An ongoing revolution
Note: this article is a compilation of a series posted on the blog of Open Initiative.
You might have heard about Wikispeed, the open source car project started by Joe Justice in Seattle. You may think that “open source car” is a paradoxical idea. Actually, it makes a lot of sense.
They publish an open source design for a car that they build themselves with standard materials that can be found in any hardware store. The idea is that anyone with an Internet access, including you, can download the design, make their own car out of it, test it, improve the design, and republish it. That’s how hundreds of people have already participated.
If you think it’s a bunch of nuts in their garage in a complete insanity, you should think again. They’ve built a car that goes from 0 to 100 km/h in 5 seconds and tops at 240 km/h. Its fuel consumption is as low as 1,5 L/100km. And they’re working on the C3, which should be comfortable and cost less than 10 000 $. Plus you can build it locally, even yourself if you feel like it, and adapt it to your needs.
But they’re not alone. OSVehicle designs Tabby, an open source car that can be built in 42 min, for less than 4000€. Opendesk d
esigns open source furniture, that you can cut out in any wood workshop close to you, and then assemble like a flat-pack from Ikea. Wikihouse makes open source wood houses that you can cut out and build like a lego house. Openknit makes an open source knitting machine, on which you can make clothes that you download. Think about the 3D printers, think about all the creative commons contents.
Is it really credible, you may ask. The experience we have so far is with software. Free software has existed for more than 30 years now. In the beginning, it all looked like a bunch of nuts in their basements. Crazy people with a crazy idealistic vision. But it proved to be super efficient. No one doubts today that Linux is a very strong technical basis for an operating system. Apache is the most used web server software. Firefox has deposed Internet Explorer as the most used browser. And a countless number of other applications prove everyday how strong that model can be.
So it is not a bunch of nuts in their garage. It is a consistent movement, hitting all domains, and changing the way we work. A lot of questions still need to be answered, but there is no doubt it will impact our society in a long lasting way. And it is happening. Today.
A new industrial model
So what makes it consistent? All of these projects share a common model:
- Don’t protect the knowledge. Share it. It’s probably the hardest thing to understand as we’re living in a society of strongly protected knowledge with patents, trademarks and copyright. But an open source model enables the rise of a community, and that may be worth much more than the copyright that you’re protecting. So you need to switch from “Don’t copy me!” to “Please copy what we do, use it in another market, improve it and try it in ways we haven’t”.
- Make a network based on open standards. No need for one company to rule everyone. People will be able to join as they like and do things you would never have thought of. Open Standards are essential as they are what ensure you can use your improvements with other people’s together.
- Adopt a horizontal governance that is open to contribution. As there is no hierarchy between the entities of the network, there will be no
- boss deciding what is to be done. Decisions need therefore to be made on a consensus basis so that everybody in the community feels empowered.
- Produce locally and customize. That’s what open source is about. A new group can emerge anywhere to use what you’ve designed for their own needs, and adapt it to their reality. You could download your next piece of furniture, for example, cut the pieces in a workshop close to your home, and adapt it to your own living room. Forget about boring everyone-has-the-same furniture!
So at this point you might be wondering why you should consider this instead of a good old proprietary control model. The real question is actually this: how long can these proprietary models survive, each in their own silo, while communities gather to build something common? It’s not about giving up the project, but about growing the community by empowering people and enabling diversity. In other words, it is not a threat, it is an opportunity.
But yet some critical success factors need to be kept in mind in order to get that community actually growing. The community needs to be taken into account to set the right governance, organize the right communication, set the right standards, and document them so others can join. And most importantly, encourage the initiatives so that people feel empowered.
So whatever you do, whatever the domain you’re in, you should consider it, because it is the world of tomorrow.
The revolution is yours!
That theorical model looks great, but you might be wondering how you can get concretely involved in a project you find interesting. There are actually many ways to get involved. Let’s look at some of them.
The consumer phase
As the “1% rule” states, the vast majority of users in a community just consume the content generated by others. This makes sense, because when you first discover a community, you investigate it before eventually feeling able to contribute to it. So here are a few things you can do:
- Just use it! The more people that use the software, the stronger its community. It may be hard to realize in the consumption model that we live in, but Open Source projects are not made by them for me, but instead by us for everyone. So just trying it out is already joining the community.
- Learn about it. There are people behind that project. Who are they? Why do they do it? How do they organize? Learning about the project will make you a closer part of it, and will probably help you get the most out of it. You will discover new uses that you had never thought of, and maybe a rich community who will be able to help you.
The contributor phase
It’s only when people start feeling at home in the community that they start getting involved in it. They start by improving the content and helping others in the community.
- Promote it and help others. Show other people what they can do, and help them. Improve the tutorial or make a blog post about it. Remember, the bigger the community, the stronger it is. So every time someone joins in, you’ll get a better product yourself.
- Give feedback and fix it. You think it could be improved? You have new ideas? You want someone to fix this bug that has been bothering you? Just say it! All feedback and comment can be valuable. And don’t forget you can even correct the spelling mistakes you may run into. It may look like a tiny contribution, but that’s what the community is made of. And it will help you get used to the process, and eventually maybe make a bigger contribution.
- Adapt it and translate it. Communities share their work around the world. But the context is not the same everywhere. Translating the product in your language or adapting it to your local reality is very important as it enables the community to grow in new places and environments. This diversity is what makes open source strong, and every local flavor is a major help to the community.
The creator phase
People who contribute regularly may eventually feel empowered enough to actually create content of their own that they’ll give to the community.
- Build a local team. You can buy the tools to produce furniture or cars for your neighborhood and actually make a living out of it. You can also create a local user group to help local people use the software. This group will become a hub for the community and the incarnation of the community on which people will rely.
- Create it. Of course the best way to contribute is to actually create content that will be added to the ones the community already uses. A feature or a plug-in, a brand new design of an object the community didn’t have before. Once you have the skills and understand how the community works, add your own signature!
It’s important to note here that the number of creators isn’t fixed to 1%. In fact studies have shown that this number tends to increase over time for lasting projects, and the same applies to contributors. If people feel empowered and included, they will naturally tend to participate more and more, and move towards the center of the community. But the community needs to be built correctly, and particularly, the values need to be clear and agreed among the members, the interest people have to contribute should be clear and shared, getting involved should be very easy, if not trivial, and, most important of all, people should be respected and participation valued. People need to feel respect and belonging to get involved. Otherwise they’ll just leave and the community will disappear.
Of course, you don’t necessarily have the skills or the time to create your own content. But that shouldn’t stop you from participating! This is why we’ve created Open Funding, the co-funding platform of Free Software and Open Source content. You can contribute to the new feature you need by funding the creator who will work on it. You’re part of the open source community, so contribute and make the product your own!