Mayo Fuster Morell ¹ and Ricard Espelt ² ; Republished from mdpi.com. (This article belongs to the Special Issue Sharing Cities Shaping Cities).

Abstract

The term “collaborative economy” or “collaborative economy platforms” refers to exchange, sharing, and collaboration in the consumption and production of capital and labor among distributed groups, supported by a digital platform. Collaborative economies’ use is growing rapidly and exponentially, creating high expectations of sustainability and their potential to contribute to the democratization of the economy. However, collaborative economy platforms lack a holistic framework to assess their sustainability and pro-democratization qualities. In addition, there is confusion about platforms which present themselves as collaborative when they actually are not, and similar uncertainties and ambiguities are associated with diverse models. To address this confusion, this article provides a framework for assessing the pro-democratic qualities of collaborative economy initiatives. It was applied to 10 cases in the context of the city of Barcelona. The methods used in this study include mapping and typifying 10 collaborative economy cases in the city, structured and in-depth interviews, and a co-creation session. The results indicate the presence of several modalities for favoring democratic values in a collaborative economy.

Procommons collaborative economy analytical star framework

Full text available here

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

Photo by glocalproject

The post Essay of the Day: A Framework for Assessing Democratic Qualities in Collaborative Economy Platforms appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

The business strategies of the REMODEL participants have really started to mature, and we are almost at the end in which the companies can harvest the output: Namely a newfound strategic understanding of the business potential of open source principles in manufacturing of hardware products, as well as a draft plan for the existing product in their portfolio that they have been working on throughout the process.

To get to this end goal, however, they first had to go the final stretch to uncover more specifically which kind of community they need to build in order to succeed with their new open source strategy.

Phase 7: Prototyping your community ecosystem

In this concluding phase the companies first and foremost ran one last iteration of their system map, based on the feedback from the stakeholder interview last time. With that in place it was time – based on the revised system map – to craft a prototype of their desired community eco-system: Looking at who are the key participants, what human resources they will need to establish and maintain it, and lastly which licenses and technical platforms to choose in order to realize it. You can browse the tools and methods for this in the Phase 7 repository on the REMODEL Github page.

What have we learned in this final phase? Community building is an art form worth mastering.

Lots of really interesting learning points came forward in this work. Here are a few highlights:

First step is to motivate key stakeholders to get on board

Identifying key stakeholders that are needed for the community to succeed in the first place is absolutely key and such stakeholders should be the first ones to be catered to and looped in. The key question to ask oneself is therefore: How do you motivate them? One of the companies pointed out that as a community builder you need to consider not just the pay-off for yourself, but more importantly what is in it for them (it needs to be a 2-way relationship). Working with motivation of stakeholders in general is a great investment of time.

Be aware of the resources needed

Proper, systematic building of community requires a solid resource base, so any planning ideally needs to include a cost estimate and business calculation. This is something that we actually had not implemented in the REMODEL program so far, but as it was quickly pointed out by some of the more business savvy team members across the companies, this is something that we will add in coming iterations.

Bottom line is that it is important to have the actual cost estimate sorted since the extent to which such funds can be secured has a great impact on the chance of realizing the idea.

Putting community building first might be less intimidating

Open sourcing first and then building community afterwards might be the wrong chronological order: In fact, it might be easier to build a community first (without having any open assets for them ) and then figure out what to open source later based on input from the burgeoning community. On one hand this might give a bigger sense of co-ownership among the community members, but secondly, this might even make open sourcing less intimating for business owners, because they can start small and build relationships first as a proof of concept before getting into deeper waters.

The platform may become the product

For some of the companies, there was the realization that maybe the community (or platform) is the actual product, rather than the hardware. In a digital economy more often than not the real business (and scaling) potential lies in creating a bond with users and offering a continual service rather than simply selling a one-off product. In this train of though the hardware could be seen merely as a connecter of the company and the user, and therefore it makes sense for it to be freely copied in order to scale the volume of relationships; allowing for the emergence of new business opportunities based on, for instance, subscription-based service models.

