The Trouble with Open Source

[Eli Malinsky]

Hey everyone. This is a follow up to the discussion about the new
space in Shanghai - Xindanwei - that was mentioned the other day.
Special thanks to Liu Yan for referencing the Centre for Social
Innovation and for freely sharing her own experiences.

A few years ago the Centre for Social Innovation released a set of
three books, making available the cumulative knowledge of about five
years' experience. Our goal was to help other spaces to benefit from
our experience and adapt/adopt the things that made sense for them. We
made a decision to make these 'open source' - meaning, users could
access the documents at no cost and could take the content and adapt
it in future publications, as long as they referenced CSI. We've had
thousands of downloads and a lot of positive feedback.

We have very mixed feelings about what we did. Simply, we have
subsequently seen our words in dozens of contexts with no reference to
CSI. Compared to the number of downloads, we've received comparatively
little recognition for what we've done by the people who (we know)
have used the information.

I don't share this to complain. I just present it as an illustration
of the challenges we;ve experienced with this particular effort at
open source. I think we probably made some missteps. We certainly
messed up by not capturing the email addresses of people who
downloaded the docs, so at least we could have a more accurate count
of users, cities, etc., and an opportunity to survey their value.

In a few weeks we are going to release a book on Community Bonds. In
2010, we raised $2 million from 'community investors' in order to buy
a building to support our growth. The story, and the model's
adaptation to other contexts, is really extraordinary (if i may say so
myself). This time, however, we are going to exert more control. We
will release just part of the book for free and add a fee for the full
publication and for access to the templates.

Anyway, i wanted to respond to yesterday;s post. Again, I'm not
writing this to complain about what happened - I just want to shine
some light on our own experience. I am sure that people in this
community have a lot of feedback for how we could have done this
differently/better. I'd welcome your thoughts, and you own examples of
successful and unsuccessful open source info sharing.

Finally - I realize I am also setting us up for some criticism: Why
should we complain about not getting recognized? If our material is
really a contribution to the field, why obsess over 'credit'? I guess
we just feel that, in this case, the CC license wasn;t really adhered
to, and I wanted to share how this experience has shaped our approach
to future publications.

:-)

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
Toronto, Canada

[Chad Ballantyne]

Well crafted Eli.  Despite the lack of credit - you all continue to thrive and inspire the community.  It's often that a conversation around The Creative Space includes a reference to CSI.

Open Source/CC is a great concept and sharing is one of the strongest threads in a culture's tapestry but it's still a hard sell to offer credit in this age where we're blasted with messages to go it alone, be famous and/or just go with the flow.

Some say we're pioneers, I always say, "nope - just following the trail blazed by those that started before us!  And as the saying goes "there's nothing new under the sun."  

Looking forward to the community bonds book and seeing everyone at the Deskmag Tour in March.

Peace,

Chad

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[Liu Yan]

Dear Eli.

I want to thank you dearly again for your wise decision a few years ago to make those three books available online for free use. Without them, I would never have time and energy to write a whole new book and turn it into an apps.

The day the apps was online, I received a "tweet" on Weibo(Chinese twitter/facebook) saying that there was a map being made for more than 20 startup cafe (Chinese version of coworking spaces) popping up in Shanghai like the mushrooms. I was shocked, pleased and worried at the same time. Shocked? because this seemed happening overnight. Pleased? Someone have recognized the importance of coworking spaces for startups. Worried? In China, there is tendency of copying and making everything quick. Will these spaces disappear in a few months time?

I was wishing that my experience in the "Coworking Manual" could inspire these followers so
- they understand the coworking business is not a fortune-making business, it takes a great deal of passion, effort and resources to make it last and thrive;
- if they realize this, I don't want them to go through our mistakes;
- we can have everyone in coworking scene to be creative and active with creating new business models and new approaches so we can get inspired by one another

For the long run, Xindanwei wants to change the scene for startups and creative freelancers in China to achieve a greater impact, we need more "competitors" to join the force to make this pie bigger.

I guess this is my story from China. I know I don't really answer your question, just want to let you know your effort has made a change to China. :-)

regards, Liu Yan

I share my own experiences of building us Xindanwei space and community, I

[Alex Hillman]

I think it comes down to motivation, and what you're sharing. 

