A brief update about the Sharing Economy (after the previous post about Design and Sharing).

Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research released “The New Sharing Economy” study that indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources as well.

The greatest areas of opportunity for new sharing businesses are those where a lot of services do not currently exist within a specific industry category and where a large number of people are currently either a) sharing casually (not through an organized community or service) or b) not sharing at all but would be interested to share. They include transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces.

Peer-to-peer sharing allows for potentially unbounded scalability, access to more resources and often at closer proximity to us. Because peer-to-peer companies aren’t subject to the overhead cost of purchasing and maintaining a “fleet” of assets all their own, the cost to renters is often lower; moreover, members have the opportunity to monetize their own possessions. These peer-based “marketplaces” help the environment by using the resources we already available more efficiently rather than manufacturing more new goods.

The New Sharing Economy

NOTE: this post was originally written for the P2P Foundation blog on September 22nd 2010, but since it’s a quite interesting issue and its contents fit within openp2pdesign.org, I republished it here. The original post is here: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/design-in-the-age-of-sharing/2010/09/22

01. Sharing by Design

A recent post on Shareable made me think about how the culture of Sharing has been changing the discipline of Design after the success of Open Source and the Web 2.0.
We are researching and discussing how we can bring collaboration into design processes and how we can use design processes to foster collaboration, but what about developing design projects for facilitating the sharing of physical goods?

Keara Schwartz wrote a post on Shareable, trying to start a conversation about this issue; however, that post is not really deep and inspiring since she finds that the only barrier to sharing products is the lack of trust in other people we have in sharing physical products. According to Keara Schwartz, we can share digital information easily, but not physical goods as well because we don’t believe other people will take care of them as we would do; she then suggest that products might be designed differently in order to facilitate their sharing.
I believe though that this is not the point: we don’t share products because our socio-economic system has developed in that direction, not because products are not designed for being shared. And designing for facilitating the sharing has wider (and older) implications.

Nonetheless, that post is a good starting point in order to think about the issue of Design for Sharing: we have to notice that Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that “tells the story of sharing, covering the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life”. And its tagline is Sharing by Design, implying that sharing can be enabled with design.

02. Access by Design

We could argue now that we are entering into the Age of Sharing, since after the success of Open Source and of Web 2.0 new terms, theories, technologies, products and services that are based on the concept of sharing (and collaboration) are increasingly introduced. But these trends started before, though a little bit different, as Jeremy Rifkin clearly explained in his book The Age of Access:

In the hypercapitalist economy, buying things in markets and owning property become outmoded ideas, while “just-in-time” access to nearly every kind of service, through vast commercial networks operating in cyberspace, becomes the norm. We increasingly pay for the experience of using things-in the form of subscriptions, memberships, leases, and retainers-rather than for the things themselves. [...]
Rifkin argues that the capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of human time and experience.

As Rifkin noted, the transition from owning products to accessing them through a service started long time before the rise of the Web 2.0; it is therefore a longer trend coming from the evolution of society and economy. Design for Access came before Design for Sharing. Design, and especially Product Design, in the Age of Access means above all Product Stewardship, a concept developed as a Design for Sustainability effort with the aim of involving all the stakeholders of the life cycle of a product. With this approach, we ask all the stakeholders to take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management of products. If we want to just access a product instead of owning it (and maybe the service is built upon its sharing it with other people), we need a lot of different players that actually manage it through its life cycle.

Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning for, and if necessary, paying for the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life. This may be achieved, in part, by redesigning products to use fewer harmful substances, to be more durable, reuseable and recyclable, and to make products from recycled materials. For retailers and consumers, this means taking an active role in ensuring the proper disposal or recycling of an end-of-life product.

Accessing a product, instead of owning it, means that the traditional life cycle of a product has to change and to be shared among all its stakeholders. Design for Access and for Sharing is more about new processes than new product typologies and technologies: it could be a way to design more proper and sustainable products (like the Universal Design / Design for All approaches). (more…)

I finally have time for writing about the November 2009 tour for openp2pdesign.org: let’s start with the Media Ecologies and Post-Industrial Production Workshop in Manchester.

Unfortunately I could not be present there because of the many travels to do in November, so we arranged a skype presentation. There were some problems and therefore I recorded my voice over the presentation. Here it is, and forgive me for the bad audio recording, I was sick with flu that day!

Beside Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Manufacturing, there is another path the Open Everything phenomenon is taking: Open Money. Although the Open Money projects are in their early steps, they represent a very important strategic and metadesign move in order to enable the spreading of community-based open and p2p organizational forms.

