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

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Growth of Open Design and Production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From perfecting a do it yourself spectrometer to mapping and monitoring pollution emissions, Public Lab believes that environmental science can be everyone’s responsibility, and that collaboration should begin at the earliest stages of scientific investigation in order to change the way people see the world around them socially, politically, and environmentally.

Public Lab is free and open for everyone to get involved. Find out more at their website.

Interview with Stevie Lewis (Outreach Manager), Liz Barry (Director of Community Development ), and Mathew Lippincott (Director of Production)

How does Public Lab view open science and citizen science as a pathway to participation in civic community?

Traditional science researcher-subject relationships remove people from the inquiry process. In Public Lab, local environmental questions are asked by people living nearby, and can be explored with tools that are low cost and easy to use. Practicing open source science increases not only the number of people who engage on environmental issues, but creates the space for everyone to explore, generate data, and define the outcomes they seek. Open science and citizen science put people in the center, empowering them with tools and resources to speak substantively about their environmental concerns.

Open licensing is built into all the Public Lab’s projects. In what ways have you seen open source effectively foster collaboration through open processes and licensing?

Open licenses set a basic expectation of sharing. Public Lab’s friendly community norms around sharing are backed with legal structures, so participants know that their authorship will be credited and downstream contributions will continue to grow the commons. When working with community groups, open licensing is the basis for community ownership and provides a sense of security. This transparency increases conversation and discussion, which reinforces the community’s ability to pursue long-term environmental justice outcomes.

Why is “open” important to the Public Lab? How do you use openness to support scientific and educational communities?

Science is fundamentally about replication, and truly independent replication without openness is impossible. Closed licenses and proprietary hardware limit independent evaluation and access to knowledge. Openness has many aspects, however, and we see openness as about more than just licenses. Consider the accessibility of communications and data: Translating content out of difficult expert discourses expands the number of people who can interact with the issues and concepts. Accessible data, such as photographic monitoring, and other visual data, helps people to engage with results. So being open isn’t only about the science itself, but about making the process accessible.

Photo: Public Lab River Rat Pack St. Louis Exhibition CC BY-SA-3.0

How does openness drive innovation within environmental science and other scientific work?

It is exciting to see science today thinking a lot about openness at the publication stage with a push towards publishing full datasets and articles in the open access movement. However, there is even more work to be done at the pre-press stage. This is not just about “open source between scientists” — but a project to use the principles of open source from problem identification to publication. This helps to break down barriers between science practitioners and the public, to the benefit of both. In many fields there’s little or no open collaboration, especially with the public in other parts of the process. This has contributed to a wide gap between science practice and the public; a gap which keeps key environmental and pollution knowledge from communities which need it.

When openness is the part of the focus, and communities are part of the entire process, we all work in the same space. This means that we can more easily share ideas, learn from each other, and collaboratively generate more knowledge.

What kinds of projects have you worked on that have been particularly inspiring? Have you seen your work remixed or built upon by your community in any surprising ways?

Balloon and Kite mapping, the project that launched Public Lab, continues to inspire. Our original case– making online photo maps of pollution sites (recent example in Picayune, MS)– has expanded to include photography and videography at protests, enhancing public discussions on the qualitative experiences of place and dislocation, and new photography rigs for panoramas and 3D scans.

The spectrometry project has been through many variations, and builds. There are over 70,000 spectra from these and over 8,800 contributors. Where originally this project aimed at exploring questions such as “can I tell if this sample contains petrochemical oils?”, people have built and used spectrometers that look different and explore all kinds of other questions such as food oil fraud and the presence of organophosphate pesticides.

Balloon Mapping the Camp. Photo by Claudia Martinez Mansell CC BY-SA 3.0

What environmental challenges are you solving for with your community right now? How do you initiate projects?

Examples of some of the challenges people have been working through on Public Lab recently have included things like: How can I measure the size of a landfill in my community, and can I determine when it has reached its capacity? Can I monitor emissions from polluters with any body sensing methods such as visual or odor monitoring, and if so, what types of violations can I catch with these? How do I capture a pollution runoff event from a development or a facility? These challenges come into Public Lab from people who bring them to the website, the online forums, and in-person events.

What’s coming up for the Public Lab? How can people get involved?

There is a lot of exciting activity in Public Lab right now. We are working to bring structure and strength to the research culture of the community by creating systems for publishing assistance and tool versioning. There are also new ways to interact on Public Lab with the creation of activity grids on tool pages and a new “Question/Answer” feature that’s helping people to interact and share information. We also have a number of live spaces where people can collaborate, from our monthly OpenHour, to the upcoming Annual Barnraising in Louisiana this coming November. Everything from building the questions and the knowledge base on Public Lab, to creating the website itself is an open process that people can get involved in. Join us online or in person!

lead photo credit: Regional Barnraising CC BY-SA 3.0. Article by Jennie Rose Halperin. Cross-published from Creative Commons

The post Collaboratively Generating More Knowledge: Public Lab’s Approach to Citizen Science appeared first on P2P Foundation.