After some months of designing and prototyping, I am so happy to annouce you that the openp2pdesign.org store page on Lulu.com is now finally open at http://lulu.com/openp2pdesign.
You will find there all the print version of the books published within the openp2pdesign.org project.

The first book you can already find there is the print version of openp2pdesign.org_1.1, which I already published online in September 2008. Three versions are available: one in English, one in Italian and one in Spanish. I had to work further on it in order to print it correctly using Lulu.com’s print service experimenting both with Scribus (I used Scribus 1.3.4 unstable but more advanced version, and it was really unstable and with some bugs) and Lulu.com (I encountered some problems with bleeding and after some prototypes I decided to avoid any elements close to the page margins, due to strange cutting problems with Lulu.com). And after all this experimentation, I decided to publish it only in black and white (but with CMYK cover) because otherwise it would cost too much.
And after this period of experimentation, my knowledge of book designing, printing and publishing has grown very much, and from this moment it will be easier for me to publish a book in the openp2pdesign.org project: expect more books coming in the future!

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Max Barret,
Social Circles

Everyone

A Venn diagram, drawn with light, showing
the 5 different sets of social databases I use:
Hotmail.com contacts, Facebook.com friends,
Myspace.com friends, MSN messenger
contacts and those in my mobile phonebook.
A total of 259 people.

via | manystuff.org

While reading some of my favourite blogs, I stumbled upon two examples of Web 2.0 services that enable people to redesign products or, way better, that crowdsource the redesign process. The first one is RedesignMe.com: Open Innovation in Product Creation

RedesignMe aims to improve the products and services around us by collectively rethinking bad products into better products and good ideas into great ideas

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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):

To design for/with a community means participation, and Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics represent a very strong form of participation, an active one, where the people produces and shares knowledge in order to solve a problem. An Open Peer-to-Peer kind of participation is a recent phenomenon, so it could be very interesting to take a look at how participation has been considered through the years.

And here I’m going to talk about a specific way to analyse and classify participation, regarding it as a ladder.

The first ladder of participation came fron an article written by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 (Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224).

Why use a ladder? Because the most important thing to notice, is that there are different levels of participation, ranging from full participation to fake participation, from being in-control to being under control.

After this one, other ladders of participation have been described: for example the
Ladder of Children’s Participation (also called the Ladder of Youth Participation), from (1997) Roger Hart, Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care, UNICEF:

…that has been adapted as a Ladder of Volunteer Participation too.

(Here and here in Spanish )

…and, guess what, a participation scale has been adapted also for Web 2.0! This image comes from the work of Charlene Li at Forrester (via Steve Rubel). The most striking things is that 52% (the majority) is inactive, but this is not a surprise.

Cobo Romaní, Cristóbal; Pardo Kuklinski, Hugo. 2007. Planeta Web 2.0. Inteligencia colectiva o medios fast food. Grup de Recerca d’Interaccions Digitals, Universitat de Vic. Flacso México. Barcelona / México DF.
Versión 0.1
http://www.planetaweb2.net/

The first book about Web 2.0 I suggested to you was composed of three different perspectives, while this one is more organic and linear. And very interesting!

Now it’s just a matter of time, to read it carefully and waiting for the next versions!

Another proof that Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics are spreading in Design comes from the Design Management Forum 2007, 9-10 November, Cologne. This event is about design as process and tool (and therefore not results) for better business, and this year the focus is on Communities, Co-Creation, Web 2.0, Social Networks.

Small, medium-sized and large enterprises need to respond to these developments. They need to design both their structures and decision processes and their planning, development and design processes in a new way which includes their customers. How can we make this happen? What are the possibilities to design the co-operation between enterprises and customers? Hierarchies are already dissolving in enterprises, and being replaced by interlaced structures. At the same time responsibilities grow for everyone. The 4th Design Management Forum discusses the role and limits of design in the context of these new challenges and debates solutions for sustainable innovation and design strategies.

Here’s the program (in German).
Unfortunately, the whole website is in German (and I don’t speak German) and most of the presentations will be held in German, but here you can download a short presentation in English

Just take a look at the workshops that will be held at the conference:

1. Design as an Initiator of new business fields?
Jens Krause from the Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology of the Leeds University (Great Britain) will clarify what we can learn from current research on social network architecture with animals and humans and apply this to restructure organizations.

2. Customer Co-Design
Users in the computer game industry have become designers and decision-makers. Thomas Zeitner, managing director of Electronic Arts in Cologne, will present examples and existing possibilities of ”customer co-creation”.

3. Explorative user Research
Clemens Marek, director of ergonomics at the Ford plant in Cologne, will reveal how findings from a systematic acquisition of insights of user behaviour and characteristics affect the planning, development and design in the automobile industry.

4. Integration of communities in design processes
Today, communities exist everywhere and cover every aspect of human activity. For television programs they have been a decision parameter for a long time. Axel Beyer, director of the television entertainment at the WDR Cologne, will report on his experiences with the phenomenon ”community building“, based on examples from television entertainment programs.

via | core77

I’d like to suggest you to watch this presentation, a very comprehensive one about Web 2.0, developed by Ed Yourdon and published under GFDL.

You can access the presentation as a pdf file (9,54 Mb, in English), in Google Docs or in Scribd (but yo would loose al the links, so it’s better to download it):

via | Pandemia

This is the second part of the notes taken reading this book (the first part was in the previous post).

Simplifying maybe too much the cases, the objectives of the organizations can be put at least one of these three great scopes: to offer a service, to get economic revenues and to survive. In order to satisfy this scopes, an organization moves can be more or less ambitious, more or less social, more or less capitalist, to put some adjectives.

The simple use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) is no more a competitive advantage. Simply, if you don’t have ICT you can not be competitive and you are condemned to disappear. And it seems to be that in a quite immediate future the social and relational capacity, that lies beside the concept of Web 2.0, is going to be a requirement to survive: the consumers are more informed and more connected, and don’t tolerate the companies that are not connected, do not listen, do not participate, and that do not understand that the markets are like conversations.

Even if there are companies interested in the Web 2.0 phenomenon for nonlucrative reasons, it is necessary to accept that an organization needs to obtain and economic income to be able to maintain its activity. This is necessary, and if an income does not arrive from capital movements between partners and shareholders or from investments from venture capital, it would be better to offer an activity that generates some type of economic income. In the case of 2.0 initiatives, the strategy to obtain those direct incomes depends very much if we base our activity on the existence of an user base (and we earn an income connecting to it someone else) or on a technology (and we earn an income offering it to the users).

1.1. Business models based on the users

The models of business of Internet present great similarities with the ones of conventional communication channels. So it is logical that they have similar strategies to get an economic revenue:

• Advertising
  The network is the force that sustains many 2.0 initiatives, since these are mainly based on the aggregation of individual efforts that end up constituting a network of shared knowledge. The greater the number of people sharing, the greater the utility of the proposed service. All of them base their force on the contribution of potentially millions of people, which potentially provides them millions of visitors as well.

  But until now who wished to have an adverstise on its Web page had to manage it: an enormous work that needs special knowledge and abilities and, moreover, takes a lot of time. And here it is where Google made a very important contributionl: it developed a technology that allows it to vary the adverstises in its search results on the concrete words that each user was looking for. That is to say, customized contextual adverstising.
  But for Web 2.0 the really excellent thing happened when Google decided to offer the contextual advertising to other Web pages and created the AdSense (wikipedia) affiliation program. The webmaster an AdSense affiliated Web page can decide in what pages and where he wants an advertise, and Google analyzes in real time that context and locates the most suitable announcement there. Google will receive from the advertiser an income that is based on the effectiveness of that announcement, and will distribute part of those income with the owner of the Web page where the announcement has appeared. In this way, thanks to AdWords (wikipedia) an advertise can appear almost in any page, and as well, thanks to AdSense any page can have an income publishing in a simple way and without assuming costs nor tasks of management. AdSense offers a model of income that increases in direct relation to the volume and quality of the users, although it is possible to have an estimation (not very precise) of the income by means of TextLinkAds, a web page that simulates an estimation of daily income and/or monthly based on the web page address and the position in the page where we would put the AdSense announcements.

• Commissions
  Another option of economic income tied to the users is charging commissions by transaction. If the people who use the service conduct economic operations among them, normally buying and selling, the promoter can aspire to get a commission on them.
  The classic example is eBay. The hundreds of millions of transactions that take place every year in eBay at world-wide level are subject to one double tax: some for the announcement (from 0.05 euros to 2.50 euros, based on the price of the product for sale) and the same by commission on sale made (in the worse case it is supposed to be even a 5% of the final price of the product¹ ).
  The other classic example is Second Life (wikipedia), where millions of avatars (each one of them belonging to a real person) meets participating in a virtual economy (they buy, sell, start businesses and companies) and every transactions is done by means of Linden Dollars (also called L$ or LindeX).
• Donations
  The social character of many of the 2.0 initiatives causes that in many occasions his users constitutes an users with a high degree of complicity with the project. Their members or users are people who contribute to the success of the initiative by means of their contributions of contents and their fidelity demonstrated in the reiterated visits, but there are some of them who want to go beyond that and want to demonstrate their affection to the initiative by means of economic contributions. These are contributions without any claim than the one to try to help the initiative, since they do not obtain any rights on the results nor any participation in the economic aspects in return. The classic example of this model is Wikipedia.
• Pay per view
  To register the user is an habitual practice in the majority of the Web sites, but in Web 2.0 it is exceptional to have to pay to accede to the registered zone or certain contents. Most of the initiatives that manage their users with subscription models are used to do it more as building customer loyalty than as getting a direct income. A movement like the 2.0, which is based on a the contents that have been generated by users, will be a priori quite obstinate to a proposal that tries to receive an income to give access to such content. And if the expectation to receive an income is based on own proprietary contents that have not been enriched by the users, no longer we can speak of a model of business based on concepts of the 2.0, but on concepts of the most classic Internet.

  The Web 1.0 explored the model of business of pay of per view, specially in the world of the press, but always with a relative success as it demonstrates the fact that the majority has left this solution. One of the sectors that follows with a business model of pay per view is the one of sex, for obvious reasons, but it adopts different shades when the initiative is based on contributions of the users, as it is the case of Marqueze², who has a long history³.

• Studies and analysis
  The Web 2.0 services have an user base that relies on participation, contributing texts (Wikipedia), connections (del.icio.us), photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube) or professional data (Xing, LinkedIn or the Spanish Neurona). Therefore, if the administrators of these projects analyze the contributions done by their users can collect very interesting qualitative data in the if the user base dimension is significant, and there many companies who pays to know these results.
  For example, Flickr⁴ maintains a page where it informs on which cameras are more used by its users and seems reasonable to think that it has the capacity to associate models of cameras to geographic, age and population statistics, types of photographic style, and so many others possibilities that without a doubt would be interesting for the sector.

1.2. Business models based on the technology

Another group of options to generate economic income is related to the ability to offer advanced benefits to the users. These are businesses that give something more, as we are talking about Web 2.0 and therefore about services that offer already something for free.

• Pay for Premium Use
  The examples of paying to access to greater benefits are common in initiatives that base their force on a technology. There are two types: those that make users pay to give access to greater capacities, or those that make users pay to give access to new benefits. The 2.0 initiatives offer to the users the capacity to generate and to interchange information and contents, and it entails an important bandwidth consumption of resources or disc capacity, for example. Some of these initiatives develop a model of income based on improving those benefits to those users who are willing to pay for that reason. A good example is Box, a service that offers for free 1 Gb of virtual hard disk where the user can keep and share any type of file, and that by 4.99 US$ per month extends the space until 5 Gb. Another example, if not more popular, is Flickr.
  The other option is make users pay to give access to improved functionalities as WordPress.com does, one of the most used blogging platform, when the user wishes to go beyond what is offered in the free basic version⁵.
• Corporative services
  Sometimes the possessors of a reliable technology freely offer their service to the general public in order to demonstrate their effectiveness and to continue improving the product, and with the intention offer it commercially for the companies. A good example is eConozco⁶, a social network that offers customized services for companies and associations.

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Notes:

1. http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html [↩]
2. http://www.laflecha.net/canales/empresas/articulos/marqueze_-una-decada-creando-una-imagen-de-marca [↩]
3. http://www.laflecha.net/canales/empresas/articulos/publirreportaje_marqueze [↩]
4. http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ [↩]
5. http://www.wordpress.com/advanced-services/ [↩]
6. https://www.econozco.com/?ac=globalHelp&key=faq#_Toc57743135 [↩]