Almost two years ago, in May 2010 I blogged that openp2pdesign.org reached a new milestone (version 1.5): from a personal blog to an open source community.

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:

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A couple of weeks ago I was part of the 2011 edition of DMY Berlin, together with the Open Helsinki group inside the MakerLab. This event was part of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. Even if I was there only for the last two days (and it’s always difficult to get attention in a Design Festival, especially in such a noisy place), there was a good feedback from the visitors, especially on the last day.
I gave two lectures twice and helped few visitors understand and develop open processes and businesses, see below for the details, the presentations and the toolkit for designing open processes.
You can see more pictures from the event from Miska Knapek‘s Flickr account.

DMY Opening from robertanderson on Vimeo.

Open P2P Design

Open P2P Design brings open source and peer-to-peer dynamics inside a community-centered design process, in order to have real co-design projects with people and their communities. We can use Open P2P Design for co-designing Open Design processes or commercial or public services with open and peer-to-peer dynamics, starting from communities and involving them inside the design process. We can also use it for analyzing an existing business and opening to collaboration some of its activities, or design new ones in order to start a collaboration with a community of users.

Markets and business models for Open and DIY projects

Which are the possible business models for Open projects like Open Design and Open Hardware? And what about running a Fab Lab or a similar place? Which strategies can we adopt in order to have successful DIY Craft projects? People that want to organize collaborative spaces or companies need to think about how to run their business in a
sustainable way, but even single or groups of Open Designers could get more insights for their project if they discover the possible business models. Let’s have a look at the existing markets, the common business models and the possible future scenarios.
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Few months ago I prepared a presentation in English about Open P2P Design and openp2pdesign.org that was not used; I remade it now and I decided to publish it as the shortest and easiest introduction to Open P2P Design methodology and the openp2pdesign.org project. You can find it in Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/what-is-open-p2p-design

You can download the pdf file and share it, it’s under a Creative Commons license:
Massimo.Menichinelli_what.is.openp2pdesign

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.

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