You cannot learn community building in a design sprint

This will likely not come as a surprise to anyone, but should be mentioned anyway: After the dust has settled after the completion of the REMODEL design sprint several companies noted that they realize how community building is much more complex than they had imagined and that while having gotten a good introduction in the program, they need to dig much deeper: So in really understanding how to build a community they need to learn what REALLY are the drivers? Community building is an art form, and for several of the companies, it became clear that they now need to continue on their own to learn more (Note: We often point people to Jono Bacon’s seminal The Art of Community as a great point of departure).

With this round-up of the 7th and final phase of REMODEL, we conclude the first series of sharing insights, but the sharing continues in other forms: We are writing up business cases on all 10 companies and are also preparing our REMODEL conference to take place on October 9, 2018, in Copenhagen. Stay tuned.

This is the sixth blog post of the REMODEL programme. Read number one, number two, number three, number four and number five 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 Discovering the MAGIC of community building: 7th and final week of REMODEL appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Which knowledge, skills and learning environments can boost Open Design & Manufacturing at meaningful scale? How can OD&M  become the ground of collective experimentation and co-creation between Universities, Makerspaces and Enterprises?

OD&M is a Knowledge Alliance dedicated to create and support communities of practices around the Open Design & Manufacturing paradigm, making the most of openness, sharing and collaboration to create new value chains of innovation in design and manufacturing oriented to the social good.

Through inspiring international mobilities, dedicated events, project-based trainings and innovative systems of learning outcomes certification, the OD&M community is committed to create a valuable environment of capacity-building for students, university staff, enterprises and highly creative and passionate people.

The P2P Foundation and its sister organization, the P2P Lab, are part of Open Design and Manufacturing platform, which has recently released an report. The report can be downloaded in it’s integral and reduced versions. Below you will find the report’s introduction, (written by Laura Martelloni, from LAMA agency) followed by its Executive Summary.

Introduction

Often, new professions and jobs emerge from transformations in the market.

They tend to remain in a grey zone where they mostly take shape through progressive adaptation and training on-the-job, until institutional education and training systems are able to recognize, codify, embed and scale them up into coherent learning journeys and learning outcomes, understandable by the labour market and the wider society.

Manufacturing in Europe is going through a major, almost unprecedented transformation. While it is suffering heavily from the effects of the global crisis and ongoing globalization, we are witnessing the emergence of a social technology-based movement, the Maker movement, spreading fast across the globe. Supported by ICT networks and by the establishment of physical spaces such as Fablabs, this movement is expanding its outreach across the globe, involving people with different backgrounds and mindsets that converge around common values such as ‘sharing’ and ‘openness’, generating a multi-faceted and complex knowledge.

The maker movement has opened the way for a new paradigm of production, called from time to time open manufacturing, p2p production, social manufacturing, maker manufacturing; although the plurality of definitions hints at the lack of maturity of the sector, its keywords – open hardware, open software, distributed networks, collaboration, transparency, among others – all point to the movement’s vocabulary and narrative.

These new forms of production are enabled by open source ICT and rooted in social innovation principles, they adopt open-ended business models and act at the level of ecosystem, they harness distributed networks and ubiquitous communities to unlock the inventive of peer to peer collaboration, and are able to imprint production processes, products and organizational forms with social purposes and outcomes. Considered in its potential to infuse production processes with social innovation principles and values, open manufacturing opens room to cultivate radical changes in the economy and society, able to preserve and grow the public good while steering disruptive paths of innovation (Johar et al., 2015). Open manufacturing has already reached a stage that offers the prospect of new jobs and businesses, but education and training systems across Europe are still stuck in the grey zone of unaware and fragmented intervention.

Within this framework, the OD&M project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe)[1] works to create a trust-based and collaborative Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, traditional manufacturers, and innovation communities of digital-savvy makers and open manufacturing businesses across Europe and beyond. The Alliance’s ultimate goal is to build a European enabling ecosystem that fully embeds the key approaches, values and principles underlying the open manufacturing paradigm, and turns them into drivers for a more competitive, sustainable and socially innovative manufacturing in Europe.

