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…)

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)

After a very long work, openp2pdesign.org version 1.1 is ready, both in its website form and in its book form!
Starting in February of 2007 with the initial idea to publish my master degree thesis and further study these subjects, we reached now a first milestone.

openp2pdesig.org version 1.1

In the past one year and half my skills as a webdesigner improved a lot and it was time now to redesign and reorganize the whole website.
The website has been redesigned starting with the Fervens – A theme created by Design Disease and distributed by Smashing Magazine. Some details still need to be refined but it is working now! For any suggestion or question just leave a comment in this post.

openp2pdesign.org_1.1: the book

After a very long work, my master degree thesis has been resumed in three languages (English, Italian, Spanish) and published under a Creative Commons license in a pdf file using open source software like OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus on Ubuntu Linux.

(more…)

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!

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! ;-)

On a previous post, I wrote that participation in an Open Peer-to-Peer Community could be either bottom-up or top-down.
Last week, while I was preparing the slideshow for another lesson I gave at Politecnico di Milano, I thought that maybe we could notice a third type of participation, that lies between top-down and bottom-up forms of participation.

Open P2P Communities can self-organize with:

• a bottom-up participation: a community gather independently to fix a common problem (for example: Amul). The community forms in a bottom-up way:
• a top-down participation: a (public or private) service that allows the formation of a community and bases on it its operation is offered. Participants operate in order to fulfill the enterprise’s/local institution’s goals/work (i.e. the participants depend from the enterprise/local institution) (for example: YouTube). The service is offered in a top-down way, and the participants act consequently .
• a marketplace participation: a (public or private) service that allows the formation of a community is offered, and the participants gather in the community. Participants behave independently, forming relationships between each other in order to develop their own goals/works (i.e. they behave independently, in a true peer-to-peer way) (for example: BBC Action Network). The service is delivered in a top-down way, but the participants act in a bottom-up way within it.

The fundamental point is: who takes the initiative and looks for persons in order to form a community? And with which goals? And which type of relationships, and therefore social network, it enables?

I am not sure that marketplace participation is the right term, it should be something that relates to a place where people can gather, that doesn’t emerge spontaneously, but it is offered instead by someone else (a private company or a local institution). There, people could follow a market economy, or a gift economy too.

Any suggestions?

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Unlike a traditional, linear, design process, Open Peer-to-Peer Design is non-linear and characterized by multiple parallell processes because of the large number of agents and their interactions. An Open Peer-to-Peer design process thus provides the basis for developing more parallel projects, an ecosystem of designer agents with a memetic evolution of the projects that are more “suitable” to the community, whose selection will lead to better results.

An Open Peer-to-Peer design process is characterized by openness and sharing of the project (the source code for software) of the platform and of the activities that it allows once provided to the community by the designers. The community will test and modify it several times and in several directions (in the software, compiling the binary code), until a satisfactory version is reached (the stable version of the software) and self-organization is ensured.

The source code of the project (community source code) consists of tools from design services, with the introduction of a description of the reputation levels within the community, the license that governes cooperation and the access to the results, a social network map able to show weaknesses and strengths in the community. The source code is accessible to all participants, who are testing it with increasing level of reality (the platform is gradually built during this phase) reporting to the design community any errors (bugs in software) present. The higher the number of participants, the greater the chance that errors are detected and corrected.
During the design process and at its end, the community will self-organize modifying the project if necessary, as far as possible; it is this ability to self-organize and improve the local conditions that makes the communities alive and interesting.

Participation in this design process is open and equal, but is also governed by two principles: self-selection and reputation, which give place to different levels of participation in the various design phases, according to the possession of knowledge needed in each project phase. The different phases of the design process, therefore, require different levels of participation and therefore commitment and visibility of the participants. These different levels give place to different typical phases (similar to some phases of the community of practice) of the life of the communities: potential, coalescing, stable, self-organization and expansion, decline.

analysis

The project begins with an analysis of the participants, in order to understand the existing and therefore usable resources, limitations, critical points. Through the analysis, the designers begin to know the participants, prefiguring which features the community’s activity could have in the future. The objective of this phase is to define the objectives and the strategy on which the concept of the community’s activity will be build. The analysis, carried out through ethnographic investigation and social networks analysis, will cover the platform, the characteristics of the individual participants if possible, as well as existing activities.

concept

Once the analysis of the participants, of their activities and their social networks is done, a first concept of the community’s activity (and its platform) is developed. The designers then develop an initial version (we might say the 0.0.1 version) of the project of the activity/platform, formalized in the community source code.

parallel co-design / test / setting-up

Once developed, the concept is shown to the participants and collectively discussed. From now begins a phase of co-design of the activity/platform, characterized by steady growth of commitment, energy and visibility by the participants. At this stage, the concept of activity is developed collaboratively to get a functioning project, a “stable” source code (version 1.0).
The participants test the community source code of the community simulating the activity, in order to understand what are the weaknesses, errors (bugs in the community source code). The source code is subjected to a peer-review process, in which both the designers (who observe the simulation) and the participants report errors and the necessary changes. Once a bug is identified the source code is modified and again a testing begins with the new code.

In order to simulate the activity, participants must share the conditions necessary to carry out the activity, represented by the platform. Rules and roles should be developed and adopted, and the artifacts that are not already present will be built or acquired. This means that along with the continuation of the co-design / test process, the platform is implemented and when the project reaches the stable version, the participants can begin the regular activity, strengthening then the sense of community.
Once the co-design / test ends, the project will already be done, there are no phases of production nor execution. As in software, then the source code (the project) gives place to the binary code (the work done by the participants).

self-organization

After the first “stable version” (1.0.0) of the source code is reached, the community will be largely formed: during the simulation / activity new social relationships will have formed. A stable version of the source code means that it can be “compiled” (ie, done) and used by anyone without the possibility of critical errors. At this stage, therefore, the community is able to carry out the activity and self-organize without the contribution of the designer: if his role was that of a facilitator (enabler), now the community is able to act successfully alone.