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 [↩]

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 quick announcement: Michel Bauwens, Belgian philosopher and Peer-to-Peer theorist, founder of the P2P Foundation, is going to be in Milan in these days and he’s going to give two lectures.

Here’s the first one:

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Aula 12, Scienze Politiche, Università di Milano
Street: via Conservatorio 7
City/Town: Milano, Italy

And here is the second one:

Date: Friday, March 20, 2009
Time: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Location: Politecnico di Milano
Street: Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32. Ala Nord, Chiostro Edificio N.
City/Town: Milan, Italy

I’m going to attend the second one, I hope to see you there… And if you cannot be there, remember that you can watch the second lecture in streaming online here: http://live.laureaonline.it/intlessons/ where you can also ask questions and chat with Michel Bauwens.

And here’s the abstract of the lectures:

TITLE: Peer to Peer as an economic and ethical revolution

Abstract:
A long-standing historical problem with social alternatives has been that none have them have been more productive than the for-profit alternatives, or at least not, in the context of the existing balance of power. However, a combination of technical and social trends has produced a historically novel situation that challenges this state of affairs. Internet-based tecnical infrastructures have made it possible to scale small-group dynamics to the level of global coordination of highly complex social artefacts that produce common value for self-aggregating peer producers; deep changes in ways of being, knowing and feeling have produced a new set of open and free, participatory, and commons-oriented paradigms that are changing the structure of desire of emerging generations.
Remarkably, the new set of social practices, i.e. peer production, peer governance, and peer property, are both strengthening the current political economy, (much as emerging capitalism did for the flagging feudal system from the 16th century onwards), but also undermining it through a systemic crisis of value, while also pointing to post-capitalist alternatives that may want day supplant the core of the current system.
This lecture by the founder of the P2P Foundation will examine the impact of peer production as a challenge to the current political economy and present different scenarios for the future of social change, especially in the context of the current meltdown.

.

I’m very honoured to say that Michel Bauwens invited me to write a contribution for the P2P Foundation Blog, and here you can find it: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/massimo-menichinelli-open-p2p-design-as-enabling-open-p2p-systems/2008/11/24

It’s a resume of the Open P2P Design history and concept, and of its differences from Open Design as well.

While Open Design focuses on opening a design project, Open P2P Design focuses on building a community or social system that follows Open P2P principles and organizational forms in order to put in practice a collaborative activity that generates Open Innovations. With Open Design we offer a design project to an Open P2P social system; with Open P2P Design we co-design and enable an Open P2P social system. Not just open processes and open contents, but also peer-to-peer relationships.

(more…)

Linus Torvalds:

I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart – nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.

And doing so in the open, and allowing all these different entities to cross-pollinate their ideas with each other, and not having arbitrary boundaries with NDA’s and “you cannot look at how we did this”, is just a better way.

I compare it with science and witchcraft (or alchemy). Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.

And that’s exactly the same issue with open source vs proprietary products. The proprietary people can design something that is smart, but it eventually becomes too complicated for a single entity (even a large company) to really understand and drive, and the company politics and the goals of that company will always limit it.

In contrast, open source works well in a complex environment. Maybe nobody at all understands the big picture, but evolution doesn’t require global understanding, it just requires small local improvements and a open market (”survival of the fittest”).

So I think a lot of companies are slowly starting to adopt more open source, simply because they see these things that work, and they realize that they would have a hard time duplicating it on their own. Do they really buy into my world view? Probably not. But they can see it working for individual projects.

http://www.oneopensource.it/interview-linus-torvalds/ (in English)
http://www.oneopensource.it/17/07/2007/intervista-a-linus-torvalds/ (in Italiano)
http://www.oneopensource.it/entrevista-con-linus-torvalds/ (en Castellano)

via | Digg

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04 « Intro.05

And what about Open P2P Communities?…

An early definition of Open P2P Communities

Before I reassume shortly the methodological part of my thesis and the conclusions to draw from it, I think that it would be useful to say something more aboute those cases that I have defined Open P2P Communities. The methodology that I have developed in the thesis, in fact, has been developed taking in consideration some existing cases before, and later taking in consideration which design tools and theories were suitable.

Therefore, I searched for cases with a community-based collaborative organizational form, that can build short and long collaborative networks, reaching a potentially high number of participants with an important active role. For sure, this was still a vague definition, therefore I began searching those cases that were inspired by the Free Software / Open Source / P2P phenomenon, as already then (at the beginning of 2005) some believed they had developed organizational forms and principles that could be adopted in other fields with success¹.

