Since 2011 I have been working almost full time on collaborative projects, with open and decentralized organizations. I can say that I’ve seen it all, but I am still trying to make sense of it all.

I recently realized something that plagues a lot of small scale collaborative organizations. As strange as it might seam, it’s the good feeling that most of them nurture. To put it bluntly, often these type of organizations put the good feeling that members experience together, before work. Members of these organizations will often act to save the pleasure, the friendship, while they sacrifice work.

We all want to feel good in our work environment. But we need to realize that the primary reason people get together in open and collaborative projects is to achieve something, not to have fun. There are plenty of other opportunities to have fun. Fun can be a byproduct of working together, when everything goes well. But work is not always fun, it comes with responsibilities, sometimes we must do things that we don’t like, sometimes it generates stress, sometimes we need to confront difficult situations and difficult people.

The problem is that most informal, small scale collaborative communities lose their ability to deal with negativity, which cannot always be avoided. When a negative situation arises, very often people go into hiding, try to cover it up, put on the proverbial fake smile, simply ignore the situation, or take the wrong approach in dealing with it, avoiding at all costs making things personal, even when the source/cause is a particular individual. Some people, we know them as the straight shooters, the community guardians or the barking dogs, identify the issue, call it like it is, point the finger. Very often, those who don’t shy away from defending the community from wrong-doing find themselves attacked by other members for disrupting the good feeling. They become the problem, they feel victimized for having acted for the benefit of the community, they get frustrated, and some even quit. Such communities filter out these important individuals who fill the role of keeping things real, and attract people that avoid negativity. Some communities that I experienced feel fake, they are a place where everything is rose and must be kept rose. When the straight shooters and the barking dogs are neutralized, the community becomes a lame duck, widely exposed to abuse. What might happen, is that wolfs identify the widely exposed flock of sheep and infiltrate it. When they attack, the superficial sense of good feeling gets replaced with an overwhelming sense of insecurity, and the community disperses.

We also need to mention the tremendous amount of effort these communities spend to harmonize relations, which is not put into productive work. They are pretty heavy into forging a group identity and a sense of belonging. They spend a lot of time on training their members on non-violent communication. They heavily rely on face-to-face meetings to strengthen interpersonal bonds, which are costly (in terms of time and traveling), sometimes highly inefficient and excluding those who cannot be there but can still contribute.

Another important side-effect of too much bonding is the creation of collusion clusters, people that start protecting each others, covering each others up for their wrong doing to protect their friendship, even if that goes against the common goal. A strongly bounded community also develops a tribal mentality, which makes it less open to newcomers, who need to divert a large portion of their efforts towards gaining acceptance instead of doing productive work. There is an optimum of bonding in a collaborative community, beyond which things turn bad.

But it’s not just people to blame here…We need to understand the socioeconomic dynamic. These types of organisations that form around a cause and don’t generate (enough) tangible benefits for their members are held together mostly by good feeling, shared values and culture. People instinctively or consciously realize that in order to keep everyone engaged they need to keep everyone happy, they need to nurture a positive atmosphere. The game becomes: commit to some effort and you’ll be rewarded in good feelings. Peer pressure gets biased towards maintaining the good feeling.

So how can we escape the spiraling down towards the la-la land?

In my opinion, we need to realize that the game played within small scale collaborative communities is only first order, mostly driven by irrationality. People are almost unconsciously driven towards this good feeling and want to preserve it. They end up reversing priorities, putting the good feeling before the work. They almost forget why they are there, which is to achieve something together in the first place, rather than just having fun. Shying away from negativity is also a natural, mostly irrational reaction. Dealing with negativity requires energy and guts, which come with commitment, with the realization that we are there to achieve something, and that something needs to be protected.