Focussing on the co-creation of new teaching and learning processes, as well as on new methods and models of knowledge exchange and capacity-building between the nodes of the Alliance, OD&M works to unleash a new generation of highly skilled and entrepreneurship-oriented designers and manufacturers, able to boost open design and manufacturing towards meaningful impacts.

The present report contains the results of an action-research carried out by OD&M between March and August 2017. The core objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole. The overall goal of the action-research was ultimately to identify gaps and opportunities for strengthening connections and collaborations within the OD&M Knowledge Triangle, enabling in particular Higher Education Institutions with new capacities and assets to play a valuable role in this field.

The action-research has been coordinated by LAMA Agency and has actively involved teams of researchers from: University of Florence – DIDA (Italy), University of the Arts London (UK), University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering (Spain), University of Dabrowa-Gornicza (Poland), University of Tongji (China), P2P Foundation (Netherlands), Furniture and Furnishing Centre (Italy). The other partners of the project (i.e. Fablab London, Fablab Lodz and Tecnalia) have contributed as key informants and hubs of connection with relevant stakeholders in the targeted countries.

As the report will highlight, the action-research confirmed that the maker movement is a complex phenomenon that is nurtured by a continuous serendipitous melting-pot among cultures, skills, knowledge, learning styles, languages and attitudes. If this richness represents a fertile ground for innovations across manufacturing sectors – and probably beyond them -, it also represents a challenge for the codes through which Higher Education Institutions embed new topics and shape new mindsets on the one hand, and through which companies demand and search for new, innovation-oriented skills and competences on the other hand.

More research is needed to further encompass and systematize the wide geography of knowledge, competences and skills underlying the maker movement, as well as to better understand how and to what extent they can be encoded in a framework that is portable across life’s domains, and recognizable by different actors. However, the OD&M research represents an important step in this direction, providing insights and identifying a possible scenario of education, training and business innovation built upon an unedited Alliance between Higher Education, manufacturing businesses and maker communities, able not only to prepare the next generation of designers and manufacturers, but to spur innovation – and, in particular, social innovation – across the whole open design and manufacturing value chain.

[1] The OD&M project is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand. The project started in 2017 and will run over three years. It actively involves the following organizations: University of Florence – DIDA, University of Dabrowa-Gornicza, University of the Arts London, University of Deusto – Faculty of Engineering, University of Tongji, Furniture and Furnishing Centre, Tecnalia, Fablab Lodz, Fablab London, P2P Foundation, LAMA Agency. The project also involves a number of Universities, SMEs, Foundations, local innovation communities and networks across Europe as associate partners.

Executive Summary

The present Report contains the results of an action-research developed in the context of the OD&M Project (A Knowledge Alliance between Higher Education Institutions, Makers and Manufacturers to boost Open Design & Manufacturing in Europe), funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme, Knowledge Alliances strand.

The main objective of the research was to analyse how and to what extent the emerging open design and manufacturing paradigm (OD&M) is currently becoming the ground of progressive convergence and synergy between Universities, enterprises and maker communities, and how this ‘knowledge triangle’ is collaborating towards the creation of effective and meaningful value chains of innovation.

The research started by investigating the key competences and skills that presently identify and characterise the ‘maker profile’, in order to draw a general picture of how these are developed, in which contexts, and through which particular teaching and learning processes (formal, informal, non formal). Further, the research explored existing experiences of making-related activities and initiatives promoted or partnered by Universities, and discussed with Higher Education’s representatives the drivers, barriers and possible scenarios connected to the introduction of making education within formal learning. Then, the research involved professional makers and OD&M enterprises (that is, enterprises that show strong and direct connections with the open design and manufacturing paradigm) in order to get an in depht understanding of how making-related values, skills and competences are contributing to shape and inform their businesses. Lastly, the research explored the perceptions and opinions of ‘traditional’ companies regarding these topics, and discussed with them the potential risks and benefits that may emerge for them from the OD&M paradigm as a whole.

Indeed, the different levels of maturity of the maker movement – and, more generally, of the open design and manufacturing paradigm – in the different countries, poses clear challenges in the implementation of this type of research; on the other hand, it reflects the reality of an emerging phenomenon and points to both the challenges of a common path, and the opportunities of building common experimentations at European level.

