It has been roughly a decade after the days that people first discussed Open Design. It has hitherto evolved from a concept, to a movement, to a viable business choice.

The RepRap 3D printer has been one of the first and most successful examples of open design. A 3D printer that could replicate itself is more than a design solution; it is a bold statement on the technological capacities of our time. A thing built to create other things, now creating copies of itself. Creation, being one of the core human characteristics, is now embedded in our creations.

It is, thus, no wonder it has sparked a wave of enthusiasm across diverse communities. Different visions of open innovation, distributed manufacturing and an automated self-sufficient society embody, to a lesser or larger extent the notion of open design. Though as much as the vision extends, the actual practice remains rather restrained. And while RepRap based 3D printers may have evolved to a billion dollar industry, industrial uptake of open design and open manufacturing is, arguably, still not there to see.

Part of the problem, as it is often the case, is structural. As a social activity, the open sharing of ideas and collaboration to create useful things by the users themselves has a self-evident merit. It can lead to better technologies, more learning from the side of the users, broader access to means of making and less waste, due to on-demand production and better maintenance capacity. But as a business option it goes almost against the foundations of everything we understand as the purpose of an enterprise.

In the end of the day, is able to survive to the extent it succeeds to exchange their products and services for money. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, identifies this practice of exchange as a core survival tactic amongst individuals too. In a society where people produce themselves only a small fraction of the things they need, they exchange the products of their labour with these of other people to get the rest of it. It is then the common sense that markets and money is in fact the very purpose of the economy.

From a different perspective, the economy is about provisioning. It is the sphere of human activity that serves to cover societal needs: from the basic means of subsistence, to things and actions meant for pleasure and self-actualisation. From this point of view, sharing is actually a very economic function. Even more, on many instances it serves to create and distribute vital resources much more efficiently than markets. However, at least until recently, sharing could not be generalised as a capacity providing for human needs at scale. Therefore, it was mainly restrained to those domains where the costs of enforcing the rules necessary for market exchange were simply too high to bear.

But what the internet revolution brought about is much higher capabilities for communication and coordination based on shared information and human sociality. The sphere of these domains where market exchange is not the common sense has rapidly expanded. It became possible for people to pool, rather than exchange, the products of their labour on much greater scale, thus creating a much more generalised capacity for societies to serve their needs.

That is of course not to suggest that markets and money are simply done away with sharing and open design. Nevertheless, they no longer serve as the sole imperatives stimulating human creativity and coordination, if they ever have been. And it is vital for the flourishing of our societies to recognise, support and further stimulate these dynamics in our economic institutions. Even when access to better design and user experience is now more available than ever, businesses, especially small ones, will not invest in these possibilities before clear returns can be foreseen, in terms of covering their overheads, wages and taxes.

In the transitioning from the feudal order to the industrial one, no markets could ever exist and no exchange could take place if there weren’t for the provisions and enforcement of property rights and trade agreements. Likewise, in order to reap the benefits of the new technological capabilities, we need legal provisions to re-establish the relationship of businesses with their user communities now largely participating in the design and production; support measures like universal basic income for workers to be emancipated and devote their creative energy where it most needed in their local societies; and collective institutions that generalise and support pooling of productive capacities wherever possible, from digital platforms of open design, software and knowledge to open spaces for collaborative production, distributed manufacturing and needs-based design for societal needs.

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On November 30th the Italian OD&M course “Design Driven Strategies” began. The course is organized by the faculty of Architecture and Design University of Florence together with CSM – Centro Sperimentale del Mobile – a consortium association of companies operating in the furniture sector – and LAMA Agency, a consulting company and founder of the social innovation coworking space “Impact Hub” in Florence.

We interviewed the Professor of Design for Sustainability, Giuseppe Lotti and the expert of European projects of LAMA Laura Martelloni, to better understand the opportunities offered by the course, and its innovative features.

The word “Design” is now popular, but its meaning can vary greatly depending on its application: what is meant by “Design Driven Strategies”?

GL: The competitiveness of companies and territories depends on the ability to define innovative strategies. These can be guided by design, which can be considered as a discipline to foreshadow the future, to perform the function of synthesis and catalysis of interdisciplinary contributions, making innovation immediately expendable.

LM: The thought behind this course is to recognize that those who now design products, services, experiences, does it within an increasingly complex, in an interconnected and uncertain system. A need for a new set of knowledge and skills therefore arises, as well as a need for new learning environments, able to go beyond training ‘in silos’. With this course we move towards systemic skills and competences, useful to work in complexity, recognizing that complexity needs to be analysed from different points of view. The designer of the 21^st century will increasingly make use of a mix of “hard” and “soft” skills: therefore, we want to train designers able to involve different disciplines and communities, to find new answers within a context that changes rapidly, continually forcing us to change models and frameworks. In other words, the economic and social transformations encourage us to think designers as professionals who help to create hybrids between products, experiences and services.

The course is organized around innovative teaching methods: can you describe them?

GL: The course is the work of several actors, with different approaches, methods and tools. The methodological rigour and the importance of theoretical-critical contributions are typical of the university; the experimental approach from the makers and practitioners’ communities is LAMA’s added value; the challenges of companies from CSM brings concreteness, applications and impact.

LM: The training method has three main characteristics: it is experiential, distributed, collaborative.

“Experiential” means that we rely on real challenges around which students will experience a learning experience. We would like to try to challenge the traditional culture of ‘learning outcomes’ and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), to focus instead on the process as an experience of open learning, not necessarily predefined. In the course, through moments of peer review, students will understand what they are learning, considering the plurality of contexts in which they learn as the guiding principle of evaluation. Self-evaluation, peer evaluation and more traditional evaluation will all play an important role.

“Distributed” regards the decentralization of the method. Students will learn not only with traditional lessons, but especially through the experiences they will have and the people they will be in contact with during the whole process. We want to stimulate students to deepen the contents both in team and independently. We will use principles and approaches of communities of practice, stimulating the creation of a community of learners, operating with self-regulation and self-organization dynamics.