Collaboration has always existed, but only today its importance has been amplified to such levels that it is now considered more promising than competition. Thanks to the ITC distributed infrastructures, collaboration is being diffused as an organizational form outside of the Free Software / Open Source / P2P Communities.

To all these cases directly inspired by the Open P2P phenomenon², I have added some cases that, even if not explicitly inspired by Open P2P, share some of its features (and therefore they could have been influenced indirectly)³ . And then I have added some previous cases (and therefore without relations with Open P2P), but that had developed community-based organizational forms able to build long collaborative networks with an active role of the participants⁴.

The existence of these last two categories is of fundamental importance: community-based organizational forms are not just for Open Source / Free Software / P2P software, but they are very important, and as they tend to develop some common characteristics, they can be used therefore for a wide range of situations and disciplines, independently from the degree of technology used. The Open Source / Free Software / P2P phenomenon is therefore important because it made us aware of the importance of community-based models and inspired us to search for similar cases. Moreover, they have shown own scalable and innovative organizational forms, adapted to face the challenges of a knowledge society.

All these cases represent community-based organizational forms, based on collaboration through the sharing of flows of information and sometimes of material resources. While traditional organizations are based on a vertical hierarchy that commands and controls, the Open P2P Communities are based on a horizontal network in which every participant commands itself and contributes to control the whole network. While in the vertical hierarchies the relationships are defined by power (top-down), in the Open P2P Communities they are defined by reputation (bottom-up). The structure is therefore an horizontal reticular type, where the reputation becomes a centripetal force of infuence towards the other participants. These communities can assume forms that are localized or virtual; they share the ability of self-organization during the development of a main activity for the solution of a specific problem, that the neither institutions neither the market had provided satisfactory solutions. Their community nature allows the creation of social capital,that could generate further processes of improvement of the local dimension, through the connections that they potentially can bring between short networks (the interest for the local dimension) with long networks (that involve a wide number of participants).

A loose definition, between many classifications

This is therefore the concise definition of those cases that I have called Open P2P Communities. For sure, like every classification, there is the risk of excessive generalization and therefore to group cases that represents different things. And as I was approaching to Free Software, Open Source and P2P for the first time, there could be some ingenuous statements. I hope you will understand and help me develop further this ideas collectively!

And as one year has passed from the discussion of my thesis, the definition of an Open P2P Community maybe should be rethought and redefined. Probably in the future it could be convenient or necessary to make a distinction between those cases in which the community risks to be “used” in order to produce value with an activity, and those cases in which is the community itself that directs its activity.

But for the moment I think it is better to continue to observe these phenomena, while they are living and developing, leaving any expectations of exaustive definitions for the future. Even so, this definition has been very useful for me, as it helped me to find a way between the wide number of cases. Let’s remain, at least for the moment, with a loose and adaptable definition.

But maybe it’s time to signal others two phenomena (or, therefore, also categories of definition) that became famous towards or after the end of my thesis, and that share relations with the Open P2P Communities. They are Web 2.0 and Crowdsourcing. I’m going to write something more about them on future posts, but for the moment I will explain what relations they share with Open P2P Communities, as some of these cases can be considered also as Web 2.0 or Crowdsourcing examples.

My research started from existing cases, with a wide and flexilbe classification at the beginning, and its point of departure was the Free Software / Open Source / P2P phenomenon and its diffusion to others fields. At the time (March 2005) the term Web 2.0 already existed, but it had not become so famous (it happened in 2006, according to me, with the success of YouTube) and developed completely. Therefore it seemed to me more useful to focus on the Free Software / Open Source / P2P phenomenon. And the Crowdsourcing term was born in June 2006, when the thesis was already finished.

Therefore, the main reason for the lack of Web 2.0 and Crowdsourcing inside the thesis is mainly due for a temporal factor. The interest towards the organizational forms and the principles developed in the Free Software (and Open Source and P2P) Communities was born end of the nineties. However, we had to wait until 2003 for the first awareness of this possibility, thanks to the Goetz’s article appeared on Wired⁵. The organizational methodology of the Open Source Communities are seen as the right infrastructure for a knowledge economy, just as the assembly line had been for the Fordist mass-production economy. The interest for Open Source / Free Software / P2P organizational forms was born therefore before the definition of Web 2.0⁶.

