview Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant from Open Design City, a co-working and community-based space for making hosted in the Betahaus (Berlin, Germany). The following interview is the result of a reconstruction of a great half a day of sharing of ideas and talking in Berlin.
(By the way: I’m going to be again in Berlin next week for the Open Knowledge Conference: I’ll be part of a panel and workshop on creating a standard for Open Hardware and Design, more details on the website of the event.)

Massimo Menichinelli: Could you please tell us the story of Open Design City, how it started and what is planned for the near future?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Open Design City happened by accident, starting from an existing community, with an event in Betahaus in February 2010.
Various makers from Berlin and other places met for an Open Design Event, which resulted in a dinner party, numerous products, experiments and the documentary “delivered in beta”. The design festival DMY Berlin then was interested in having a Maker space, 200 square meters of space, with a budget of 3000 € for materials and transportation provided by Etsy (Editor’s note: Etsy has an office in Berlin, here). Then Betahaus wanted to start a Fab Lab, and before the MakerLab, we opened the space in Betahaus, catalysed by the community formed in creating the MakerLab. We confronted business models, asked the community about how to organize (and then create) the space. People brought tools, resources and ideas in the space, that was not defined in the beginning. We left it up to the community to share tools, skills, machines and organize events and workshops to launch the space.
Everything in the place has been built or donated by the members, except for a series of tools donated by the marketing department at Bosch. Then CNC machines and a Makerbot arrived later.

We are now in a transition process, recruiting more members in order to cope with the rental costs, and trying to establish a long-term business plan (because everything happened by accident). Since we don’t have a legal status yet, we are not receiving any subsidies from government or companies, the space is offered by Betahuas but all the money comes from members, so there’s need to find more money.
We are trying to establish connections with companies that may benefit from the space, but in any case the community comes first for us. It is a space by the community for the community, and we are trying to create opportunities for the community to make money through workshops and more services.

Massimo Menichinelli: What is the current situation in Berlin for Fab Labs and Open Design? What kind of impact a Fab Lab like yours could have in Berlin?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant It’s very hard to get fundings from the government, moreover there are interesting projects and artists but not so much industry and no other Fab Labs.
There are many coworking spaces but with no focus on open design or fabbing technologies. There are some Hackerspaces with RepRaps and small workshops, and some other places offer access to cnc machines by paying per hours.
There is also a space for reusable materials in Pankow, and a well equipped workshops for artists from bbk-kulturwerk. Then there is the internet platform “verbund offener werkstätten”, a German wide association for open workshops and fab labs.

Generally, Berlin does not have a tradition of industry and factories, but there are many DIY workshops from the squatting times in the ’80s; most of them are closed now, but there’s still this tradition in the city.
Moreover, there are a lot of projects about Open Source in Berlin (Creative Commons, Freifunk, …) and therefore there are many overlapping communities.

Massimo Menichinelli: Fab Labs are still a new experiment, and there is the need to develop proper business models. What’s your experience in the field, and which are the problems that you encountered in managing a Fab Lab? Any advice for starting a Fab Lab?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant A budget or business plan is not necessary for starting a Fab Lab, you just need enough people that want to be part of it. And tell the right story about the space, so people will start contributing naturally. Start with spaces and the community, then consider later the tools and machines (most of the usual tools of Fab Labs are not so important actually). It’s also important to have different skills present, from electronics to product to social programming.

Massimo Menichinelli: In your experience, which kind of users are more interested in your Fab Lab: designers, makers, artists…? Could we extend the user base to non-designers as well?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant Our user base is really broad, and it’s diversity what makes this space so interesting: hackers, artists, economists, philosophers, designers…
It’s a communication issue: the way you communicate the space attracts different people, from open hardware to open data, privacy, self-production. We are striving to maintain the user base so different and that people can engage with peer-to-peer dynamics.
We are currently developing the project of a mobile infrastructure for tools in the city (collaborating with ngos and the green movement).

Massimo Menichinelli: How does Open Design City work? What are the structure and rules that you have, and could they be implemented in other cities as well or are they specifically related to the Berlin / Germany context?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We decide with the community (asking them for propositions): they announce events and they are responsible for their organization.
There’s a center in the organization (Jay and Chris are responsible), but we’re trying to decentralize it more and It’s an ongoing challenge. We are also trying to define how the space is legally defined: there is no legal infrastructure now, so it opens opportunities but there are drawbacks (for example you can’t look for funding).
Anyway, if you think there’s something that could be improved in the space, just do it!