“Collaborative” means that all the work is done in a team, and that the ultimate goal is to build fluid communities of practice, that collaborate, experiment and learn.

Finally, I would like to underline how the recognition of skills is also achieved through an innovative method that will allow the construction of digital portfolios, able to read the entire hard and soft set of skills acquired through the learning path.

What is the added value of organizing a training course that takes place not only in university classrooms? And what are the challenges related to this approach?

GL: We are talking about design-driven innovation and research projects. Design, by its nature, is not a discipline that works only in university classrooms but has an innate ability to get your hands on, as defined above.

LM: Uniting Impact Hub Florence, the University of Florence and an ecosystem of local businesses is an opportunity for students to reconnect meanings and actions that we often live discontinuously and fragmented. It is an attempt to link formal, non-formal and informal learning contexts in a single sense framework, understanding how each of these contexts can bring value into a training experience.

The course is organized within the European Erasmus + program, Knowledge Alliances. What are the motivations and added value of working in parallel with other universities (in London, Bilbao Dabrowa Gornicza,)?

GL: The first added value is certainly represented by the possibility of comparing different production and research entities. This stimulates the development of good practices and the overall growth of our respective educational systems.

LM: The motivations are many: listening, exchanging practices, learning how others do things.

The project itself is a gym for us to work in complexity: when you work simultaneously with four countries, ten partners, the related teams, made up of people who perform very different functions, you are part of a great gear. From this point of view, I believe that programs like Erasmus have a great added value not only in supporting the innovation of training – today an urgent need in the face of the great transformations of the fourth industrial revolution – but also in bringing Europe closer.

Finally, who do you think are the right people to take part in the course? And for what reasons?

GL: The right people are first of all curious people! “If you are not curious, forget it”. Achille Castiglioni.

LM: The course addressed to anyone who has to do with the design of products and services, taking care of their social and environmental consequences. Personally, I hope that this will include also designers in the social sphere. I believe that in these areas the opportunities from the point of view of knowledge and skills are still untapped. The course could also be an opportunity for third sector designers to try to radically change the way they look at the design of their services.

The training brochure (in Italian) can be found here. A more detailed description can be found here.

The post Design Driven Strategies: A Course by Open Design & Manufacturing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of “Open source agriculture: Co-create with Tzoumakers” , celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world. The workshop will be hosted at the rural makerspace “Tzoumakers”, which is located in NW Greece.

 1. Introduction and background

The P2P Lab is a not-for-profit organisation based in Ioannina, Greece. It is dedicated to research around peer-to-peer dynamics in technology, society and economy. It works for the development and maintenance of a global knowledge commons, encompassing a global community of researchers and activists.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. Agriculture is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant ​open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create ​feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising a 5-day workshop in Ioannina (NW Greece). The workshop will build upon our experience gained from the previous year, when makers around Europe gathered at a local makerspace for asylum seekers in Ioannina and co-created solutions with a local refugee community. The workshop will now take place at Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace situated in a small mountainous village called Kalentzi. The latter is part of the village cluster of Tzoumerka in Ioannina, a place abundant in cultural and natural wealth but scarce in the economic means of welfare.

The main aim of the workshop is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.

2. Invitation to apply

The P2P Lab is looking for 4 designers, makers or enthusiasts to join the workshop in Kaletzi (Ioannina). Selected designers will introduce their technological solution related to agriculture to the local community and manufacture it with their help, while keeping local biophysical conditions in mind.

Travel, accommodation and per diems of the grantees will be covered by the P2P Lab.

Ηere are the general requirements for applicants:

• The designers should be based in the EU, while the solution may originate elsewhere.
• The solutions must be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).
• Each solution should be fully developed within 3 days or less.

Please find below the selection criteria and timeline for this call. If you would like to apply, we ask you to fill in the application form and send it to us no later than Friday, 8 March 2019 22:00 CET.

3. Selection criteria and conditions

The submitted applications will be reviewed and selected by the local community in light of the criteria and the conditions described below:

• Does the solution fit with the values and principles of small-scale farming systems?
• Is the solution developed according to expressed user needs?
• Is the solution easily reproduced and adaptable?

4. Procedure and timeline

To apply for this call, please fill in the application form via this link.

The deadline is 8 March 2019 22:00 CET. The decision will be announced at the P2P Foundation blog on Monday, 25 March 2019.

The workshop will take place in June 2019 (exact dates to be confirmed).

For queries, you may contact us at [email protected].

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

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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.

AbilityMate is a Sydney (Australia) based social enterprise whose mission is to help people with disabilities access the equipment they need. Their vision starts by making custom-made 3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs) available to Australian children! The enterprise’s approach is to use 3D scanning & printing technology to fabricate customised designs for AFOs. They are developing 3D scanning equipment and are making it widely accessible on the World Wide Web in 2018. The enterprise was founded by Melissa Fuller and Johan du Plessis.

3D printed Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs)

AbilityMate initially started by running design jams and projects at community makerspaces. The aim was to help people with disabilities by developing custom made 3D printed devices. In this early phase the AbilityMate community would work directly with people with disabilities to assess their needs and 3D print the devices that made them more independent. This has been exploratory and the AbilityMate community has co-created a number of different designs for people in need of assistive devices. These designs have been made available online.

Hack-a-Home Project

A more recent collaborative research project which is still ongoing seeks to test “what happens when you put the means of production in the hands of those who need it”, whether the production of custom made assistive devices could be moved to the community requiring them. The project entailed conducting trainings at various residences where people with disabilities live. People with disabilities and their carers were trained to do various aspects of the design and production of assistive devices, from body scanning to 3d modelling and 3D printing. Overall, this project seems to have had a low general impact, as coordination has been challenging and production has only happened when AbilityMate makers have been present. However, the impact is large for individuals when they experience the power of being able to produce assistive devices to cover their own needs.