Read the full version of the report here

Read the reduced version

The post Universities, Enterprises and Maker Communities in Open Design & Manufacturing across Europe: an exploratory study appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Open Call For Participants

– A 2 day open collaborative online event dedicated to documenting circular economy solutions –

(Forum Topic)

Good documentation is key for decentralised collaboration and the collective set up of a sustainable circular economy. And good documentation needs its own time and attention. So OSCEdays starts a new and ongoing series of events called: Writers Weekends. And we invite you to join us!

Do you have an interesting circular economy solution, project or methodology? And you always wanted to document it properly – so others can build on it and engage in collaboration with you? But you never found the time to do it? Join our OSCEdays writers weekend.

Over the course of 48 hours we will create together globally connected documentation. We invite you to create documentation in the format of an ACTION protocol. But any form of documentation is welcome. The created ACTIONS and documentation can be used by everyone on the globe – for example during the next global OSCEdays event.

Join us.

For complete information, please go to the OSCEdays site.

The post OSCEdays’ First Writers Weekend – Open Call For Participants appeared first on P2P Foundation.

More than two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, global urbanisation keeps accelerating. United Nations projections indicate that 75% of the human population will be living in cities by 2050. Newly created cities and the urbanisation process in rural areas replicates a lifestyle based on consumerism and the linear economy, causing destructive social and economic impact while compromising the ecological system of the planet. Extreme industrialisation and globalisation have turned cities into the most voracious consumers of materials, and they are overwhelmingly the source of carbon emissions through both direct and embodies energy consumption. The rise of offshoring and automation indirectly leads to a decrease of the practical and cultural knowledge on how and where things used to be made locally in our cities. These dynamic hubs lose their livelihood.

We need to reinvent our cities and their relationship to people and nature by re-localising production, so cities are generative rather than extractive, restorative rather than destructive, and empowering rather than alienating. In these cities, prosperity flourishes and people have purposeful, meaningful work that they enjoy and that enables them to use their passion and talent. By connecting citizens with the advanced technologies that are transforming our everyday life, we need to recover the knowledge and capacity on how things are made in our cities.

The Fab City is an international initiative started by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms (CBA), the Barcelona City Council and the Fab Foundation to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. The project is connected to the global Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory) network and comprises an international think tank of civic leaders, makers, urbanists and innovators working on changing the paradigm of the current industrial economy. In the latter, the city operates on a linear model of importing products and producing waste. This should change to a spiral innovation ecosystem, in which materials flow inside cities locally and information on how things are made circulates globally. Fab City is about building a new economy based on manufacturing infrastructure and distributed data.

For more than ten years, Fab Labs have provided widespread access to modern means for invention and production. They began as an outreach project from MIT’s CBA, but Fab Labs have spread from inner city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the most northern tip of Norway, counting approximately 1,000 Fab Labs located in more than 78 countries today. Activities in Fab Labs range from technological empowerments to peer-to-peer project-based technical training. Projects being developed and produced in Fab Labs include, for example, solar and wind powered turbines and custom housing. Fab Labs share core capabilities among each other so that people and projects can be shared across the world. These labs work with components and materials optimised for use in the field and are controlled with custom software for integrated design, manufacturing and project management. This inventory is continuously evolving, towards the goal of a Fab Lab being eventually able to make a Fab Lab.

In 2054, our cities should be at least 50% self-sufficient.

Global manufacturing

In 2011, the Fab Lab project was launched at the FAB7 conference in Lima, Peru. A few years later, at the FAB10, the Mayor of Barcelona invited his colleagues around the world to join the Barcelona Pledge: a countdown for cities to become at least 50% self-sufficient by 2054. Ever since, several cities have pledged to join the network. Amsterdam joined the movement in 2016 at the first annual Fab City Summit, held at the EU2016 Fab City Campus. The Fab City movement is open for other cities, towns or communities to join in order to collectively build a more humane and habitable new world. Fab City takes the ideal of the Fab Lab – the connectivity, culture and creativity – and scales it to the level of the city.It is a new urban model for transforming and shaping cities that shift how they source and use material from ‘Products In, Trash Out’ to ‘Data In, Data Out’. This means that more production occurs inside the city, along with recycling materials and meeting local needs through local inventiveness. A city’s imports and exports would mostly be found in the form of data: information, knowledge, design and code.

