We invite you set up a local event in your city, develop and use open circularity solutions and connect to people world wide. Here is how and why:

WHY

‘Planet earth is doomed’. Is it?

Humanity faces enormous challenges: Climate change is marching, resource shortages accelerate, species extinction is faster than ever, and the current rise of fascism in some parts of the world presents us a first impression how people react when they get scared by things changing to the worse for them.

But,

You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

-Albert Einstein

We need to recreate our economy – our methods of collaboration and production – to build a future worth living in.

Open Source is a transparent, distributed, collaborative methodology made possible by the internet. Though still in its infancy outside of software, we firmly believe that Open Source offers the most rapid and transformative pathway to create a truly ecological ‘circular’ economy that can meet humanities needs while staying within planetary boundaries and enabling all life forms on earth. And this is what we are working for!

But changing habits isn’t easy. The current methods of production and collaboration are effective and deeply embedded in our everyday life and thinking. Open Source – collaboration methodologies based on transparency – on the other hand is still an unsolved riddle in many areas. Let’s solve it! Let’s experiment and make progress. Let’s use and build upon existing open circularity solutions and create more of them. First pioneers have created projects and business that show us the potential of openness and the ecosystem thinking that goes with it. We all can start with Openness and Circularity right now.

So once again we invite you to join us for a global event. Switch on your brains and creativity, activate your optimism, zest for life and local community so that together, we can imagine and build a positive future. Here is a Guide for Participation:

Create A Local Event – FAQ

OSCEdays connects people on the subject of Open Source Circular Economy. In the past 3 years more than 100 cities participated with local events contributing to the progress. In 2018 & 2019 we continue the journey focussing for the first time on using/implementing the resources that were created by the community in the past. It is a big moment :-). Join us, set up your local event, and let’s make progress together. Here is how:

Date & Size

There is no required minimum size for a local event. A room with a smaller group of people working for a few hours or hundreds of people working several days, everything is possible.

You can set up your event whenever you like. Every year so far we announced a global date. This date is not mandatory. And there is no date set for 2019 yet.

Program

What are good activities for an event?

Open Source and Circular Economy are pretty new questions. So some local organizers struggled in the past to find content for an event. But with the work of the past years there are now first good resources to use and build upon at your local event. We invite you to implement open solutions and develop them further. There are also other options for content like talks, workshops and challenges. But let’s start with the solutions:

1) Play With ‘Open Solutions’

The OSCEdays forum contains many valuable things. Really well documented and ready to use resources are marked with “Solution”. Here is a list with a collection of them. For most it is self explanatory how to use them for interactive hands on sessions in an event. Some have extra remarks to support this. So browse the list and find possible activities and content.

Examples from the list:

• Open Source Business Models For Circular Economy. A design-thinking tool and workshop format on open source (business) ecosystems and the practical design of products & services for them. >
  
• Precious Plastic: Well documented machines you can build yourself to recycle plastic locally, build new products with it and set up a business around. >>
  
• ‘Make It Circular’: An open poster on circular making you can translate, print, hang up and run prototyping sessions with. >>

• Circular Wedding (Or Celebration): Learn from Seigos wedding tutorial and create a zero waste event circular style! You can have a circular wedding or adapt the methodology to any other event or celebration. >>
  
• PRe-Use & Re-Use Sessions: Find existing circular modularity in your environment and build infrastructures or products with them. >>
  
• Circular City Hacking: A list of urban interventions/city hacks to transform your city – and to experiment and campaign for the open source circular city. Run a hackathon or implementation session with them. >>

(more here)

Think about combining things! Build an urban garden with reused infrastructure and structures based on a unified grid for example

Call For Open Circularity Solutions!

Do you have great, open and well documented circularity solutions people could use locally, run events around and implement them in their city? For example a hardware that can be built during an event? Let us know Here!

Facilitation Of Open Solutions 

For most if not all of these resources you’ll need someone to facilitate a public session about them. Do it yourself: Pick a resource and implement it. This is already an event. But if you want to run a larger event with several sessions try to find people in your community interested in doing the same with other solutions. Sessions can be well prepared upfront or you can come together and have a deep look at the resource only at the event.

You can do this also university like: Build a group that wants to set up an event and then each of you picks one activity (solution) to prepare and run.

You can also reach out to the creators of the solution. Maybe they have some time.

2) Challenges, Talks, Workshops Of Your Local Actors

In almost every city there are people working on sustainability solutions. This might be companies or startups or other types of organizations like NGOs. They probably don’t use or build a lot of Open Source resources yet. Invite them to your event. There are a couple of things they can do:

TALKS

Most of them are probably ready to do a presentation. Talks are good, inspiring stories are important. But try to make your speakers not just deliver advertisement talks, but share really meaningful, enabling information and details (how is it working). You can ask your speakers about Openness, Open Source and transparency in the Q&A. Some might have heard about it already and have some ideas or opinions. You don’t have to convince them about Openness. All ideas are welcome.

WORKSHOPS

But maybe you can get them to do more than a talk. They can bring their product, open it – invite people to screw it open, ask questions about technical details, improve it together and so on. Find someone who can teach how to grow mushrooms, how to solder, how to avoid waste in your house etc. Some inspiration how to share solutions in other formats than talks can be found here.