Open Source 3D scanner

The Magic Shoes project  

In mid 2016 AbilityMate started receiving many request form families in the Cerebral Palsy community who saw 3D printing as solution to the challenges they face. Members from this community requested that they have a go at 3D printing Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs). AFOs are customised leg braces worn to support posture and mobility of kids and are used for corrective therapy. Currently AFOs are prescribed and hand fabricated by a medical specialist called an Orthotist. After looking into how AFOs are currently made they realised that their approach of using 3D scanning and 3D printing could potentially create a more pleasant experience for children and reduce the turnaround times and wait times experienced by these families. Because of the large amount of work and investment required to make this a reality, AbilityMate was joined by 6 other impact driven organisations. The project includes regulatory affairs, a clinical study with 20-30 children, development of an open source 3D scanner, the establishment of 2 orthotics clinics to make 3D printed AFOs available and the release of an open source package including blueprints of the 3D scanner and findings from the clinical study. A considerable financial investment of $600,000 is required for a project of this size. With a strong collaboration in place and a successful proof of concept AbilityMate has raised $400,000 through crowdfunding and philanthropic donations and still needs to raise $200,00 to complete the project.

Magic Shoes project team

The AbilityMate model

Having explored the production of a number of assistive and medical devices, AbilityMate came to the realization that it needed to create a viable business model. Once it has done this, it will be able to apply the same model to other types of customised assistive and medical devices. The current focus of AbilityMate is therefore to establish this new enterprise model around the customisation and production of AFOs. They’ve started with  “The Magic Shoes Project” and now have now begun to set up a sustainable social business.

AbilityMate are a For Purpose technology start-up that’s incorporated as a Proprietary Limited Company. They have modified their constitution in line with a Social Benefit Company. It permits and requires Directors to act to deliver the purpose and to consider wider impacts of their decisions. AbilityMate will be engaged in the customisation and digital manufacture of custom-made assistive devices. AbilityMate’s products help orthotists achieve the clinical results they expect and deliver effective, cutting-edge options and better experienced to their patients.

In their experience the interaction with orthotists is critical to the safe delivery of 3D printed AFOs because these devices are corrective by nature not augmented like a prosthetic hand for example. AFOs are traditionally prescribed and made by Orthotists, after careful evaluation of biomechanical needs.

Moreover, many devices that are normally prescribed by health care providers have been subjected to clinical trials. Simply having a repository of open source templates for assistive and medical devices does not really suit a large percentage of the market. AbilityMate has learned that it has needed to create a model which incorporates the medical profession and clinicians that prescribe the devices. The new model has three basic aspects:

1. Open source body scanning devices;
2. A customisation and fabrication service (CFS);
3. A network of localised 3D printing facilities

Customization of AFO

The first barrier to overcome is the way in which orthotists develop AFOs in the first place. For things like AFOs, orthotists have traditionally used plaster casting which children tend to dislike. The first problem to solve is to find a way in which orthotists can digitize the production process. There are many types of body scanners, but they have not been widley adopted by the profession. Good scanners can cost between $20,000 to $30,000, and may not be made for scanning the legs of wriggly children. AbilityMate is therefore working on an open source scanner that will be available to anyone to make at a much lower cost.

Secondly, orthotists are not digital designers, they work with their hands, and do not normally have knowledge and experience with CAD and 3D printing. AbilityMate believe it is not realistic to expect orthotists to become experts at these. AbilityMate’s strategy is therefore to set up a customisation and fabrication service (CFS). This is currently the model used for orthodontics and other medical devices that require a high degree of customisation. The CFS would be an online platform set up and run by AbilityMate. AbilityMate would receive orders from orthotists based on digitised body scans and their prescriptions. AbilityMate will make arrangements to have the leg brace printed at a 3D printing facility located closest to the orthotist who placed the order. Before onboarding a 3D printing facility to join the platform, AbilityMate will ensure the facility has all the required quality control and regulation requirements in place.

Thirdly, to fund and protect users this model requires there are elements of open source IP and closed IP. By opening the IP of the 3D scanner they reduce barriers to 3D printing. It will also enable AbilityMate to reach kids in remote communities. They will also have to keep some IP closed. AbilityMate has received genuine concern from the medical profession about open sourcing templates and 3D designs for AFOs. Because AFOs are corrective devices there is a major risk in having an unqualified person designing and printing AFOs for already vulnerable members of the community. AbilityMate is also in the process of raising seed investment from impact investors. For them it doesn’t make sense to open the IP surrounding how to customise an AFO in CAD modelling. These barriers have really challenged their thinking about open design and cosmo localisation because their vision started out with ambitions to keep everything open! In reality this approach could have negative consequences on children and on AbilityMates’ ability to raise capital. As the business model evolves, they hope that the tensions between the vision for cosmo-localization and the practical considerations of AFOs and seed investors can be resolved and integrated.

Based on this three-part model their plan is to support the development of AbilityMate “Pods”. Pods would be localized operations that can support a number of territories in instantiating the model (a little bit like a franchise but using open source principles). AbilityMate would package as a service how to set up a full-fledged operation, which would include how to conduct 3D printing as a CFS, how to produce and use the scanners and upgrade orthotics clinics to digital workflows, and how to draw on an open design commons. AbilityMate would help people set up their own operations in different parts of the world to service their local areas.

Open clinical trials and university collaboration

AbilityMate have also learned that the production of medical devices based on open designs needs to be coupled with clinical trials and the validation of models and technologies of medical devices. In Australia, for example, clinicians/orthotists will not normally prescribe an medical devices that has not been validated through clinical trial. This means that from a medical profession point of view, there is no real value in having hundreds of innovative open source designs for medical devices if none of them have been trialled and validated. In addition to this, medical trials are very hard to do, they cost a lot of money because of the research costs involved. In their opinion, they believe that certain contexts warrant a more liberal approach to this. For AFOs, for example, it is better that kids have them than not. For other types of devices where there is higher risk, they feel clinical trials need to be strictly applied.