Moreover, I think they represent phenomena closely correlates between each other. Web 1.0 has been developed by communities, with bottom-up and P2P dynamics, through sharing and Open Source / Free Software. Therefore it wasn’t Web 2.0 that introduced these dynamics, but they were already present since years in the computer science and programming sciene under the hacker ethic. Web 2.0 represents therefore a phase in which these dynamics have been widened, reinforced and spread further. Web (1.0, 2.0), Free Software / Open Source and P2P therefore should not be considered separately. The classification of Open P2P Communities, can be applied as well also for Web 2.0 services like YouTube.

Although the classifications of these cases are in constant development, it is possible to assume for the moment the partial classification of the Open P2P Communities. It has the advantage to collect cases directly inspired from the Free / Open Source / P2P Software as well the ones that are not recalled directly (but that share some principles and organizational formss), are they recent or antecedent cases. If we want to learn from communities, in order to design with and for communities, it can be useful to maintain such a classification (a loose one but focused on the community dimension).

An Open P2P Communities list (1.1)

Here you can find the list of Open P2P Communities I made during the development of the thesis (2005 – 2006). The number of cases has increased remarkablly since then, especially if we consider those cases that can be classified like Web 2.0 services and Crowdsourcing; for the moment let’s consider this directory, later on I will write about new interesting cases. The cases have been classified by the main activity these communities develop, gathering participants and building collaborative networks.

Collaborative networks that reach a critical mass of participants

• PledgeBank
• Meetup
• Smart Mobs

Collaborative networks that manage informations and knowledge

• Indymedia
• The Global Ideas Bank
• Ohmynews
• Kuro5hin
• Slashdot
• OpenLaw
• Wikipedia
• Connexions
• Silver Stringers
• NASA Mars Clickworkers
• Distributed Proofreaders
• SETI@Home
• Grid.org

Collaborative networks that develop scientific research

• The International HapMap Project
• The Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI)
• The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi)
• The SNP Consortium Ltd
• The CAMBIA BIOS

Collaborative networks that design

• Open Source Green Vehicle (OSGV)
• OSCar – The Open Source Car Project
• Episodes of collective technological innovations
• Thinkcycle
• iCompositions
• Solar Roof
• instructables
• Zeroprestige.org

Collaborative networks that organize business activities

• Neubauten.org
• Amul
• Dabbawalla
• Napster
• GNUtella
• Amazon
• eBay
• P-grid
• The Sims
• Grameen Bank

Collaborative networks that improve their local dimension

• Terra Madre / Slow Food
• Open Heatlh
• Development Gateway
• BBC’s Neighbourhood Gardener
• The BBC iCan/Action
• Self-Help Groups
• Honey Bee network
• Kiva

Collaborative networks that help other communities

• Sustainable Everyday Project / EMUDE
• The New Earth Fund
• mySociety
• The Launchpad (Young foundation)

Open P2P Communities and Participation

I have always said that these Open P2P Communities can self-organize themselves, and this affirmation should be explained better now. These communities are created in order to fix a problem through the development of a collaborative activity. The social relations can already be present but more often, if they develop through time, they rise from the development of the activity. Moreover, we can point out a distinction on the possible types of participation: there are two ways in which Open P2P Communities can self-organize. They can self-organize with:

• a bottom-up participation: a community gather independently to fix a common problem (for example: Amul);
• a top-down participation: a (public or private) service that allows the formation of a community and bases on it its operation is offered (for example: YouTube).

The fundamental point is: who takes the initiative and looks for persons in order to form a community? And with which goals?

For example: Free Software is bottom-up, Open Source and P2P could be bottom-up or top-down, Web 2.0 and Crowdsourcing are top-down.

Moreover, from this bottom-up and top-down distinction, we can ask another question: how much these communities are Open and P2P? Data, informations, processes, results are accessible in an Open and P2P way? This is a very important issue and should be studied more.

As a consequence, as designers, we could design for a community in two ways: offering our professional capabilities to existing communities, or designing and developing (public and private) community-based services.

Before we can get to the conclusions on my thesis, I should reassume one last thing: how can a designer relate to an Open P2P Community (and therefore towards an Open P2P Design).

How can we design for a community that gathers around a main collaborative activity?

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. Mulgan G., Steinberg T., Salem O., “Wide Open. Open source methods and their future potential”, Demos, London 2005, http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/wideopen [↩]
2. For example: Thinkcycle, OSCar, Open Health. [↩]
3. For example: BBC Action Network, Neubauten.org, Pledgebank. [↩]
4. For example: Amul, Dabbawalla, Grameen Bank. [↩]
5. Goetz, T., “Open Source Everywhere. Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation”, Wired Issue 11.11, 2003 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/ [↩]
6. For example, Thinkcycle started on March 2000, 4 years before the Web 2.0 first definition [↩]