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!

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.

Open P2P Design Toolkit: bring your project!

Beside the lectures, I had prepared for the Maker Lab a a toolkit for helping designers, makers, companies and whoever is interested in developing an Open and collaborative project, starting from a community or from an existing activity. The toolkit can be download here in the Source section or on Scribd and Issuu.

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

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.

You can read it online here, or you can download it from the texts section or from Scribd.
In a few weeks it will be available in a print form in lulu.com, I’m working on it right now..so please leave comments and corrections!

Many thanks to Jos Buivenga for his smashing free fonts!