Therefore, the challenge is not just to cultivate an open design commons for assistive devices and medical devices, but to build an approach to prototyping, testing and trialling assistive devices and medical devices in conjunction with this design commons. This requires open data on clinical trials that others can build on, which allows for people to build on and create subsequent design optimizations. In essence there is a need to create a commons around clinical trial data and the validation of devices. AbilityMate have only just begun to have conversations with universities about this.

Values and principles and the role of the maker movement

AbilityMate is an expression of deep personal connections with the experience and challenges for people who are disadvantaged by disabilities. Johan’s grandfather, for example, had polio, which left him with an impaired limb. The social stigma of being cripple haunted his grandfather’s entire life, impacting his work opportunities, and had an impact on three generations of his family. Melissa has a cousin who was struck by a car and acquired a spine and brain injury, losing the ability to walk and speak. The state insurance, which was meant to last his whole life was quickly exhausted by medical costs for equipment, and she saw how her cousin’s family constantly improvised to figure out how to solve basic problems.

The maker movement has also had a big impact on the values and thinking of AbilityMate. Before starting on this journey, Melissa did a tour of 40 makerspaces / tech shops / Fab labs across the United States. Realizing the massive impact of producing material things, and the possibility this new model could have has been a motivation as well. The way in which the maker movement merges the idea of the user with the designer and the consumer has been significant. In 2014 Melissa started a community makerspace in Sydney which is where she and Johan met.

Fairness is also a key concept. AbilityMate do not want to do charity, but rather create a more fair and equitable system. They feel that the emergence of a global design commons levels the playing field and creates fairer opportunities for people to have access to assistive devices and equipment. Fairness also means the price of assistive devices. The current high costs of assistive devices adds yet another burden to people with disabilities. The global design localized production model provides a way to lessen that cost burden.

Overall, they feel four words help to express their values and principles:

1. authentic-ness;
2. transparency / openness;
3. courage;
4. fairness.

Team, skills and decision making

Melissa comes from a design and manufacturing background, and Johan comes from a computer science and startup background. There are 4-5 other people they work with. Their backgrounds include industrial engineering, marketing and product management, CAD modelling and UX design. There are also volunteers that are connected with local maker spaces, and some interns with a biomedical background. Overall engineering with a scientific approach is valued, the ability to test hypotheses and conduct rapid prototyping, engage in user centric design, entrepreneurial skills and fund-raising. Areas where they may need future support include legal, fund-raising and finance. But the intangibles are critical in their opinion. They feel that people must have a personal connection with the area, and they are always looking for people who understand the “why” behind why they want to be involved. Often there is a personal story or connection with the disability area.

In terms of work style they prefer to cultivate a culture of co-learning rather than hierarchy. Decisions are made in different ways depending on the context. Most the time there is a team conversation which is open. Meetings are weekly. If there are more urgent decisions to make then less people may be involved in a decision. They use Loomio’s method of working groups and ensure decision-making is transparent, documented and as open as possible. Overall they try to be as organic, open and inclusive in their decision making as they can. While Melissa and Johan are the driving force, they try and distribute this as much as possible, for example by trying to rotate pitching for money or when applying for competitions.

Strengths and weaknesses of open design logic and the future

One of the biggest challenges that they face is in articulating the benefits of an open design business model. There has been lots of scepticism on the part of potential impact investors and it has been hard for people to understand why they would want to give away their “IP”, a constant need to explain and educate people on the benefits of equity fundraising. Alternatively, the benefits of working within the open design business model is the clear resonance it has with many people, associated with its altruistic dimension and potential for social impact. People have been very attracted to the model and have wanted to help, which has made it easier to establish strong partnerships. This has also helped attract talent which has become part of the team.

They feel the open design business model is a critical strategy in addressing the many challenges that we have. They do not feel approaches that rely on patents and tight intellectual property will make enough of a difference. They feel the future of open source hardware is bright if people take the open design pathway. They are optimistic and feel the changes will come from the bottom up.

They see the outlines of a virtuous cycle developing across the open design distributed manufacturing development space. There needs to be ways to circulate value from users and clinicians back through designers and platform developers. As well, learning from other open design enterprises is critical, as the verification of such models helps to create knowledge and legitimacy. They feel it is a bit like social bootstrapping. When there are not a lot of cases it is hard to articulate the benefits of such a model and harder to get resources and people behind it.

At a social level they see an economic virtuous cycle emerging. When a valuable design is added to the global design commons and the benefits of that design begin flowing into the local community, then it frees up people and their time to do others things, and people can apply yet more open source strategies, in a virtuous cycle of economic benefits. As open design enterprises get on their feet and produce results, they capacitate communities to do more. This can include strategies for building circular economies into this model. Finally without a global design commons, local production is not possible, and without local design production then the global commons is not possible. Creating such virtuous cycles is key.

This report on AbilityMate was conducted by Jose Ramos in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

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“OpenROV started in 2001 as a project to make underwater exploration tools accessible to anyone, launched by Eric Stackpole and David Lang. The company shares much of its designs and cultivates a community of hobbyists that help test, modify and refine its products. Its main product so far has been a low cost kit that people order and assemble themselves, for an underwater drone that can explore to a depth of 100 meters. The company is now in the finishing stages of launching a pre-assembled and manufactured product called Trident.

Out of graduate school, Eric worked at NASA as an engineer, but was an active hobbyist. In part inspired by the maker movement, he felt a sense of possibility that he could create technology that could solve problems. After hearing a story about sunken treasure that was hidden in a cave area (the Hall City Cave in Hayfork, California), he discovered a reason and purpose to build such an underwater drone. This project helped him to find his cofounder David Lang, and also to get media attention. The co-founder David Lang was very astute about the need to build a community around the project, and a community building website. Once a prototype was built they attempted to retrieve the treasure they had heard of, however the project was beset by technical problems and no treasure was ultimately found. Yet in the process they had begun to build a community around the idea of DIY underwater exploration.