Massimo Menichinelli: While Fab Labs have grown considerably in terms of popularity, Open Design is still more controversial: many designers and companies fear or don’t like the idea of open collaborative processes and the sharing of the design drawings. How could we overcome this problem?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant We should start with real examples, we have to prototype some products, just to show the strategic power of Open Design. There’s a lot of theory around business models for Open Design, we should demonstrate them as a real possibility. Otherwise it’s just idealism, while Open Design should be part of the economy and we should communicate that’s not only about giving stuff for free.
At the moment is just a leap of fatih to be enagaged in the Open Design world, and we are not so motivated by money. ;-)

Massimo Menichinelli: I started researching about Open Design in 2005, and in 6 years the situation has changed a lot: from isolated experiments to a full ecosystem emerging right now. It is always difficult to make forecast, but how do you see Open Design and Fab Labs in 5 years?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant The future of Open Design is not here but in Africa or Asia or South America. If China close their Intellectual Property policies, there won’t be any future for Open Design, and we look at Shanzai as a good examples of what can be ahead.
There is a need therefore to change laws, they are not clear and limitate people, especially for what regards IP. We will have also to explore new legal frameworks and business models that are community-guided.
Finally, we have also to study more how to do product hacking, it will be interesting to understand how Open Design interacts with closed design cases and companies.

Massimo Menichinelli: Quite often Open Design is seen as possible solution towards making our society more sustainable (and there are even examples of Green Fab Labs). Do you agree? How could we further explore this direction?

Jay Cousins – Pedro Pineda – Christophe Vaillant With openness you can create innovation and knowledge in a distributed model and if you have an open process, it’s also about renewing resources as well. It’s about the commons, and it’s hard to find the right strategy on a legal level (or to change the economic system). Furthermore, there should also be a long term vision; there are not so many theories that are well grounded, with probably the exception of Michel Bauwens. And then there’s of course the need of proper business models.

The challenge is: how do I make money from Open Design? Because once you have Open Design, anybody can solve problems because there’s free access to knowledge and tools that are open. Another question is: what are people’s objectives? We should ask it ourselves before saying we should need money or a project should be open. If I already have the life I want to live, should I care who’s making money?

In open design, value lies in the return of the artisan: a company can’t get and offer the same emotional connections and feeling. And the enemy to fight in order to reach sustainability, is planned obsolence. If we manage to use Open Design to solve this, we will reach sustainability. Furthermore, open existing products to fix this planned obsolence problem and make them not obsolete is the key, so we can understand what can be improved (material, energy efficiency, …). We also studied how to create bioplastics, but the materials shrink too much, so there should be more investigation about it.
As a conclusion: as a designers we are trained to develop everything new, from scratch, but it’s not true that this is what we really need… how many chairs are already there?

01. A novel: Makers

The first sign is clearly the publishing of Cory Doctorow‘s novel Makers: a science-fiction novel about the Maker subculture and the rise (and fall and rise again) of Open Designers through 3D Printing, User-generated Exhibitions and financial fights with big corporations like Walt Disney. And it is an important book also because it tries to show how Open Design could develop with possible business models and scenarios (trying to learn from the dot-com bubble of the ’90s).
You can download it in different formats here, or read it here below (and you can also read a great review by our friend Adam Arvidsson here).

02. IDEO and FrogDesign

02.01 OpenIDEO.com

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

OpenIDEO is a project launched in August 2010 by IDEO, one of the most famous design and innovation consultancies. OpenIDEO can be regarded as an hybrid between Crowdsourcing and Open Design, since they launch challenges to the online crowd, but later the process is collaborative. We must note however that the paradigm here is more Web 2.0 than Open Source: collaboration on OpenIDEO is only about voting, commenting and talking about the projects, in order to refine them and discard the less interesting, so that one winner will be chosen in the end. There is no actual collaborative design with an Open Source process.
All concepts generated are shareable, remix-able, and reusable in a similar way to Creative Commons (though this means they’re not using Creative Commons), since participants own the concepts but grant a non-exclusive license to the Challenge Host for possible publication. Beyond that, organizations that partner with OpenIDEO on challenges may choose to implement the top ideas.

All challenges posted will be for social good, meaning that they won’t be used for commercial projects. In time, IDEO may use the same platform as part of their client work for closed challenges (that won’t appear on OpenIDEO). It seems therefore that it is for social and non-commercial goals now, but at the same time it’s a research about using the same approach (that is, more Open Innovation that real Open Design) to the commercial side of IDEO.