At this point, ideally, the role of the designer is not needed anymore; however, the community will always need its contribution in the future: the designer has always knowledge and expertise useful to provide support to the community in response to changes in the outside world.
Also, if the community activity is a design one, the desinger’s capabilities make them important in the community, and they will continue to be part of also during the self-organization phase.

These observations represent therefore an initial proposal (1.1) for an Open Peer-to-Peer design guidelines, in a broader process of studying a comprehensive methodology.

Finally, what are the future opportunities and directions for the application and study of these design guidelines?

(to be continued)

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Once we define the platform, it is possible to comprehend what, effectively, a designer can design for an Open Peer-to-Peer community. It still remains to define how this project plan can be carried out holding account of the complexity of the community. It is necessary to define a design methodology (or at least some guidelines) that can improve the open and peer-to-peer participation of the community and its complexity.
The community is a complex system, and there is the need of a design methodology able to face its complexity without reducing it. As we have seen before, Open Peer-to-Peer organizational forms seem promising in supplying greater probabilities to face complex problems and to elaborate complex artifacts. That happens just thanks to their own intrinsic complexity: the complexity of the project reflects the complexity of the community, and both strengthen each other. Whe we design an activity, the community itself (a complex system) designs a complex project collectively (its own organization and the necessary conditions).

Moreover, a project dedicated to a community must hold on account the characteristics of the context in which it lives, especially the territorial characteristics that become resources once the community realize their importance. This is an ulterior reason for giving it a greater opportunity of direct participation to the design process, as a community can recognize the usable resources better than others. This is therefore a design approach that take advantage of the participation of a potentially elevated number of participants, through a complex process characterized by its specific path (path dependency), oriented to several the levels of interaction: between participants, participants and community, community and another community, communities and institutions, community and society. We should therefore adopt a design approach based on participation, in order to use the knowledge of the participants to getter better results.

We can therefore say that a project directed to an Open Peer-to-Peer community should be itself Open Peer-to-Peer, based on the participation of the community to the design process (open: open to the participation), to whose members is recognized an equal and active role (peer-to-peer: the acknowledgment of other people’s competences and acquaintances). An Open Peer-to-Peer design process therefore becomes a co-design process, where designer and participants collaborate (a collective intelligence) constituting a wider design community.

The designer therefore assumes a specific role in the projects directed to Open Peer-to-Peer communities. Thanks to his/her competences, a designer can supply the instruments of self-organization and the optimal conditions for an activity to take form, assuming a role of an enabler and not of a provider (or supplier of defined solutions). No more a simple supplier of his/her own creativity, but an enabler of distributed creativity. No more a simple design process that produces definitive solutions, but a design process that support communities so that they can develop appropriate solutions to their own needs and characteristics.

We can see that the same shift is happening in the local institutions too, where local government is transforming into governance. A redefinition of the role of the local institution that becomes an enabler of the participation and the coordination between public entities and private and social ones, and not a provider of rules and services¹.

A designer can be an enabler naturally, since his/her competences make him/her able to establish connections between customers and enterprises, therefore mediating between different interests. Thanks to his/her abilities to visualize in advance, a designer can at the same time manage multiple and discordant interests, remembering the advantages that derive from a collective collaboration. Moreover, an enabler should supply support to reach the self-organization of the members in the short term, avoiding to render them depending on him/her in the long term. The goal of a designer is therefore the social enabler of the development of communities; the role that Linus Torvalds chose to assume in the development of Linux, avoiding the more traditional one of designer-provider².

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2004) Vicari Haddock S., La città contemporanea, Il Mulino, Bologna [↩]
2. (2000) Kuwabara K., Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos, First Monday, volume 5, number 3, March 2000, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_3/kuwabara/index.html [↩]

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What can we “design” in a community?

We cannot think about designing the relationships and the complexity of a community (which are the features that make it a community). The disciplines that traditionally have been interested in communities (architecture, urban planning, web design) are not oriented to design the relationships but the characteristics that, once realized, enable and support the birth and the development of the relationships. The necessary infrastructure for the relations, their platform.

it is convenient to talk about a platform¹ as the object of the design process. It is possible to design and to supply those fundamental conditions that, shared inside the social networks of the participants, act as an infrastructure to the emergence of the community and its characteristic activity. A platform is present (and necessary) every time a community forms deriving from the interactions between a high number of agents. As it is part of the activty, the platform can therefore be described through the Activity Systems. The platform consists in a system of artifacts (materials, cognitive and communication ones), rules and division of labor, which make possible the development and practice of the collective activity. As it is shared between the participants, it has a reticular and dynamic nature.

If the platform is necessary for processes that demand an interaction between a high number of agents, then also the design methodology will demand a platform for being carried out. The platform exists previously to the design process, that has the goal of improving it in a determined direction, that comes from a design choice. It is therefore necessary, at the beginnig of the design process, to analyze the existing platform for the collective discussion; thanks to it is possible to establish a contact with the participants. The designers, in fact, enter in the wider design community of the plan: a community whose activity is an open and peer-to-peer design..

But how the designer’s role change when he/she enters in a wider design community?

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2006) Menichinelli M., Reti collaborative. Il design per una auto-organizzazione Open Peer-to-Peer, Tesi di laurea, rel. Ezio Manzini, Politecnico di Milano, A.A. 2004/05 http://www.openp2pdesign.org [↩]