OpenROV evolved into an approach for prototyping underwater drones. OpenRov’s underwater drones have iterated through a number of phases. Throughout its development it has been involved in a number of maker faire’s and won a number of competitions. In 2012 OpenROV launched a kickstarter campaign raising over 100,000 dollars for a kit product. In 2015 OpenROV launched a new campaign that raised over $800,000 for its Trident drone. The company’s values center around the exploration of the unknown, creating technology which is revolutionary and having a big and positive impact on the world.

Business model and open source elements

OpenROV’s core business model is in selling kits and products that are highly engineered and relatively low cost compared to other products, based on many years of research and development. To do this the company eclectically uses a mix of open source hardware and conventional parts. The company maintains the majority of its designs as open source. However not all of its products are open-source, for reasons that will be explained.

As a general rule OpenROV shares what it can, much of the process in creating the drones and the parts / technology that make up. However it requires a huge amount of energy to document the engineering and development process. Documenting everything would not be possible, so it is important to make strategic decisions about where OpenROV decides to put its documentation energy. The filter that is used to make decisions about whether something will be open source or not is whether it will be beneficial to the community and to the company at the same time. The company cares more about the quality and performance of the product than in making it open source for open source’s sake.

An example of this is the use of the Qualcomm chip set. OpenROV decided to use this because it was the best and most appropriate part. The company has signed a nondisclosure agreement with Qualcomm, and as Eric explains “if we only allowed ourselves to use parts that are open source our hands would be tied.” In Eric’s opinion there is a subtle difference between community-based hardware and open source hardware. Non-open source hardware can still be low cost and have a large community of users and developers around it. For example their choice to use the BeagleBone Linux computer was not based on it being open source, but rather because it was low cost and because enough other people were developing with it that they could learn from. It is more important to have a healthy developer community where people can share and learn and build, which in Eric’s view is itself its own kind of open-source, whether based on proprietary hardware or not.

There is also the need to be careful about open sourcing elements of OpenROV that they have put huge investment in. If everything were open source, large-scale competitors / manufacturers, from China or elsewhere, could be easily able to replicate what they did, making OpenROV uncompetitive. OpenROV has put in well over $1 million into R&D costs and they need to make sure they get value back. For other elements of the design, where OpenROV does not feel over exposed, they do open source design elements and hope that people can tinker and build off the ideas.

Open-source for software has existed for a while, however for hardware it is still a new emerging space, and the need to translate research and development costs into future profits is still an issue in question that OpenROV grapples with. For this reason OpenROV straddles a fuzzy and shifting line between open source and proprietary elements. They see open source as a means to an end, and are more interested in democratizing DIY underwater exploration and building a bigger community and ecosystem of innovators.

Community dimensions of OpenROV

The more substantive dimension of open source for OpenROV is in the community dimensions. Eric believes that “everyone is smarter than anyone”, by which he means that more people working on the problem draws on more intelligence than simply a limited group. The community dimension of open-source allows for greater social momentum built around a project, something OpenROV has repeatedly experienced. Eric expressed that it is somewhat of a cliché that a community will produce lots of intellectual property to make something better. He feels that the “free IP” concept of open source is a myth. For him the bigger element that arises from openness is sharing something that he believes in with the community. This allows him to see what people value, pick up, and where the interest is. And he gets motivation and encouragement from the community as well. Communities are all about helping do the thing together that they mutually care about.

For OpenROV openness is closer to the idea of “user led innovation”, being able to see how a community engages with product. They have reaped the most benefits from understanding what the community’s interests are, what things they adopt, they try and build themselves. Cultivating a community is also a source of recruitment – finding people from the community and hiring them. For them those are bigger returns than any IP they have drawn from the community.

Building a global ecosystem?

One thing that they have noticed is that as they have open sourced the drone technology, other companies around the world have copied what they have done. Most of these competitors do not necessarily share back to the world their own unique additions. On the one hand the logic of this competition could be seen to be good. Competition can energize development of a market with a widening variety of niche areas. Like the iphone app community or Elon Musk’s decision to make Tesla designs open, the intent behind open sourcing is to create the conditions for social infrastructure to develop that supports all of the competitor’s in a system.

They also hope that ecosystem sharing emerges in this new niche area. Yet so far there have not been any companies that have done this. In OpenROV’s own community there are some examples where people are creating and sharing their own new designs, however is not the same as multiple enterprises driving the development of an industry sector globally.

Connections with research is one of those bright spots, there have been over 100 articles and essays written about OpenROV, including a number of theses. There are many relationships to universities, teams of researchers who have bought the products, corresponded with OpenROV, used of technology and adapted it. In many cases OpenROV have provided support on a pro bono basis. Therefore, in the area of research and development, there has been a space of open knowledge production which has emerged in the space of submersible robotics, which OpenROV has helped to spark.

Skills, competencies and decision making

Designing underwater drones requires a high degree of technical capability. Even those buying the kits need to have technical capabilities and feel comfortable with technology. Many of the users of the technology are small business owners involved in some form of underwater exploration.

The team itself has between 12 and 15 people working full time, and about half a dozen interns. The team itself is highly technical in orientation, what they do is hard-core engineering. The team does all of its own analysis and design work. Eric feels that this is the right way to spend resources in beginning – to make sure the product is excellent. He feels it is the hard-core engineering and research and development that has driven its success.

There is no formal problem-solving process or approach for the company. There is a lot of transparency between what everyone does and people can easily talk to each other. The environment is more like a group of friends rather than a boss with workers. There are not a lot of meetings in the company. If people are involved in the problem-solving process they will work with the people directly involved in this problem. Collaboration spills out organically from the need to solve technical challenges.

OpenROV also does not formally hire people. It attracts people who are passionate are then invites them to be part of the team. Team members feel a strong sense of alignment. People feel a sense of care for the projects that they are involved in and want to steer them in the right direction. It is not just a job where people feel they need to show up. If people don’t like the way things are going it bothers them and they’ll most likely say something. Ultimately the people who work as part of the team feel a sense of ownership for what we are doing.

