Openwear is the new open source concept and community in course of developing by EDUfashion, a two-year project for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. It is born out of the collaboration of Poper - a social communication studio based in Ljubljana – Ethical Economy – the company based in London providing web tools to build ethically significant relations, and 3 universities from Italy (Faculty of Political Science in Milano), Slovenia (Faculty of Natural Sciences in Ljubljana) and Denmark (Copenhagen Business School).
In Openwear’s online space, small fashion producers, designers, stylists, students, interns,tailors, photographers, models, crafters, sewing cafes, silk-screen printers, fashion schools and others will all be able to open their own web space and personal profile, have access to the service and tools made available by the community, network, learn but also take part to the first collaborative, peer-produced, open-source fashion brand and its collections.
For the first time, the result of the innovative process of crowdsourcing will not be owned by a particular firm or company because the owners will be the community itself.

In this post I’m going to interview two of Openwear’s members, Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen.

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Massimo Menichinelli: The phenomena of Open Hardware, DIY and Makers have reached a remarkable level of development, fame and reputation. Perhaps less famous but equally important is the phenomenon of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises that are often visible on platforms such as Etsy. What are the differences and similarities between these phenomena and how do they relate to each other?

Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen: All these new scenes have in common a desire to empower understanding what they have in their hands, how it was made and improved. This desire blurs the distinction between producers and consumers, not in the sense that everyone will make everything they need, but that everyone more and more often will able to produce or design something and make it available in a flux of exchange out of which everyone could benefit.

Both phenomena are related with crucial changes that are undergoing in our social and economical environment. The Peak Oil calls to 0 Km chains of production. The rise of 2.0 social networks, mixed with the spreading of p2p communities, encourages new forms of global/local communities of producers and consumers. New technologies in communication and material production foster distributed manufacturing.

The difference is that DIY crafters sometimes have the tendency to perceive themselves more far away from technology because of their handmade pledge. It’s more a problem of cultural background. But as long as they envision the possibilities of new on-demand machines, they realize how craftsmanship could be revolutionized without loosing its soul.

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Massimo Menichinelli: Right now, which are the most common business models among the cases of DIY craft and craft / fashion micro enterprises?
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01. Open P2P Design workshops

The last part of the November 2009 tour took place very far, in South Korea (in Seoul) and in Singapore where I facilitated two workshops together with Roger Pitiot. Both workshops share the same structure and contents, even if the Singapore one had to be one day shorter (3 days instead of 4).
Let’s start reporting these workshops with the structure and the contents, something we had been working for months and we can easily replicate in other contexts in the future.
With the next posts I will explain in details what has been done in both workshops.

02. Workshop Contents

Design 2.0: designers meet social networks and new technologies for distributed systems

What is Design 2.0, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect

• complex problems
• increasing importance of design
• open innovation
• opening design

• • with new technologies
  • Knowledge sharing
  • social networks
  • fabbing

Open P2P Design: how to organize open projects for distributed systems

What is Open P2P Design, where it’s coming from and going to, why it’s interesting and what we should expect enable distributed creativity

• collaborative activity for complex problem solving
• metadesign for open process
• co-design for open projects

The Workshop will answer the following questions:

What is Open Design and how can we develop it with a community in a collaborative way?
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The second date of the November 2009 tour was in Helsinki, at the Open 2009 Symposium organized within the Media Lab Helsinki of the Aalto University School of Art and Design.
It was a great advance for me, as I was invited there as a keynote speaker for the second day!
Unfortunately I could stay in Helsinki for very little time (less than two days), and I was still a bit ill for the flu of the previous days, but people from Media Lab Helsinki were very nice and friendly. I really hope that we will collaborate in the future!

One of the most surprising things about the Open 2009 was that there were almost no hackers / coders there. It’s the first Open Everything event with no hackers I’ve ever seen! This is an interesting fact that shows how the Open culture or at least the interest for it is spreading and advancing in the society (or at least in the Finnish society!). This idea is supported by the fact that also during the afternoon panel (which I participated in) the discussion quickly shifted from the state of the art in supporting Open Systems to using Open Culture, Open Systems and Open Processes as a way to change and improve society.
About this issue, I think that we should proceed on two directions at the same time. On one side we should research how to develop proper Open Tools, Open Methodologies and Open Processes for enabling Open Systems that really works and fosters collaboration. On the other side, we should also study independently what changes and what initiatives we should take in a collaborative way in order to change and improve society (and all its related issues about social, economic and environmental sustainability). Tools and Strategies have the same importance and should be mixed wisely (too many times I see open source projects that seems to me almost useless or a waste of time in terms of social impact). Tools are important because they change the processes and the outcomes we get, and strategies are important in order to use the tools properly (this is my comment to the last tweets and the last part of the panel discussion when someone proposed to forget tools and to create a movement instead).
And note that Open Source proved to be useful and interesting not trying to change the whole society at once but by proceeding step by step with a strong focus on single projects and tools.