Small collaborative communities need to add a rational layer on top of the irrational first order, which amounts to a work ethic. Members need to be reminded that they are together first and foremost to achieve something, that work might be difficult, stressful, that they might have to deal with insecurity, to put up with problematic individuals, etc. The community needs to nurture a sense of responsibility and commitment to the cause, not just to naively promise fun and good feelings until the end of the project.

Inject more rationality and objectivity into your community and you’ll avoid becoming a la-la land. Realize that your straight shooters and barking dogs are important assets. Nurture a work ethic of responsibility and commitment. All this should be enough to change the collaboration game to: commit to some effort and we’ll achieve our collective goal, and perhaps have some fun on the way. Changing the game will affect the composition of your community. You’ll most probably lose some people, those who have a really low tolerance to negativity, but you’ll retain other people, those who are more goal oriented.

Building a more goal oriented community is an important step, if you aim at creating a more stable and capable organisation, that can generate tangible benefits for its members. As members start to benefit in a tangible way from their collaboration (generate earnings for example), they will stop putting the good feeling before the work, the collaboration game will shift again.

For more insights, also read my post Developmental stages and problems for open communiti

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Stacco has worked alongside Michel Bauwens for many years and has an excellent grasp on the concepts of the commons, whilst Monica is currently developing Teixidora.net and also contributes to several commons-oriented initiatives in Catalonia such as La Comunificadora, and cooperative FemProcomuns. Tiberius is focused on open hardware development, production and distribution.

Focussing on the present and future possibilities, in this panel and live Q&A session the speakers discuss how we can develop sustainable, self-organising ecosystems based on open innovation, highlighting business models that are based on p2p economics principles and rely on p2p technologies to develop shared infrastructure and methodologies of mutual aid and peer to peer support.

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“SENSORICA is not a corporation, it is not a coop, it is not an non profit, it is not an LLP. It is an open value network. From a legal perspective, it is a non-registered association. It is an open network of freelancers that coordinate and co-manage their work using some IT tools (the NRP-VAS) and some special governance. If you still don’t understand what SENSORICA is and how it operates please don’t panic. It is something new and it takes a bit of time to get accustomed. It is new, but at the same time it is very similar to other new things that have emerged recently, like Bitcoin for example. We can say that

Tiberius and his colleagues try to explain how Sensorica succeeds in transferring value from the classic economy to the new peer production economy.

Excerpted from Tiberius Brastaviceanu, Scott Laughlin, and Jim Anastassiou:

“How do you sign a contract with a loose network of individuals? Who is going to show up to do the work? How can we guarantee that a swarm of people converging on tasks from all four corners of the planet via the Internet will deliver on time, and with the required specifications? Who is responsible and accountable?

In our opinion, SENSORICA is the most advanced commons-based peer production network applied to hardware production, using infrastructure and methodologies that have been specifically tailored for open networks. We claim that the OVN model is able to sustain deterministic economic processes and accountability, while preserving the open and fluid nature of networks, while maximizing individual autonomy. This new ability of open innovation and peer production networks to generate predictable outputs, demonstrated by SENSORICA, was the main topic of the meeting with Jenn Gustetic from the White House, in June of 2015.

The role of SENSORICA in the service cases enumerated earlier shaped as the interface between the crowd and the classical institution. In other words, input from the crowd can be structured and channeled towards solving someone’s problem, through SENSORICA’s infrastructure, methodologies and governance. But let’s not get confused, we are not talking about a crowdsourcing platform. So what is the difference? A crowdsourcing platform like Upwork is an intermediary between companies and the crowd: the company posts a problem with a prize for someone who can provide the solution; the platform takes a cut. Taskrabbit is the Uber of cheap labor, connecting people who need chores done with people who can do them, while taking a cut from their transactions. In both cases, the intermediary platform is owned by a company and those who supply the work aren’t organized, they respond individually to demands. In the SENSORICA model, no one in particular really owns the platform. Affiliates of the network organize, they form groups to tackle complex problems for long periods of time. In the cases discussed here, the size of a project is comparable to a startup, reaching up to 10 individuals. The longest duration of steady work is 6 months and ticking. These are the first pilot projects, but the potential is for thousands of individuals per project, which amounts to a large size enterprise, for long-term projects that can take years. SENSORICA is really showing the signs of a new system of production that can operate at large scale. But as an R&D service provider, it can be already be seen by classical institutions as R&D on demand, as an adjacent, very cohesive R&D operation open to the crowd, funneling in low cost and rapidly evolving open innovation. Practically the entire revenue generated is split among participants, with only 5% going to maintain and to develop the infrastructure, which is under the total control of participants.

At the third iteration, the service beneficiary gets a fast paced innovation at a quarter of the normal cost. Even more interestingly, the cost cuts aren’t transferred to those who provide the service. They are actual cost savings that result from a heavy use and rapid remix of open source, from the mutualization of resources within the network, from the collaborative nature of activities, from the elimination of bureaucracy, and other inefficiencies that come from lack of motivation. On the contrary, everyone is paid with the same measure, according to the Canadian labor market, no matter where the contributor lives. More precisely, within SENSORICA those who live in Pakistan aren’t paid less. And if that wasn’t enough, on top of providing rapid innovation at a fraction of the cost to classical institutions, so that they can maintain jobs, at the same time sensoricans increase the value of the global commons, because everything they do is open source. All the data about the economic activity within SENSORICA is open to the public, we can’t make this up!

This mutually beneficial economic relationship between classical institutions and SENSORICA, as an open innovation and peer production network, can be seen as a bridge between the classical capitalist economy and the p2p economy, as a channel for transfer of resources from the old economy to the new.”

Example 1: The Barda case

The Barda periscope project was the first implementation of a new open project development methodology designed by Fernando, Tiberius and Lynn, in the context of a service provided to a client. This methodology was formalized in SENSORICA’s network resource planning (NRP) software through a concept named Workflow recipes, which are time-dependent and deliverables-dependent bundles of Processes associated with a Project (a context of work). This methodology consists of the following steps: Project initiation, Design considerations, Design, Prototyping, and Product. All the contributions to the Project were logged within this structure.

In order to reduce the perceived risk for the client, the Project was divided into milestones. A cost estimation was produced for the client for every milestone. The agreement was to get paid at the end of every milestone. Every milestone was to be delivered with complete documentation, open source style. The client could stop the process at the end of any milestone and decide to switch to another organization to complete the Project. The documentation provided a guarantee for rapid continuation. The burden was on SENSORICA to provide a good service, at the level of satisfaction of the client, in order to complete all the milestones.

Moreover, the activity logs in the NRP and the associated documentation provided the client with full and real time access to the process. Coordination on different issues and tasks took place in context, directly in the working documents, and the client was invited to provide feedback.

A problem emerged during this project: very rapidly, the work documents became long and the client’s ability to follow the process was hindered. We spent time formatting the documents to make their content more transparent, but these measures didn’t diminish the time spent by the client to effectively follow the process. The situation was more complex, because this was a three parties relation, between the SENSORICA team, Barda and Parcs Canada, Barda’s client. Information produced by sensoricans had to be reformatted to match Barda’s project management structure and the language used between Barda and Parc Canada. In the end, Barda provided sensoricans with a template for 3-way communication, based on their own open issues and tasks.

The Barda periscope project was a small project, involving only a few contributors (see project in SENSORICA’s NRP-VAS). Coordination was fairly easy at this small scale.

Example 2: The Queen’s University case

Joshua Pearce is a professor at Queen’s University and Michigan Tech University. He is dedicated to open science and sustainable technologies, and had been following SENSORICA since 2013. He is the author of the Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development paper. For years, Joshua’s team has designed multiple scientific instruments by building on various open source projects. These instruments have been released under open licenses. In 2015, he decided to take a risk and transfer to the SENSORICA network the task of designing an instrument used in the characterization of photovoltaic materials. This was an important shift in Joshua team’s approach, from in house development with inspiration from open source projects to crowdsourcing development through the SENSORICA distributed network. The main goal was to create an instrument with a community around it, which would increase the speed of innovation, insure continuity of the product, and increase its diffusion rate to universities around the world. At the same time, the PV characterization project was also seen as a pilot project to build an interface between the crowd and a classical institution, Queen’s University, through SENSORICA’s p2p infrastructure, open project methodologies, and governance.