Rescaling and connecting

At the core of the Fab City strategy is the development of a global network of cities that are a part of a sustainable ecosystem of production and knowledge: from a 3D printer at home to the neighbourhood’s Fab Lab, and from the city factory to global production infrastructure. In a Fab City, the number of imported goods – like food and resources as water and energy – need to be reduced. To make this possible, urban farming needs to evolve from experimental practices to a larger scale infrastructure. Local production of food at domestic, neighbourhood and city scales create a closer loop system for food production and harvesting. The use of recycled, raw materials for the production of objects in cities should be increased. this way, we create added value in every iteration of a new product, in a new spiral economy approach. A new productive ecosystem to rescale globalisation and provide the means of innovation to empower citizens. This process involves a huge cultural shift. One that promotes the empowerment of cities and their citizens.To become a Fab City requires having a more precise knowledge of the way that cities work. The evolution of the movement will make it possible to create better systems of capturing and analysing data, developing knowledge about each city and sharing it, and it will require the implementation of an evaluation system and detailed monitoring: the Fab City Dashboard. The Fab City strategy is unique in that it addresses a range of environmental, social and economic objectives (carbon reduction, waste minimisation, relocation of manufacturing and work) in a system approach to harness new technology and production approaches. All of this is brought to a practical level, by connecting with the existent Fab Lab Network and complementary productive ecosystems; a vast source for urban innovations being shared already globally by makers in more than 70 countries and 1,000 labs. The first city to become self-sufficient – simultaneously increasing employment by creating opportunities through open innovation, and radically reducing carbon emissions by relocation production – will lead the future of urban development globally.

According to Marleen Stikker, founder and director of Waag Society, also home to Fab Lab Amsterdam, Fab City shows that the combination of maker movements and circular economy are solid alternatives, ready to scale.

“The shared starting point is that we have to take responsibility for our own behaviour. We cannot wait for systems to change. We have to be the change. This Do-It-Ourselves, or rather Do-It-Together, mentally unleashes a powerful dynamic in society. It shows that civic movements are at the heart of change. We need an innovation paradigm shift. Not shareholders value, but social value, open instead of closed, cooperative instead of competitive. Smart citizens instead of smart cities.’ – Marleen Stikker, director Waag Society

The Fab City approach can contribute to achieving a range of city objectives. It helps civic leaders to develop locally productive cities in collaboration with local communities, companies and institutions by revitalising manufacturing infrastructure and offering incentives towards a new economy. Fab Lab and makerspace-based innovations could be a source for solutions to connect to real problems in cities, opening opportunities for businesses, research and education through projects in the digital realm. In this approach, citizens and cities are empowered to be the masters of their own destiny as their resilience is increased. With the circulation of materials and associated energy consumption, a more ecological system is developed in which carbon emissions – typical for the current economy – are drastically reduced; atoms stay in cities while bits travel globally. In order to make this happen, the city must be locally productive and globally connected to knowledge, economic and social networks. In this connection, the cooperation between cities, citizens and knowledge centres form the basis of scientific knowledge.

A concerted and coordinated response must be made to reimagine how, where and what we make if we are to live harmoniously within the bounds of the planet’s resources. Fab City proposes a model for cities to be resilient, productive and self-sufficient in order to respond to the challenges of our time. It also proposes the recovery of knowledge and the capacity to make things, to produce energy, to harvest food and to understand the flow of matter, in order to empower its citizens to be leading agents of their own destiny. The Fab City is about radical transformation. It is about re-thinking and changing our relationship with the material world, in order to continue flourishing on this planet.

This publication was written by Christel van de Craats together with Tomas Diez and originally appeared in New Amsterdam Magazine #10. You can access the original publication here. 

Feeling inspired? Watch the video below.

Photo by Myxi

The post The Fab City movement Creating locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.