I was invited to tell a story last night at Agora Rollberg – a budding community space in the old storage hall of Neukölln’s Kindl Brauerei. The event was bringing together practitioners of open source collaboration, and Alice & Simon, two of the organizers, suggested that I share how I got started down this road. I guess most people start out in open source with software, but my experience was a little different – so this is what I shared with the group: Around 10 or 11 years ago, in my hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, I was in need of a place to live, and heard from a friend about a beautiful old house with a large garden, available to rent, not far from town. With only a little embellishment, I told the landlord that I was a responsible young professional, as I had a stable job working for for a reputable firm (at the time I was the production runner on the [ahem] critically-acclaimed TV show Power Rangers). I also told the owner that I already had the perfect group of other responsible young professionals, keen to move in with me. So they let me have the house, and suddenly I had two weeks to find at least 8 housemates to share this huge place with me. Somehow, thanks to helpful friends and the magic of MySpace, it happened, though responsible young professionals these were not. I had found 8 guys and one girl, who stretched the entire spectrum from unemployed to underemployed. We had members of three different bands, with 12 guitars and two drum kits...
I gave a presentation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CE100 meeting in Berlin – it’s a relatively private event which connects representatives from the different corporations and industrial firms which participate in the network. There are no recordings or publications of talks, so I’m posting my talk here instead. Together with a talk from OSVehicle, it made up the last session of the event, called ‘Embrace Collective Intelligence through Open Source’. There had also been other presentations from OpenDesk, FabLab Berlin and Provenance, so the tech/open scene was well represented. Feel free to use and remix the talk, source files (SVG and ODP) are in the Slides and Illustrations folder, as usual. Hi, my name is Sam, I’m a co-founder of Open It Agency – we help businesses understand and utilize open source. My particular focus is on applying the Open Source idea to new areas outside of software, and for the last few years I have been part of a team building a diverse international network around the Open Source Circular Economy Days – people all around the world who share the goal of a Circular Economy, and believe that Open Source is the best methodology we have to get there. Together we’ve been running events, exchanging knowledge, and building the foundations of an open source circular economy. I’d like to share our perspective with you. Since the industrial revolution we have been steadily accelerating our linear economy. Only recently have we realised that we have to not only slow down, but change direction entirely, and create an economy that might look something like this… It’s a...
On July 2nd I was invited to give a workshop at Supermarkt’s event ARTS & COMMONS: Art, Money and Self Organization in Digital Capitalism. Together with the participants of my workshop, I wanted to discuss the co-creation of artistic work, in the mold of open source collaboration or Yochai Benkler’s term ‘commons-based peer-production‘. The form was a hands-on collaborative collage workshop to get us on-topic, and give participants a taste of peer-production for themselves, followed by a discussion on how peer production of art is currently being attempted, and what might be necessary to improve and spread the process. An in-depth recipe for the collage workshop can be found here, but the general concept was for different teams to work sequentially on the same artworks, with the only method of collaboration and communication between the teams being some written documentation, which would accompany the work-in-progress as it moved from one team to another. We were building on existing work in the commons – Judith Carnaby and I had put together a collection of interesting Public Domain imagery (printable PDFs here), largely gathered from the Public Domain Review, New York Public Library, and the British Library’s Mechanical Curator. As we didn’t have enough time to put together a huge collection, this was bulked up with a few pages ripped out of magazines, where we very naughtily infringed the copyright… er, I mean, where we made a provocative artistic protest, striking at the corrupt heart of the copyright industry’s hegemony. Or something. Next time it will be 100% public domain, I promise :) To understand the process, I’ll take you through...
Op3nCare is a global community working together to make health- and social care accessible for all, open source, privacy-friendly and participatory. I made a number of short icon-based animations to be used in presentations, videos and websites to illustrate their themes. Source files for the animation can be found on...
This post originally appeared on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ‘Circulate News‘ website. The shift to a circular economy presents a wicked, multidimensional problem: how can we redesign our operating system so that it works in the long term, and reflects the current context in terms of resources, energy and economic pressures? It’s hard to know where to start. After all, our linear economy is reaching its own end-of-life, and ‘designing’ new economies has never really worked that well for us in the past. The challenge is really about enabling an ecosystem to emerge which effectively (re)uses materials and resources, and rebuilds economic, social and natural capital. When we look at the circular economy field now, it’s dominated by large corporate players – and we do need these businesses taking on responsibility and leading with their considerable research, manufacturing and marketing clout. But redwoods and rhinos don’t make a whole ecosystem, there are many more parts to be played. To live up to the rhetoric and develop a real circular economy we need diversity of size, of focus, of motivation, and perspectives. Diversity of scale – key to a healthy economy. Reaching this goal will require a shake-up of not just our products and services, but also the way in which we develop them and interact with each other. Much like the steam engine was able to power the rapid economical, social and – for better or worse – environmental change of the industrial revolution, at this stage it seems we’re waiting to see what invention will propel us headlong into a thriving 21st century circular economy. Will it be...
The Mission Statement for the Open Source Circular Economy Days is online! It was written by me and Lars, but it is based on the ideas, discussions and perspectives of the whole team (Erica, Sharon, Tim, Alice & others coming on board…) What do we mean when we talk about an Open Source Circular Economy? We share the vision of a circular economy. An idea for a truly sustainable future that works without waste, in symbiosis with our environment and resources. A future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and different material or manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned, so that the output of one process always feeds the input of another. Rather than seeing emissions, manufacturing byproducts, or damaged and unwanted goods as ‘waste’, in the circular economy they become raw material, nutrients for a new production cycle. Right now we have a linear system – we take resources out of the ground, and transform them into (often hazardous) waste. We consume and destroy our own planet faster than it can possibly recover. We’ve known about these problems for decades and despite increasing public awareness we are still nowhere near comprehensive solutions. Current ‘green’ approaches merely act as an ineffective brake on this destructive trajectory. A more radical shift is needed – in how we collaborate, and how we design, produce and distribute our products and the services around them. One way to illustrate the circular economy is to think of cycles in the natural world. A simple representation might be a seed, which grows in nutritious topsoil, becoming a strong adult tree –...