The open science movement is building momentum. It started with open publications, increasing access to scientific knowledge. This initiative became more nuanced, proposing early stage sharing of data and information (prior to the publication), sharing of unpublished past results and even sharing of lessons learned from failed experiments. In parallel with the development on the distribution side, the movement also built infrastructure for data sharing in resource-intensive domains of inquiry, like genomics for example, as well as social networking platforms designed for scientists and scientific projects (like Research Gate). Recently, we have seen initiatives for redesigning scientific instruments that are in tune with the open science philosophy. New instruments are acquiring new characteristics: they become shareable, they facilitate socialization of scientific activities, they become modular and interoperable, as well as easily serviceable and upgradable. Efforts also go into redesigning scientific labs, making them more collaborative, interconnected, accessible through teleproxmity, etc. SENSORICA leads the way to open science, as one can see in this presentation. The PV characterization project incorporates many of these new aspects.

This project was started by incorporating all the lessons learned in the Barda periscope project. There was a difference in scale: more individuals contributed to the design and the prototyping of the PV characterization device (11 affiliates and over 200 logged contributions). The requirements for accountability and responsibility were also higher, since we were now dealing with a University. All this put more pressure on our support processes. We created a Project responsible role, to be the interface between the University and the SENSORICA OVN. Financial incentives were attached to it. Moreover, the roles of outreach (find skills), orientation (help new affiliates get accustomed), coordination (make sure that all affiliates are on the same page) and facilitation (make sure that all affiliates get the help they need) became very important. We experimented with new tools for orientation that proved to be more effective. A specific forum was created for the project, in order to focus discussions. The PV project was also more complex, its documentation proliferated faster, which lead to the need of content maps in order to ease the navigation.

During the course of the project we noticed that the outreach function was very important and not so easy to finetune. The answers to our signals propagated on social media were slow to come and the conversion to an active contributor was low. We attributed part of that to a poor general understanding of SENSORICA’s OVN model, including its system of incentives. At the beginning of the project, we grossly underestimated the efforts required for outreach, for generating the content to be broadcasted, for establishing a constant social media presence, for mapping the open source ecosystem, targeting specific pools of talent, and establishing trust relations. The project was run below the critical mass of open projects and therefore required a more centralized form of governance.

Example 3: The IoT for heavy industry case


NOTE: We cannot publicly disclose the name of our sponsor in the IoT for heavy industry applications case.
In December 2015, sensoricans were contacted by a Montreal-based company to help develop an IoT solution for applications in heavy industry. They wanted to make their product “smart” and able to predict its life expectancy. The requirements consisted of a mesh network of sensors that send data to a cloud for analysis, in order to predict failure. The race to be first to market set the pace for fast innovation and low cost. The company crafted a business model based on services, not on selling the hardware, which is fully compatible with the open source development that SENSORICA can offer. The agreement was that everything that SENSORICA develops can be released under an open source licence, with no restrictions for Sensoricans to remix this technology in other projects, including commercial ones.

Thus, the company became the sponsor of an open source IoT applications development project. CAKE, the custodian of the SENSORICA OVN takes in financial contributions from the company and distributes them to network affiliates, as a reward for their involvement to the project, as fiscal sponsorship. The company is not a client of CAKE, since this a three party relationship, between the company, CAKE and the world, the later benefiting from the open source IoT applications design, and not simply a one-to-one service exchange between two organizations, even if the company can draw a direct benefit from this relationship.

The Sensor Network project started almost in free form. The first tacit agreement was that the sponsor informs development based on their knowledge about these applications. Decisions on development were to be made during scrum meetings between Sensoricans and employees of the sponsor, Sensoricans would work on tasks, log their time contributions and get some financial compensation every two weeks, relative to their efforts. As the project unfolded, we felt the need for better planning and cost estimation. The first improvement was to manually create a map of content generated by SENSORICA’s R&D activities. This brought the idea of being able to generate dynamic content maps, either from the NRP-VAS (every development process has R&D documents as deliverables) or from our CRM (content management system), which is not yet implemented. In order to allow the sponsor of the project to follow almost in real time metrics about the project, we created an experimental dashboard. In the end, we realized that we needed to synchronize the sponsor’s ERP with SENSORICA’s NRP. We crafted a shared language and project development structure, and the agreement was to keep track of work in both places. This brings the need to create interfaces between the two management systems, which hasn’t yet been implemented. Moreover, we also decided to produce cost estimates for future tasks, to allow the sponsor to better plan its budget. All these measures had a positive impact on our relationship by making our activities much more predictable and auditable, and by increasing the level of reliability of the network.

As the value created during this project increased, the project sponsor realized its first-to-market advantage was in potential danger if the technical work was put in the context of their direct business interest in a public way. This sparked an interesting debate on openness (access to participation) and transparency (access to information). We drew on SENSORICA’s past experience with a project that was sensitive to transparency, and implemented an open and semi-transparent project model. In more concrete terms, anyone can join the project, which preserves the openness aspect. Most of the technical information generated is public from the start, but some documents that contain information about how different components can be used in an application similar to the business case of our sponsor were made non-public. Project affiliates need to sign a non-publication agreement for these documents clustered into a separate folder, but there is no restriction related to the use of this information in any other project. All these non-public documents have a date for publication, which is related to the sponsor’s market deployment strategy and pace. We believe that in through this arrangement we preserved the nature of the SENSORICA OVN, while mitigating the risks perceived by the sponsor, which led a stronger synergy between the two entities.”

Photo by Zero-waste Design

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“The Block Chain Access project is funded by IRAP-CNRC (Canadian National Research Council). This small feasibility study aims to explore how block chain technology applies to access management for physical spaces, and provide a proof of concept. We do that in the most unbiased and generic way, not bounded by any possible business model, not influenced by any institutional structure.

The larger context of this project is physical assets management. SENSORICA’s interest is network assets management, as part of the OVN model.

SENSORICA is collaborating with eVision and Living Labs Montreal.

Main immediate stakeholders

The Canadian Federal Government needs this study in order to understand how it can reduce bureaucracy associated with access, taking into consideration their requirements and their reality, from low security to high security buildings and offices.

Caisse Desjardin is interested in applying block chain technology to managing access to their facilities. They will be part of another proof of concept that will be handled by Living Labs MTL, our partners in this project.

SENSORICA and OuiShare MTL are interested in using the block chain technology to facilitate access to Montrealers to shared spaces such as fab labs, makerspaces, co-working spaces, and later to equipment that can be found in these spaces.

Background

The project has been initiated by Tiberius Brastaviceanu in OuiShare MTL under the name of Open Space Access. Over time, the momentum has shifted within SENSORICA, with the implementation of an NFC access system for the SENSORICA Montreal lab. This activity has lead to a partnership with eVision and Living Labs MTL and a contract with the CNRC for this feasibility study.

You may find more information about this project on SENSORICA’s relevant page – this is your first stop for everything.

Jim Anastasiou and Tiberius Brastaviceanu are responsible for this project. They play the role of interface between the SENSORICA OVN.

This project will be structured on SENSORICA’s NRP-VAS.

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“This keynote by Tiberius Brastaviceanu, co-founder of Sensorica, gives you a glance at open value networks, how self-organized open source hardware communities have developed and the tools they use”

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