Strengths or weakness of the open design approach

When assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the open design approach, a contrast is drawn between openness at an organizational level and openness at a social level. At an organizational level openness means that the work environment is such that people can and will debate various solutions and decisions. Not all will agree. It is harder to get decisions made, but the theory is that better decisions are ultimately made, and that those involved feel more alignment and ownership because they came to the decision themselves.

The same logic can be applied to openness at the social level. When OpenROV is open and describes the various steps that it takes in technology development, there are people who question what it is doing and point out other options. This ultimately takes more time and can create frustration, than if they just made decisions without openness to the user community. Being open to a community in the development process provides more options, more complexity, more decisions and raises the amount of work that needs to be done. However, it also means OpenROV can learn from the community and the community can help refine and support OpenROV. OpenROV does updates every month, and when there is a delay, OpenROV provides an explanation (e.g. if they decided to change a part etc.). OpenROV opens itself up to being second guessed, and providing answers in an open way takes energy. But it also means that there is the possibility of learning from a bigger system.

The weaknesses of working within the open source / open design approach is the increased time to explain internal decisions and answer questions, as well as competition that arises from openness. The other challenge are the expectations that people project onto OpenROV, the idealism associated with open source. The community may expect OpenROV to hold themselves to a higher bar than what is possible with respect to open source, but they may misunderstand the nature of the challenges OpenROV faces. It is challenging to manage these expectations, as a company that is pragmatically open source. For them, patent and open source are not mutually exclusive – and there may be blind spots in the discourse on open source that overlooks this.

Thoughts on the future

Into the future OpenROV will continue to be improvisational with open source, doing it where it can. It will continue to care about its community and building a community globally. What is most important for it is to nurture a community of makers, tinkerers, researchers and innovators, rather than simply open all innovation to manufacturers who will steal and compete on price basis. How OpenROV nurtures a community of such innovators through open source rather than opening up to non-innovating manufacturers with economies of scale is one of the biggest challenges to address.

This report was conducted in the context of the Open Design & Manufacturing project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission.

Photo by 0xF2

Photo by ellen forsyth

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But open source projects tend to exist in somewhat of a paradox. They are propelled by extremely skilled and well-educated people, but the financial compensation for projects is often low or nonexistent. Even though they are sometimes used by communities of many thousands or millions of people, the output of projects is often expected to be free of charge. While open source methods are responsible for many profound innovations in our lives, most societies have yet to understand or appreciate the meaning of “open source.”

If open source projects do not always make money, what propels them to continue growing? How does an open source project get started, and how does it evolve? What are some things to embrace and avoid when working on open source projects? The following noteworthy initiatives offer some instructive answers.

Open Source Ecology

The ambitious goal of this small organization is to develop fifty open source industrial machines that can be used to build a civilization from scratch. This includes everything from bread ovens to ploughs and 3D printers. In each case, the idea is to make useful tools out of cheap, accessible parts and share how to do so on the Internet.

OSE is the brainchild of Marcin Jakubowski, whose original mission to start a sustainable farm was hindered by the fact that proprietary agricultural tools are expensive and difficult to repair. To help his farm and his wallet, Marcin began building his own tools like a tractor and a press to make compressed earth bricks useful for building. He documented his work rigorously on a blog and YouTube channel, catching the attention of other tinkerers who began contributing time and resources to support Marcin’s efforts.

Marcin’s goals evolved quickly from developing a farm, to inventing an ecosystem of modular open source tools called the Global Village Construction Set. The project aims to supply anyone with designs and tutorials to build their own machines, thus enabling people to become more autonomous as farmers and less dependent on industrial producers. Adopting radical open principles, Marcin began documenting his work on a public wiki, including theories, detailed plans, and even financial information. A successful crowdfunding campaign and a supporter subscription system helped fund early development, but for the first few years, the project was often financially precarious.

After building a productive following of hundreds, several successful prototypes, and a community living space onsite, OSE’s proof of concept seemed to be emerging. The project received several lucrative grants to continue development, and an invitation to speak at the celebrated TED conference.

Although OSE was attracting a lot of attention, its infrastructure, both in terms of governance and the physical space at his farm in Maysville, Missouri, was not able to deal with the flow of people wanting to collaborate. Marcin’s brainchild needed other brains to grow, but living conditions were poor and he lacked basic skills in community management. After several fallouts with OSE collaborators, he became seen as unappreciative of the community and the organization evolved into a one-man show where credit for the work of many seemed to be going only to Marcin. This was obviously harmful to the collaborative environment, and led to an unhealthy, disempowering dynamic within the community. OSE needed structural stability, but with the team constantly changing, the project began to suffer. However, the vision and goals were compelling enough that money and people continued to pour in.

Currently OSE seems to be stabilizing, but the lofty ambition of developing fifty Global Village Construction Set machines still seems far off. This is the story of a project that evolved organically, but perhaps too fast and without stable governance. With a focus on machines and not on people, the vision has suffered, but there remains great potential for its future, should these issues be resolved.

Perhaps OSE’s most profound achievement is the influence it has had, which reaches far beyond the thirty acres of farmland in Missouri. In pioneering open agriculture and engineering with such ambition, new shoots are rising to adopt and spread these methods, as seen in robust collaborative projects such as Farm Hack.

WikiHouse & Open Desk

As recent graduates in 2011, architects Alastair Parvin and Nicholas Ierodiaconou found themselves hired by an innovative London design practice called Zero Zero Architecture. Both shared a passion for open design and were given the opportunity to experiment with their ideas.

While exploring CNC [computer numerical control] fabrication, the two architects and their team used automated printer-like technology to design files that could be fabricated from plywood, which in turn allowed them to develop a construction system made of large, flat wooden pieces. These pieces could be assembled quickly and with unskilled labor to make the structural shell of a home.

