Open Everything ?

I just spent three days with 30ish very smart, very dedicated people exploring the concept of openness.  The meeting was held at Hollyhock on Cortez Island in British Columbia.  Hollyhock is very, very beautiful. This meeting/retreat was part of the OpenEverything series.  I was eager to attend in a effort to

1. understand how to build an open development community on top of a proprietary platform (salesforce.com)
2. abstract and apply the methodology of open source development to solving the world's most intractable problems.

What is Open?

From what I can tell, open is currently a philosophy that aspires to be a methodology.  As a philosophy, open is a posture or creed that defines how individuals treat each other within a community.  Or, to abstract this idea, it is a set of attributes that define how nodes in a network interact.  These attributes are communal in their first order; listening, facilitating, read/write, reciprocity, share, manipulate, flame, belong, accept, refuse, aspire, include/exclude, reign etc.  They are about access in their second order; access, participate, contribute, re-mix, repair, refactor, reuse, appropriate, exploit, earn, give, receive, etc.

Access

The issue of access and its relevance to open is an interesting one I think.  I think it is very possible to be open behind barriers. Access is only relevant to an explicit community of stakeholders.  For example, an open community can exist within a closed (proprietary) organization.  So, access does not mean everyone, all the time. Yet, access is a critical component that provides attenuation to the degree of openness.   

Access is measured by a community's ability to accurately define its stakeholders and then design their network to ensure equitable access to all of these stakeholders.  Failure to provide access on these terms will result in failure to the effort.  This access must be absolute.  All stakeholders must have complete access.  This runs very deep and should include all assumptions.  For example, an open community that is working to build the meme of openness, must be ready to accept that openness is irrelevant if that is what they are told by a well defined and equitably formed community of stakeholders.  Said another way, an effort can be defined as open only if all defined communities of stakeholders participate. 

This can devolve in to a quota system of necessary attributes for specific percentages of the community's members in order to be considered accessible (diverse, inclusive, relevant, pick your adjective.)  I don't think this is the right way to look at it.  If an open community believes that stakeholders are missing they need to ask the stakeholders if they think they are stakeholders.  If they hear criticism about the communities relevance, or their power structure, or their basic assumptions, or their foundational problem statement, or their logistical details like meeting times, locations, languages (lexicon or otherwise), etc., the effort must redefine itself.  One very legitimate tactic is to redefine the community of stakeholders.  This is NOT equivalent to taking your ball and going home. 

Methodology

As a methodology, open is a set of rules that govern communal activity, in particular, activity where a common good is defined and the community's actions are measured by their ability to deliver on the common good.  This may be a better mousetrap, a better community/network or a better world.

Markets

Open is particularly useful to address market failures and abuses. Open does not stand in contrast to market structures.  To the contrary, open communities behave like markets trading value for goods and services.  Open does stand in contrast to Capitalism.  Capitalism is a system for making money.  Markets are the physics of creating, finding and trading value.  The classic example is in the best understood domain of open, open source software.  Where Microsoft builds software to sell, open communities build software to use.  The successful generation of value is directly proportionate to the success of exploiting that value.  However, in proprietary software, software is not built to do a job.  Microsoft Word is not built to do word processing.  It is built to generate revenue.  It is true that there is a relationship between the amount of revenue earned and the ability of Word to do word processing; however, there is a lot of friction here. Heat and smoke are created.  There is waste. Waste occurs in the translation of value through the abstraction of cash.

So what

I am interested in understanding how/if a more efficient transfer of value amongst a set of well defined and well connected nodes of a network can generate enough additional value to solve previously intractable situations. 

People are trying to do this all over the place.  I don't know where on the spectrum of openness this efforts lie.

Ashoka fellow, Rita Paniker, created a self-help platform for India's street children.  http://www.ashoka.org/node/2608

Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs, a consortium of social investment and technical assistance organizations that have agreed on 7 social impact metrics to aggregate across their portfolios. http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWJeMRKpH/b.4204037/k.2587/Aspen_Network_of_Development_Entrepreneurs.htm

People Finder Interchange Format, an open data format for identifting missing or displaced persons in a disaster that was created as a result of a massive volunteer effort in response to the Katrina disaster. http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=rD9&q=pfif+disaster&btnG=Search&meta=

Gapminder is a collection of global health data.  It is an example of what is possible with huge sets of open data http://www.gapminder.com

Kiva, Prosper, Microplace

Some wiki somewhere has a long list of more...?

http://openeverything.net/

Comments

[Josef Davies-Coates]

I think the point you raise about access is important and, frankly, seems to be missed by Young Foundation who apparently wouldn't budge on charging £25 for the Open Everything in London event next month.

That immediately excludes LOTS of people. Sigh.

[Conches]

Josef,

Thanks for the comments. For me, I think it is important to define the audience that you will be open to. An entrance fee of 25 pounds will be fine for some and not for others others. As long as the community is fully cognizant that they are making an explicit definition that the event is "open to any one that choses to spend 25 pounds to attend" then the event is still very much open, just only to that particular subset of everyone that might be interested.