‘CHALLENGES’

Challenges have been the core of the OSCEdays in the past. In a challenge a person, project or company presents and prepares a question or problem and invites people to help solving it. This often needs facilitation. Try to make sure there is good documentation of the problems and solutions afterwards. To get inspiration for challenges have a look here (formats) and here & here(content)

Ok. With this you should have some ideas what will or might happen at your event.

Some Helpful Resources

Pointers and resources for organizing and communicating your event.

• Funding: There are plenty of options how to fund an OSCEdays event: Sell tickets, try to find sponsors, apply for grants. Practical tips and resources that might help you to fund your event are collected and shared here.
  
• OSCEdays Graphic Design Files: We share all OSCEdays graphic designs under open licenses and in editable formats. You can use them and adapt them as you like. Many did in the past and created really beautiful remixes and additions to the available graphics. Have a look into our public graphic design folder.
  
• Video: In the °OSCE TV° category on our forum you can find tutorials how you can document and connect your event with video streamings.

Sign Up! How To Register Your Event

To get your event officially on the map we like you to register it by creating a topic about on our forum. With this you become visible on the global level and a start is made to connect your local activities to the global community.

The forum might look complicated at first but it isn’t. And we have an easy to follow step by step guide for registering your event. Continue here!

In that topic you will also find some suggestions how to make your local community use the forum to share information and collaborate with other cities. Start here!

Reprinted from oscedays. Find the original post here!

IMAGE CREDITS: 18L Module, by Nikusha Chkhaidze, CC-BY-SA; Bee, by Jon Sullivan, Public Domain; Mushrooms, by Dax & ZeroWasteLabs.Com; Open Structures Part, by Lukas Wegwerth, CC-BY-SA; Cargo, by The City Is Open Source, CC-BY-SA; Beer, by The City Is Open Source, CC-BY-SA; Make It Circular, by OSCEdays, CC-BY-SA; Biohof_arche_5012, by: Arche Zürich, CC-BY-SA; Extruder, by Precious Plastic, CC-BY-SA

The post OSCEdays Call For Local Organizers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

9 out of 10 startups fail in the first 3 years. This happens for many reasons: not the right time, not the right place, not the right team, not the right idea/solution, not the right context, and more…

The lack of quality of the solution is only in few cases the main reason. The solution might be good but the startup fails anyway for one of the others reasons. But when it has failed often the fully developed solution (a working prototype or even complete product) gets buried on some hard drives first and is lost a little later completely when those hard drives are buried. The entrepreneurs are busy with other things.

This is sad for sustainability reasons. Because a lot of time, money and energy has already gone into the development of the solution. Many technical problems were solved, many questions were answered. But this knowledge and the possibilities attached to it get lost on these buried hard drives. The progress that was made for sustainability is gone again.

Maybe the reason for the fail really was just bad timing and the same idea would work beautifully one year later or in another context. But the new team has to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel. And a lot of energy is already used up when they get to the point where the others have failed. This dynamic is really bad for sustainability where we need to be quicker and smarter. This is – as said – unsustainable itself.

So here is a simple idea for that: How about a fund where startups that have just failed or are about to fail go to and ask one more time for some last funding. They receive something between 5 000 to 10 000 Euros and this money is used to document the solution extensively and put it online under an open license – in short: they OPEN SOURCE it! Make it possible for others to study, build upon, distribute, make and sell the solution. To bring it to live after all.

The fund or institution behind it supports that process. It makes sure everything is done well, helps with the licensing questions and ensures that the data is well spread (on several platforms!) and promoted.

This could be fantastic! The solutions of dead sustainability start ups become humus for new ones:

(1) Some solutions really might get picked up by a new team with a fresh perspective.

(2) Often probably just parts get reused by other startups, for example the choice of materials or collected data.

(3) Maybe large companies pick up some solutions and end up becoming more sustainable.

(4) Even completely new ideas can be inspired and made possible for example when different solutions are combined with each other.

(5) Or maybe even the entrepreneurs themselves finally find a way to make their idea work with the opportunities of Open Source!

This “graveyard” of open sourced sustainability startups/solutions could be a fertile ground for a lot of new flourishing live and fruitful activities for sustainability.

For an institution or accelerator with the goal to support sustainability through startups this could be a very smart way and an opportunity to make more and more lasting impact. Sustainability is about opportunities for complex ecosystems!

How this would work in every detail is not for me to flesh out here. Whoever picks this up will have their own ideas anyway. But it is for sure an interesting path to explore! And I was really happy to learn in Milan, that within Climate-KIC the discussions if patents really make sense when we want to save the climate have begun! A real sustainable circular economy will only work with Open Source solutions and here we have a great angle to start this from. Instead of throwing things away (dead start ups) make sure they can be reused using Open Source.

And I just want to add that me and my colleagues from the OSCEdays and Opent It Agency are here to help with the “proper Open Source” part – here from Berlin to (literally) the other side of the globe (New Zealand).

UPDATE: The same idea in the program of the german party „Demokratie in Bewegung“

_______

Image Credits

1 – by Shantimarie, CC-BY-SA | 2 – by Andrew Dunn, CC-BY-SA | 3 a – SuSanA Secretariat, CC-BY | 3 b – by Tsaag Valren, CC-BY-SA| 4 – by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, CC-BY-SA | 5 – by S Molteno, public domain

Photo by Dru!

The post Turn Failed Sustainability Startups Into Fertile Soil (Humus) For New Ones – By Making Them Open Source 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.