After publishing the Wikihouse construction system as open source files available to anyone, the project encouraged others to adapt its creations for different environments. They released a manifesto outlining the core principles of the organization, and invited people to sign up in their own individual chapters. This allowed a collaborative network to form without compromising anybody’s autonomy. The community, twenty chapters strong in 2015, is able to connect with the project without requiring management from Wikihouse and its small team. Wikihouse is now registering as a nonprofit foundation, using grants and pre-made kits to fund development.

Open Desk is an online platform developed by Alastair and Nicolas for selling furniture that is designed and produced through open source principles. Although structured as a for-profit company, Open Desk is a collaborative community of designers, makers and buyers. Designers propose furniture designs that can be made using the same plywood fabrication technique used by Wikihouse. The proposed designs are voted upon by the community, and if demand is high, they are added to the official product line. Users have the choice to either download the files and make the product themselves (for a small fee) or buy a prefabricated product though the site. Orders are assigned to a fabrication facility local to the client, and revenues are split three ways between the designer, the manufacturer and Open Desk.

The system is not entirely open source because use of the designs must be purchased (albeit only for a small amount) and they come with licenses that prohibit commercial reproduction of the products (although noncommercial, personal copying is allowed). This has been done in an effort to protect and incentivize Open Desk’s designer community.

Open Desk and Wikihouse were intentionally founded on open principles in an effort to foster communities of designers and users. By changing the traditional model of design and manufacturing, they are allowing for global collaboration linked to local production, slowly inverting the standard “producer to consumer” production model to something more participatory, innovative and accessible.

Public Lab

Public Lab is an organization that creates cheap, open source hardware and software tools to help citizens document and investigate environmental problems together. It began in 2005 when a group of loosely affiliated activists set off to Louisiana in the wake of the BP oil spill. There, they began documenting coastal oil pollution using low-tech kite mapping techniques. Over the past few years, the organization has grown into an international community whose members are working to understand their natural environments with greater scientific precision, and to hold to account those responsible for damaging them.

Public Lab describes itself as a community supported by a nonprofit organ­ization. Through their store, they sell low-cost open source monitoring kits, which are legally considered donations. This allows them to secure foundation grants while also earning revenues from sales of their monitoring products. As an open source hardware developer, Public Lab provides guides on how anyone can make their tools at home for free.

Public Lab’s real value is not in the tools, but what is done with them. The balloon mapping kit, for example, allows users to create exceptionally high-resolution aerial photographs (to map oil pollution or coastal erosion) for exceptionally low costs. The images can then be uploaded to Public Lab’s website where users can stitch them together using open source software, and where the maps can be analyzed by the community. The resulting images (if good enough) are even scraped by Google and added to their mapping services. (This is an example of how open-platform corporations often appropriate things from the commons for their own profit-making purposes, and why many digital commoners are now turning to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses.)

Public Lab is a fine example of how a dedicated community with useful open-source tools can populate a digital commons with valuable data. The website is heavily editable in the manner of a large public wiki/notebook hybrid so that everyone’s work is documented. The community is motivated by a curiosity or concern, and the Public Lab website gives people access to the tools and information they need to help investigate. The resulting discoveries can be documented, shared and used to lobby for political change.

Jeff Warren, one of Public Lab’s cofounders, calls this “speaking the language of power.” Rather than petitioning for change through traditional means of protest, which may or may not be respected by authorities, the hard scientific data produced by the Public Labs community gives it powerful factual justifications to launch official investigations.

Public Lab is a project which evolved organically from a group of activists who realized they were developing an important new form of community activism based on the power of open data, open hardware and open source software to influence government policymaking and enforcement.

Conclusion

What motivates these projects to contribute to our commons? I think the answers vary a great deal. Open Source Ecology is driven by a desire for autonomy in farming. Wikihouse wants to lower barriers to custom design. Open Desk is expanding creative designs and localized production. Public Lab is pioneering new forms of effective, scientific activism.

. There is another salient force here: a recognition that business as usual often serves to separate us from what is really important and cannot create the scale or speed of change needed to address the multitude of challenges we face in the modern world.

Tristan Copley-Smith (US) is a documentary filmmaker and communications expert aiming to empower positive disruptions in technology and society. He has worked with organizations like Wikileaks and Open Source Ecology to build supportive followings and communities, and is cofounder of the Open Source Beehives citizen science project.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Will Scullin

Photo by oranginaaaa

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Outline

• What are the commons?
• Is there an example of a commons business model?
• In what areas are commons active?
• Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
• How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
• What is the importance of digital commons?
• What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
• What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
• Further reading

What are the commons?

Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.

Photo by 4nitsirk

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There is an emerging body of ideas and practices around distributed manufacturing / production. P2P Foundation researchers recently articulated the “design global – manufacture local” (DGML) model. Last year I followed up with this essay for the P2P Foundation on “cosmo-localization“. Meanwhile Fab City launched its initiative to drive localized city based open design production. New communities like Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysans and enterprises like OSvehicle are making practical strides.

To explore this further, I am organising an event in Melbourne, Australia, that will bring together experts in the areas of additive manufacturing, industrial design, the maker movement, and ecological economics. Together we will explore the emerging outline of this new economic model. Join us if you would like to find out what this revolution means for industry, for government policy and for society. You may discover opportunities to connect with the people driving and playing in this emerging space.

DATE AND TIME: Fri, May 12, 2017, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM AES

LOCATION: Kelvin Club, 14-30 Melbourne Pl, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

• Five speakers will present, each for 10 minutes (descriptions below).
• This will be followed by a Q&A for any guests to ask questions.
• Food and drink can be ordered from the Kelvin Club before, during or after the event.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite – Book Now

Symposium Presenters and Topics 

Sharon Ede will present on Fab City, an example of ‘Design Global Manufacture Local’ based in Barcelona, which seeks to leverage the digital and traditional production infrastructure of Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) and open source design to help bring production and making skills back to cities. Barcelona, Paris, Boston, Detroit, Santiago, San Francisco and Shenzhen are among the cities which have taken a pledge to relocalise 50% of their production of energy, food and manufacturing by 2054.

Rob Eales will discuss his current work including, developing tools for small acre and organic farmers, the farm hack model as a way to drive the development of new tools, the opportunities in the development of better internet access for Victorian rural and regional communities, the OSVehicle project and what it could mean for local production, the drivers and opportunities for his practice and current issues that exist for these approaches including scaling up or across, the funding and documenting of Open Source Hardware (OSHW) projects and R&D in the context of these projects.

Dr. Mark Richardson will discuss four core principles that tie together his practice-based design research – openness, modularity, design for reuse and making. He is interested in how tangible expressions of these help create the narratives that shift culture, inspire systems renewal, develop communities of practice and provide new and optimistic senses of self, space and place.

Alison Kershaw will talk about how makerspaces are places of opportunity and possibility. As local and global economies change makerspaces are going to play a vital part in providing low cost, low risk and supported access to new technologies and communities of people wanting to create, learn, share, solve both local and global problems. Current policy and thinking regarding makerspaces is short sighted. It predominantly focuses on makerspaces in educational institutions, to the exclusion of community makerspaces, which are more than educational but communities of makers exploring new ways of working, doing business and creating value.

Dr. Jose Ramos will talk about the transition to a design global, manufacture local approach to production, what he calls “cosmo-localization”. This shift includes a number of critical elements: the human right to produce from global designs, the elaboration of a circular economy to complement industrial micro-clusters, a “partner state” model where government will support both localized manufacturing, peer production communities and makerspaces, the development of anchor organizations that protect the design commons, and entrepreneurial coalitions capable of scaling production from niche to market.

BIOS

Sharon Ede

Sharon Ede is an urbanist and activist working to build the sharing and collaborative movement in Adelaide, Australia and beyond. In 2012, she set up Share Adelaide to document and inspire local sharing activity. In her public servant role, she initiated and collaborated on a project that maps community sharing assets, which was funded and open sourced by the State government.Sharon is a co founder of the Post Growth Institute and a catalyst for the FabCity Global Initiative.

Rob Eales

Rob Eales is an Industrial Designer working with Open Source Hardware and Software as a way to explore new approaches and methods for the development of products and services that seek to address critical societal issues such as climate change. He is interested in how the development and distribution of open source products could redefine the work that communities do and where they do it. Recently he has been working with small-acre, organic farmers to develop new tools, organising farm hack events and discussing the possibilities of open source vehicle design with his network.

Mark Richardson

Mark Richardson is formally a senior designer at Ford Motor Company, he was involved in both conceptual and global manufacturing projects, such as the R7 show car, Territory, European Mondeo and Asia Pacific Fiesta. Mark now lectures in Industrial Design at Monash University, having completed a PhD seeking evidence to support the advance of ecologically and socially sustainable mobility systems through hands-on practices of making. His research now investigates how we can transition from current design and production methods to more sustainable, resilient and accessible systems of creating, making, sharing and learning.

Alison Kershaw

Alison Kershaw likes to work at the edges and at the beginning of things. She relishes collaborating and working with others to find solutions to problems and making great things happen. Alison loves the interface of community development activities and technology to build inclusion, participation and change. Alison is happiest when she is brining ideas to life. Alison has produced large scale events, directed plays, set up an accessible internet café, designed and implemented policies and currently facilitates community development and engagement initiatives. Alison is the founding Chair of the volunteer not for profit SA Makers Inc, which promotes makers and making in South Australia. SA Makers manages Fab Lab Adelaide and produces Maker Faire Adelaide.

Jose Ramos

Jose Ramos is director of Action Foresight, a Melbourne-based business that focuses on bridging transformational futures with present-day action. He has taught foresight, public policy and social innovation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Sunshine Coast and Victoria University. He is senior consulting editor for the Journal of Future Studies, and has over 50 publications spanning economic, cultural and political change. He is an honorary fellow at the Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing in Melbourne.

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“This project aims at:

• understanding open source product development, showing concrete evidence of this emerging practice and delivering detailed description of the phenomenon;

• modeling the open source product development process as an alternative to well-anchored industrial product development processes;

• providing concrete process support in the form of methods and IT-tools. It will particularly be focused on the concept of a open design platform.

The P2P Lab is a consulting partner to this research project.

Contents of the wiki

All along the project, we will use this wiki to share results and data with the open source hardware community. Check for example the following pages:

• The page “A guide to Open Source Hardware” summarizes the best practices of product-related data sharing we have observed so far;

• The page “List of open source hardware products” provides a large collection of products released under open source licences;

• The page “Open-O-meter” defines a scale for measuring the “openness” of open source hardware.

Research programme

The aim of the project is to characterize current practices of open source product development in order to develop concrete guidance to support design process efficiency of open source product development projects. This guidance shall particularly consider:

• the organizational and business environment of open design projects: What business models can be built based on open design? What are the motivational drivers of project contributors and what are the different roles they may play? How is governance implemented? Through what regulation mechanisms are decisions taken?

• the open source product development process: What can ensure an efficient distribution of design tasks in a loosely-coupled organization? What validation mechanisms ensure the approval or rejection of individuals` contributions? How to ensure that contributions converge and let emerge a sufficiently designed product?

• the supporting information systems: What structure of product data information is adapted to a decentralized organization of design tasks? What capabilities should offer an online collaborative design platform to support the efficient collaboration of distant designers? What is the typology of information and intermediary objects to be stored and edited online to ensure building a common understanding between project contributors?

This will be addressed through the development of:

• a formalized open source product development process for coordinating individual efforts of community members towards a finished product design;

• online tools enabling collaborative engineering, thus supporting simultaneously the three functional spaces of collaboration: communication (e.g. chat, wiki), cooperation (e.g. concurrent text editing) and coordination (e.g. task allocation through workflows).”

More information about this research project can be found here.

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