We've also given extensively, like you, and as a result, our words are all over the coworking movement, in spaces around the world, many times without attribution. But many other times, with attribution. And even more times, with opportunities for us to pursue. For us, the point of sharing the words wasn't for credit, it was to make sure that we weren't alone in doing what we do. 

Sharing and open source is a long game.

The rising tide raises ALL ships, including ours. And yours.

-Alex

 

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[sk...@emergentresearch.com]

Eli: This is an interesting and complex issue. When we started
Emergent Research we decided to do open source research. By that we
mean we try, as much as possible, to include 3rd parties in our
research process and release our work to the public.

We started doing this in 1999, well before applying open source
techniques beyond software development was common. In fact, few
outside of the software developer community had even heard of open
source. Over the years we've encountered the same issues and problems
you have. We describe them as the "2 Rules of Content Creation":

Rule #1: Content will be borrowed by others.

Rule #2: Content producers can't change rule #1.

We see our stuff on the web without attribution all the time. If you
produce content - and especially digital content - it's going to get
borrowed. It happens so much to us we don't bother with licenses or
copyrights, except when we release work jointly with a client (their
lawyers require it - but it doesn't stop the borrowing).

In most cases the borrowing of our content is quite innocent and often
the borrower builds on our work in some way. This is good. In other
cases the borrowing is less positive.

We've learned to accept the borrowing and not worry about it. We use
a "freemium" business model. We give away a lot of work in hopes of
attracting a small subset of our audience to our for fee premium
services. In our case, this has worked.

Others seem to agree - the number of analyst/research firms using some
form of "open source/freemium" approaches has skyrocketed over the
last 5 years or so. Even the historically secretive strategy
consulting firms (Bain, BCG, McKinsey) are using freemium approaches.

I think the key is figuring out your goals and objectives and whether
or not open sourcing your work fits. If one of the key goals is
monetary, I suggest exploring the freemium/premium model.

If the goals are more around thought leadership and branding, I
suggest adding a PR program. Your work is both excellent and topical
and I'm confident the press would be very receptive to you. A PR
program would take little in terms of time and money and would brand
the information as yours.

BTW, while on the topic of borrowing, our 2 content rules are based on
the 2 rules of war mentioned in a MASH TV show. These two rules are
#1 young men die in war; #2 doctors can't change rule #1.

Steve

[Alex Hillman]

I'm going to bring this back to my risk-management engine. I apply
this to open source and sharing, as well as business, community
development...basically everything that involves a risk.

There's a finite number of BAD things that can happen. And some of
them WILL happen, you cannot stop them. The best you can do is
mitigate without letting it consume you.

On the other side of the same coin, there's an infinite number of GOOD
things that can happen, if you let them. The less time you spend
mitigating the bad, the more time you have to find and work with the
good.

Too often, people make decisions based on theoretical bad, effectively
throwing out the baby (good) with the bathwater (bad). Sharing, open
source, and coworking itself fall into this category.

We wouldn't have this list, and the coworking movement wouldn't exist,
if it weren't for open source principals applied to non-software
ideas.

-Alex

p.s. please steal my risk-management engine and talk about it - better
yet use it for yourself. I don't care if you attribute me or not, just
do great things with it and share it forward. :)

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 24, 2012, at 3:22 PM, "sk...@emergentresearch.com"
<sk...@emergentresearch.com> wrote:

[Alex Hillman]

Related to this thread, I just found this 4-part web series about remixing:

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

The theme that the creator arrives at in the 4th part falls more in the realm of "how IP laws are broken", but the sub-themes and history used to illustrate the point felt very relevant to a discussion around copyright & idea ownership.

Particularly interesting to me was the original reasons for creating copyright and patent laws - they were designed to promote a richer public domain where learning would be freer and more ideas could evolve naturally. It was greed in the markets that warped those ideas into the "standards" for intellectual property that we both challenge and find challenging.

I also really liked the notion that "copying is natural", but so is our averse reaction to it. "We like copying, so long as we're not the ones being copied."

The web-series is less than an hour in total - I found it interesting, educational, and entertaining. I think you might too!

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia