This is part of a serious of blogposts about the REMODEL programme at The Danish Design Centre

As mentioned in our most recent article, REMODEL has design principles baked into the very fabric of the sprint. This means we have dedicated no less than 3 phases out of the total number of 7 phases to actual outreach: Soliciting feedback from actual users, making tests of the emerging prototype and, most importantly, challenging assumptions.

Phase 6: Mentor feedback community testing round two

In this phase, the companies received invaluable input from the two international expert mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel, whom they sent their materials to in the last phase. The mentors were a dream team of global thought leaders and cutting-edge experimenters from across the open source global arena: Benjamin Tincq from Good Tech Lab (Brazil/France), Diderik van Wingerden from Open Innovation (Netherlands), Jaime Arredondo from Bold & Open (France), Lars Zimmermann from Open It Agency (Germany), Peter Troxler from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Paul Stacey from Open Education Consortium and Vasilis Niaros from P2P Foundation.

Each REMODEL company received detailed written feedback from two mentors each, who made a complete review of the materials and then, as part of this 6th phase, engaged in a discussion with the companies in a Skype session to challenge them and their business strategies as well as helped them incorporate the open source principles in the right way.

Following this call, the companies updated your system map and pitch according to the feedback and then continued to solicit more feedback: Namely from their potential community of co-creators by interviewing a key stakeholder in their ecosystem.

What did we learn? Start small and experiment your way forward

Tons of learnings have poured in from this phase, and we will focus specifically on the great feedback we received from our mentors. Moreover, for article brevity, we will limit ourselves to present you with three of the best ones here, while stressing that all the other learnings will be included in our grand documentation at the end of the REMODEL program:

Avoid getting overwhelmed, start out small:
The first dominant pattern in much of the great work being done in the companies is that it is really easy to get overwhelmed by where to start when transitioning towards an open business model for a product, mainly because (as we learned earlier on) it is not necessarily ideal to open source it all; instead it can make sense to open source certain elements in which co-creation lends particular opportunity.

Then there is also the community establishment (and maintenance) work pile (how to do it properly? We’ll get more into that in Phase 7) and there is the whole communication issues in terms of telling the work about it – and finally, and most importantly, who in the organisation will lead this effort and handle as well as grow the community? Do we have the resources and skills or do we need to hire?

The list of questions goes on. All of a sudden this seems to add up to a gigantic task. But it does not have to be, as pointed out by one of the mentors, Diderik van Wingerten: Instead, a much better approach is to start small, really small, and see what works by trial-and-error. Start with one product or just one element in that product. Find a user group among your customers, test it out with them. Then later scale up when a certain approach goes well. Note: As we write up business cases on the 10 companies over the coming months, you will see some concrete examples of this approach.

“You need someone in the company who understands open source, the value of it, and is keen on making it successful.”

Make sure you have the right project lead on board: 
The manpower/skillset issue mentioned above leads to the next point: It is starting to be quite clear that in order to go from theory to practice and to see the open source-based business strategy/model get implemented requires some very specific rootsetting to actually become realized, noted mentor Diderik van Wingerten in another comment.

In order for a company to step into the open economy, they will need an anchor person who is dedicated to the mission. That passionate person who is keen to face challenges head-on, conquer obstacles and be the guiding light for everyone on the team in order to succeed and ensure the desired yield. Building and implementing new business models is always somewhat of a struggle but becomes even a little more demanding when you are pioneering new innovation, for instance by using open source principles.

But with greater risk often comes greater reward. And for that, you need the right person in the organisation. As mentor Diderik additionally pointed out: “You need someone in the company who understands open source, the value of it, and is keen on making it successful. It is a bit like working according to Scrum: the theory is easily learned in a course, but to really get the value means you do need to have an experienced Scrum Master by your side day today.”

The need for digital adeptness:
And this leads us to another related learning, as presented by another one of the mentors, Jaime Arredondo: Digital aptness in the organization in general, at least in the team that leads the open sourcing efforts. You cannot simply expect that taking a physical product, open sourcing its design (or parts thereof) and expecting your stakeholders (as well as other potential co-creators) to understand that or, on top of that, engage themselves in it in a new way. Your organization needs a digital presence, adeptness in communicating and acting online and moreover be able to lead projects in the digital realm.

Otherwise, the key interaction with your users will either not happen or, if it does, might not lead to the kind of interaction you imagine or desire. This digital adeptness is something that many small to medium-sized manufacturing companies may not have, since their key expertise in the pre-digital age was to manufacture. This is changed with the advent of the Internet and the digital era; companies large and small needs at least a basic foundation (skill-wise, mindset-wise, and leadership-wise) of digital proficiency. This is hardly news to anyone, but – as we learn now in REMODEL – quite crucial for the successful business implementation of open source principles.

As mentioned we have stockpiled loads of more insights and learnings from this work phase and will publish everything over the coming months in the toolkit. In the meantime, we want to use this opportunity to recommend anyone looking for qualified expert business input in open sourcing innovation to get in touch with the REMODEL experts and mentors. You will find an overview of their competencies and other data here.

More learnings to be shared from the next (and also final) 7th phase. Stay tuned.

This is the fifth blog post of the REMODEL programme. Read number one, number two, number three and number four here.

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

The post Combining HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTATION with expert input: Our week 6 learnings in REMODEL appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is part of a serious of blogposts about the REMODEL programme at The Danish Design Centre

One thing that is really challenging when open sourcing your product is to actually embrace the input coming from your community members: User-driven innovation is hard, and it is not always fun hearing the honest truth from your customers as you engage with them and invite them to become co-creators. This 5th phase in the REMODEL program pushed the companies to start imagining what it means to meet their community.

As the work of the participating companies has started to reach a mature conceptual stage, we have now entered the last half of the program which focuses on reaching out, soliciting feedback from different stakeholders, scoping a potential community and continually iterating and finetuning the new, open source-based strategy for their product. A mix of classic design steps and a venture into the still largely uncharted territory of open source hardware business model making and community building. In other words: The hard part is no longer grappling with understanding the concepts of open source and how to apply it in their own specific manufacturing industry, but rather to start to look beyond their own resources and into the global reservoir of expertise that is the Internet.

Phase 5 – Community testing round one

In the 5th phase of REMODEL, the 10 companies are starting to engaging with what can potentially become their community of co-creators. Concretely through organizing a hackathon (in a board-game style simulation exercise) to collect feedback from imagined stakeholders like makers, hackers, designers, pro-users and even investors. Next, they revise their “System Maps” and “Open-o-Meters” (as introduced in earlier phases of the program) based on that feedback. Lastly, they send all their materials to their mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel for review and commenting.

Hack-a-thon: The boardgame

One way to get (early) feedback on an idea or a product – as well as to take the first steps of building a community of co-creators – is to organize a “hackathon”. A hackathon is an event in which external people (and often the general public) is invited to join a session of exploration and co-creation around a challenge set by the organizer of the event: In this case, it would be to give feedback on the open product idea and to help make it better. A hackathon is originally a highly design-driven way of collaborative problem-solving and creative tinkering coming out of the maker-world, but a concept which has increasingly been picked up in the corporate world to create rapid prototypes. In any case, it is a great, quick and informal way of inviting stakeholders (and other curious people) into a high-yield discussion and co-creation exercise.

To ensure the REMODEL program remains lightweight and easy to go through, however, we opted to not have the companies run an actual hackathon, but instead simulate one. This happened through the REMODEL hackathon boardgame:

In the boardgame the company organizes a hackathon: They start out by drawing persona-cards that represent people who you could expect would show up at a hackathon, such as makers, pro-users and designers. The company is also instructed in pitching their open product idea (in front of a camera) to make sure all the imagined attendees actually understands what the company wants them to do. The company then draws question cards that present them with challenging questions and critique as if spoken by the personas. All this fuels a discussion on the company’s work team and gives valuable input that really challenges the existing product concept.

Feedback from experts in the field

After simulating the hackathon and revising their concept and materials according to the reflections coming out of the hackathon, the company sent their work materials for review by their two assigned mentors from the REMODEL Expert Panel: As an invaluable resource in exploring cutting-edge open source strategies and business models, REMODEL draws upon the expertise of some of the world’s finest experts in the field including business developers, consultants, academics, CEOs, thought leaders and activists. As part of the REMODEL design sprint, the companies get to solicit feedback from these experts and discuss in depth their specific approach towards open source business development.

Key learnings: It is hard to engage with a community, but even harder to motivate it

For several of the companies, the hackathon-exercise was quite a revelation of the kind of blunt input (and expectations) that a vested community can present the community organizer with. The board game had questions such as:  “Who is going to offer support to modify the product?” and “I would like to copy and sell your open product, is that okay then?”. The reflections from the companies were many and included:

• A community will challenge your assumptions: It is really, really hard to predict what the community will want to do with your open product. You cannot assume your way forward but have to relinquish control to a certain extent. This is an advantage because the more agency you give your community, the more innovation space it will have.
• Motivating your community is hard: The “build it and they will come”-approach often doesn’t work; you need to actively work to get them involved, especially in the beginning. Why should they spend their time as co-creators? What is in it for them that they could not get before (when the product was proprietary/closed) or with your competitor?
• A whole new level of user involvement: One of the companies really hit the head on the nail by saying that what open sourcing really is is customer involvement on steroids: To base your product on a real demand (which is design’s ABC), you need the input of the people with a need that your product addresses. No need, no sale. Customer-insight (and hence input) is the key to success. No input is better than what you get from a customer who feels a sense of co-ownership of the product. A customer who is vested in the continued development and improvement of the product. This is what you get from those who join the community as co-creators.

Stay tuned for the recap of the 6th week of the REMODEL sprint and many more learnings!

This is the fourth blog post of the REMODEL programme. Read number one, number two and number three here

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

The post The perils of INVITING STAKEHOLDERS into your community: Our learnings from the 5th week appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I met Lina Theodorou, the artist and creator of Pawnshop, in her apartment on a sunny Sunday morning in Berlin. It was just one week after the UK referendum resulted in a vote to leave the EU. I was in Berlin to take part in an event called Art, Money & Self Organization in Digital Capitalism, the first in a series of events called Arts and Commons, organised by Supermarkt.

Theodorou and I quickly got onto the topic of Brexit. We compared notes. She wondered if, like Greece, the UK government would choose to ignore the result of the referendum, fail to invoke Article 50, and stay in Europe after all. That possibility had not occurred to me. She talked about her memories surrounding the Grexit debate – the distress, the uncertainty, the shocking hatred and hostility expressed between family members and people previously considered friends. I had been deeply shaken by the upsurge of street-level racism on the streets of Britain.

Pawnshop, the artwork that is also a board game, was set up for play, laid out on a table in her studio. It is an inversion of Monopoly: the same square board, the pieces, the bank, the cards, the dice. However in this game the player starts the game with no money, only property – jewelery, a bouzouki, antique furniture, a flat – and pays a European tax of €1500 when they pass Go (if they get that far).

Players proceed around the board, according to the luck of the dice, along a path strewn with dilemmas. A second row of squares is used to keep track of the time spent dealing with the consequences of their choices – jail sentences, or hospitalizations for example. As they move around the board, they pick one of the cards, depending on their landing square, and must choose how they will respond to the given dilemmas.

Theodorou tells me that the game is based entirely in fact. For years she has collected newspaper stories in Greece. And here they are gathered in four categories of cards – Dilemma, Involvement, Debt and Luck – to encapsulate the experience of daily life, for everyone, in modern day Greece. ‘If you are honest you lose’ she says.

Here an upbeat and colourful video sets out the rules.

On her website are photos of engrossed players at Bozar, Center for fine arts, Brussels; at the exhibition TWISTING C(R)ASH; at Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain «Le Commun» in Geneva; and at the exhibition It’s Money Jim, but not as we know it, at Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna, and As Rights Go By, Museumsquartier, Vienna. She says it’s important that at the beginning players laugh… but because of ‘synesthesia’, the longer they play, the more uncomfortable they become, they feel the ethical discomfort in their bodies.

Theodorou and I digress again, coming back to the Europe question. Because I’m in Berlin I think about Germany’s role. Germany at the heart of Europe is perhaps more part of the problem than they realise. The style of bureaucracy is molded to reflect the German mentality and their industrial system.This is coupled with a confidence in the correctness of the system – that Theodorou points out, is accompanied by the Northern European, Calvinist attitude – anyone who does not comply is wrong and must be punished. ‘But what is good for Germany is not necessarily what is good for Greece’ she says. ‘In Greece for many years the economy was made up of many small entrepreneurs, small businesses, shops, and a community focus. Why must we suddenly give this up in favour of big business. Why do you have to destroy something that is healthy?’. After the banking crisis in 2008 pawnshops started popping up on every street in every town in Greece.

Theodorou tells me that Pawnshop is the Greek reality board game.

‘Your father is sick, do you pay his hospital bill?
Yes: pay €3000 and he lives for another 6 years,
No: unfortunately he dies, but you receive a life insurance pay out of €75,000’

Picking an ‘Involvement’ card means that that player’s decision will have consequences for other people too; Debt (is the biggest pile of cards).

Gentrification strategies have failed in Athens. Back in 2006 the rich Greeks, many of whom were also art collectors, started to organise the large scale art events, (in which of course the artists worked for free), but it didn’t take. Then in 2008 the banks collapsed, the economy became surreal, but somehow, Athens remained the same. Perhaps this because regeneration does not have the ever-rising bubble of property prices to support its economy. In Greece everyday people do not speculate on the housing market (as we do in the UK). Rather a house is something you keep for ever in the family.

Theodorou describes the real world Greek tax system as ‘insane’. It changes every 3 months, Even the accountants have difficulty keeping up with the laws. This alone forces many people into the black market. Then the web of bureaucracy protects the hierarchical status quo and people in higher positions hold onto their power by putting obstacles in the way of others.

The only way to win this game (on the board and IRL in Greece) is with good luck. Good luck is the only way to avoid ethical discomfort or financial ruin.

The Luck cards (also based on fact as reported by the newspapers) are hilarious. ‘A politician hits you with her car, but fortunately the accident is witnessed by the media – collect €2500’.

‘Some rich ladies wish you a Merry Christmas and hand you €100’.

Apparently Athens newspapers have reported tales, for the last few years, in which ‘ladies’ have distributed money to ‘the poor’ from black windowed limousines.

Pawnshop is a polemic on corruption. Small corruption. Long standing, Greek-style, everyday corruption from which no-one can escape. The universal, forced collusion in corruption, and its corrupting effect on the spirit of Greek citizens and society, is set out in the game mechanics. The playful and social medium of the game means that the impact of contemporary Neoliberal politics on the Greek ‘everyman’ is made legible, feelable and discussable: unending, ethical traps; the impossibility of old-style moral political clarity; the flushing of righteous action, solidarity, resistance or even survival. Corruption all the way up and down.

I question Theodorou carefully, because I have long been suspicious of the narrative that says that corruption is the cause of Greece’s economic problems. But the corruption is a fact. While it is not necessarily the only or even the primary cause of its economic distress – which is very very real- the lack of trust in the state is debilitating and has a stagnating effect on the economy.

Pawnshop sits in an honourable tradition of artist’s activist games: to change mindsets and attitudes by actively implicating players in a reconstruction of values – see Mary Flanagan persuasive research about crticial play and the many attitude-hacking games coming out of her lab Titlfactor. Also Brenda Romero’s chilling Train game, Yoko Ono’s Play it by Trust. And for games that train for resistance and solidarity in games such as Escape from Woomera, Debord’s Game of War, and my own pacifist chess hack, Three Player Chess.

The Game of War played by Class Wargames as part of Invisible Forces exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in 2012.

A look around Theodorous portfolios of works reveals a long practice that crosses agitprop, video, installations, and networked pieces.

The work all builds on close observations of contemporary political and social systems. Through graphical exuberance and humour these observations are rendered just (barely) bearable so that we are able to spend time with complex, difficult situations and suspend our certainties. And this is necessary and important. We need to face the complexities and ethical contradictions of contemporary politics. There’s no time to lose.

Before the referendum, I found myself uneasy about actually campaigning for ‘Remain’ in spite of my desire for a pan-European peoples’ alliance. This was because I couldn’t ally myself with the dominating political arguments proposed by the Conservative party (and backed up by big-business and the establishment). I also didn’t want to participate in a binary campaign that stamped on the dignity of the layer of people in the UK who are already so disenfranchised by the effects of austerity cuts (and many years of other systemic injustices). This moment revealed for me, and for many others in the ‘social liberal’ layer, a chasm between my own values and experience and those who voted to ‘Leave’. And a desire to find a way to connect. PostBrexit the reality board game may be just the thing we need to help us come together and play our way through the effects, consequences and possibilities.”

The post Pawnshop – the Greek Reality Board Game appeared first on P2P Foundation.