Here’s my presentation.

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From Michel Bauwens, here is a mindmap that presents a condensation of 3 years of his research at the P2P Foundation. The main body of the visualization contains 6 aspects of processes representing the cycle of reproduction and growth of openness in our societies:

1. Aspects of Openness
2. Enablers of Openness
3. Infrastructures of Openness
4. Open Practices
5. Open Domains of Practice
6. Open Products
7. Open Movements
8. Open Consciousness

On the Mindmeister map public page you can browse the map in a larger format or export it as an image, a .pdf file or in various mindmap formats, including the open source Freemind (which can be imported also in the open source and better Xmind), with which you can edit the map.

Here instead, on the P2P Foundation Blog, you can read its description with more details.

A very short report from Sci(bzaar)net, one week later.

First of all, thanks to Gian for this opportunity offered me. Participating in the organization process (even if only online, building the event’s website) and at the event was an opportunity to learn a lot about how we can make room for an open dialogue between very different personalities (researchers, bloggers, designers, creatives, psychologists, journalists, programmers)… such knowledge I hope I can put it into practice when I will be the facilitator of one of the working groups of UrbanLabs.

The event was held in the Model Lab of the Scuola Politecnica di Design, and although I had not studied there but at the Politecnico di Milano, I rediscovered the university atmosphere and especially the climate of activation and of laying the foundations for collective projects that only a Model Lab (with all its tools and work desks) could exemplify so well.

Here are the event pictures taken by me and the other participants, on Flickr:

For those who could not attend, the videos were published on the website; you can find the final text of the brainstorming here (and here the related videos). Finally, I recommend you to read the Bonaria Biancu’s post that summarize very well all the interventions placing them within a coherent overall speech.
All the videos and posts regarding individual authors can be consulted on the official website of Sci(bzaar)net, which will remain as a platform for collective discussion about the relationships between Internet, Scientific Research, Dissemination Scientific and Open Culture.

It was certainly a success and an important event: the specific organizational form (halfway between a BarCamp and more traditional conference) and the heterogeneity of the components have shown that they can give an added value to the meeting and the discussion. Rarely we can attend such meetings on these issues and it’s always a pleasure to know other bloggers or persons behind new experiments in person.

I’d like now to summarize my contribution and some brief reflections resulting from the brainstorming. As you can imagine, I have participated as an “Open Culture expert” and not about scientific research/publication. The main idea that I wanted to share with the participants is that we should think about Open Culture not as a simple set of publication practices ( “to publish a specific content with a specific license”) but as a real philosophy based on enabling complex systems. Open Culture is not just use a Creative Commons license: it means to facilitate a system that shares and reuses the information self-organizing independently. Thinking about Open initiatives in a reductionist way, just like the use of a specific license, can only lead to failure.

We can then study how to enable complex systems that follow Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics and imagine what activities of scientific research and dissemination (definition of hypothesis, definition of research, data collection, data analysis, compilation of results, publication, etc.. ) can be opened to these systems.

One of the concerns expressed most frequently during Sci(bzaar)net regards the opportunity to share the research results (under Open Access): why we should do that, when other people could take all the economic benefits and increase problems for those who carry out researches? Certainly it is true, if we consider scientific research and dissemination using pre-Open Culture parameters, that is as activities based on copyright as a means of appropriation of benefits from their information within a market economy. But now we know how Open Peer-to-Peer organisational forms range between market economies and gift economies, protection of intellectual property and information sharing. We can therefore imagine new forms of organisation capable of ensuring economic resources necessary to who performs scientific research.

In this direction, we can find countless opportunities and diversity of organizational forms: the first suggestion comes from Andrea Gaggioli who proposes a crowdfunding service for scientific research.
I hope that this direction will be studied further on the Sci(bzaar)net website.

Finally, here are my presentation and video (which are also available on the official website here):

I’m very happy to give you two important announcements…I will participate in two important events that are a mix of a conference and a more informal event like BarCamps: one will be held in Italy, and the other one in Spain. In this post I will talk about the first one.

I have been invited to the sci(bzaar)net event on 17th May 2008, organized by Gianandrea Giacoma (who runs the excellent Ibridazioni blog) in the Scuola Politecnica di Design, Milan.

It will be a closed event, in order to preserve its discussion. But all the presentations will be recorded and uploaded in the website, which will eventually become more open after the event. Let’s say that the event will provide the first source code that later an open community could form around it on the sci(bzaar)net website. So, even if you cannot be there on that day, keep watching the website for its further development and participate in it!.

The main idea of this event is to study, confront and share knowledge about how science, research and scientific publishing can change if they will adapt themselves to the Web and Open Culture. I will give a presentation about how Open Culture can be seen as a culture of Open Systems, and how scientific research could be configured as an open and peer-to-peer community-based activity.

And, by the way, I designed and developed the website (except the logo, designed by Davide Casali)…in a very short time, so please don’t expect it to be a milestone! ;-)