Beside this, IDEO is already planning the launching of its design for social innovation division IDEO.org for the fall of 2011 (here’s an interesting interview about it).
IDEO.org is seeking individuals for the 2012 fellowship class: residents will join senior designers from IDEO to form IDEO.org’s interdisciplinary design team for an 11-month period. In order to chose these residents, candidates are asked to fill an online application and also to participate in an OpenIDEO Challenge.

Even if the concept is not completely Open Design (there is no real collaboration like in Open Source and the licenses used are not completely clear or Open), it is a very important project that IDEO designed carefully. They especially paid attention to the problem of metrics: how do we measure collaboration, the work of every participant and the state of the community?
I will return on this issue in the future, since it’s critical for the development of Open Design and any open projects (and therefore of Open P2P Design, that enables them). For the moment, the approach of OpenIDEO is an interesting case:

The Design Quotient (DQ) is a measure of your contributions to OpenIDEO. It corresponds to how active you are in the inspiration, concepting, and evaluation phases of a challenge. It also measures your collaboration, increasing every time you comment or build on other people’s inspirations and concepts. When you take part in a challenge, you build up your DQ by accruing points.

A DQ can help to publicly identify your design expertise and strengths. Maybe you’re excellent at providing inspiration that shapes the conversation, or you’re great at building off of others’ ideas. Share it with your friends, colleagues, teachers, and even potential employers to give them some insight into what you’re best at.

02.02 frogMob

Another renowned design and innovation consultancy, Frog Design, has started being interested in bringing mass collaboration inside the design process developing frogMob, “an experimental method of guerilla research”. This is clearly not a case of Open Design, but of Crowdsourcing: there is no real collaboration, but only challenges offered to any internet surfer (i.e. the crowd) that can then help Frog Design in developing design research of existing solutions worldwide.

frogMob is an open, crowdsourced approach to research [...] frogMob gives us the opportunity to rapidly identify patterns across markets and geographies, and ultimately glean inspiration from unexpected sources.

frogMob is not about real etnographic research, but it looks just for “small adaptations invented by real people”: it began as an internal experiment, and now it is publicly open to participants. It seems like a business version of a Wikipedia of product hacking done by users: they’re not yet co-designers, but this is one of the first steps in that direction.

Incentives are very basic: you participate because you’d like to play an active role in Frog Design’s design process, engaging in a dialogue with Frog Design’s research teams, and then you can get your submission featured on the online and print magazine design mind. Submissions are voluntary and unpaid, and participants own the rights to their content (see the term of use).

02.03 Thomas Sutton (Frog Design) talking about Open Innovation (and Design)

Frog Design Creative Director Thomas Sutton spoke on Open Innovation on the main stage at the Lift11 conference in Geneva, Switzerland (2011) with his talk Relinquishing Control: creating space for open innovation.
While Open Innovation is already a well known and accepted concept in many business sectors, it still needs to find a place in the Design field. In this talk Sutton explains how Design should become more about building connections with the whole network (because it’s not the best product that wins, but the product with the best system dynamics) and for creating a space for Open Innovation with the users.
Here again, it is interesting to note that the Creative Director at Frog Design talks about using Design for Open Innovation (and Open Design as well). Let’s hope that designers, as Sutton suggested, will leave behind their traditional idea of a role that:

Impose meaningful order on the world

and that instead uncover the meaning and order that already exist, facilitating the emergence of networks of distributed and collaborative creativity.

(To be continued in the second and third parts)

But while with code_swarm it’s easier to see how the community grows and change shape, with Gource we can have a better look at what the users are actually working on. Instead of focusing on the form of the community (be it a social network or another visual metaphor), Gource focuses on the form of the software being developed, analysing it as network of interacting pieces of code. We can then see where the users actually work and we can also see them in a better way than with code_swarm (Gource supports the use of Gravatars for visualizing the users).

code_swarm and Gource represent them two different approaches at visualizing the life of an Open Source community; there is a lot of research and work that can be done on this strategic issue, but at least for the moment we already have two working tools.

Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.

Currently there is first party support for Git, Mercurial and Bazaar, and third party (using additional steps) for CVS and SVN.

And here’s an example: using Gource to visualize the structure of the 3D modeling free software Blender:

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 (225)

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.

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

Twibe (Twitter group):
http://twibes.com/openmoney

Hashtags (a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to Twitter tweets.):
http://hashtags.org/tag/openmoney/messages
http://hashtags.org/tag/p2pmoney/messages
http://hashtags.org/tag/metacurrency/messages
http://hashtags.org/tag/metacurrencies/messages

Social Networks:
http://openmoney.ning.com/
http://people.thetransitioner.org/

A comprehensive page on the P2P Foundation wiki:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Money

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