How open source software comes about is still a myth for lots of people. The notion that a group of people with no monetary reward can get together and create something as complex as an operational system like Linux challenges all our previous notions of the market laws of production. In this video presentation, Karl Fogel, open source developer and writer of the book Producing Open Source Software, guides us through the key principles of open source communities.
I tried to illustrate in the picture above, what an participatory innovation ecosystem Letsevo wants to be. It is the first attempt to organize and communicate the concepts being discussed here at the blog. I believe that People, Ideas, Projects, Collaboration, Sponsors and Cool Products, should be the foundation for an Innovation Platform hoping to foster the development of innovative products and technologies. Under this 6 categories, I wrote some terms to further specify the participatory “pillar”.
Am I missing some “ingredient”? Should any term be added to better express the innovation cycle in a collaboration age? I am happy to hear some thoughts on it.
While reading about open source software development, I bumped into a product development methodology that seems pretty different than the methodologies being talked about in Design Schools and yet very interesting to be spread around further into product design context.
Meet SCRUM, a methodology mainly used in software development in which phases can strongly overlap without compromising the development process. It’s name comes from a Rugby terminology where the “whole team tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”*
This quick video by Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft explains very well how SCRUM works:
SCRUM’s short and fast paced framework makes each step (Version Release) an independent process, making it possible to overlap phases of the project easily without leaving people lost or losing time. This strikes me as a very interesting feature for projects in collaborative innovation networks which letsevo is trying to be. In a conventional Waterfall development methodology, it is really hard to accept contributions outside of the scope of a specific phase. As I am staring to realize, in collaborative environments like open networks, the outcome of a project depends on the ability of people to form teams and to jump in the process even if a project phase has already ended.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.*
For those wanting to get a deeper view on this project methodology, I suggest this Goolgle techtalk given by Jeff Sutherland one of the co-creators of the SCRUM software development process.
If you know examples of SCRUM applied to a collaborative product development we would be glad to hear your thoughts.
A new application for the Iphone, called Netsketch, enables two people to draw an image together, through the touch interface of the Iphone. I don’t believe it can be of great use in a professional design environment but I have to take my hat of for this fun initiative.
I can think of some applications for integrating real-time drawing capabilities on smart phones: collective VJing, Interactive walls…
Back in 2005, Clay Shirky presented, among other interesting points, a good reflection on the values of contribution between people part of a institution and a group of collaborators. Anyone concerned in understanding more of where we are going should take some minutes to watch it.
Numa iniciativa de envolver artistas e de reunir desenhos para futuras artes dos shapes do projeto ecosk8 estou colocando disponível aqui no site um arquivo .PSD (photoshop) para servir de base para futuros gráficos dos decks ecosk8.
This next article seems to Letsevo as a great mark in the collaborative design process. Wikitecture, as the folks from the Wikitecture Studio are calling it, is the first attempt I have seen in order to solve a long anticipated challenge of coming up with a programming language to build CAD constructions in a Wiki-like way. Wikitecture, as demonstrated in this youtube video, is a Secondlife scripting based project, to empower people to build Architecture together just like writing and editing Wikipedia entrances.
This is the birth of a whole new ecology system of Industry, software companies and contributors collaborating to build great things!
Are companies going to ignore that we, the people, can help each other build all the products we want when technologies like Wikitecture become more mature?? Are companies going to react like majority of the Academic field reacted against Wikipedia, rejecting the fact that the wisdom of the crowd could in deed create a Encyclopedia from scratch?
I am a true believer that the things are going to change around here. Maybe it is time to start a new Letsevo project together!! A problem so complex that we would need the help of each other to achieve great results. Something around mobility, an collaborative electric moped? Something so modular, everyone could have its own customized electric moped to cruise around the neighborhood. Seems challenging to me, and fun to work on.
Can we get some companies to “Blend-in” their CAD parts for us to design around it? Batteries, Electric Motors, suspension forks, Disc brakes?
Can we get some brothers that share this dream? Marcello, Piers, Jochen, Nico, Christian, Basti, Peter, Gross….all the creative minds out there…Lets Wikit!?
There has been a lot of hype nowadays around concepts like crowd-sourcing and open-source and user-generated things. Lots of new business are been started and closed everyday trying to grasp this leap of todays way of working. But many of them haven’t achieved great success because business plans for such initiatives are still very difficult to succeed.
There are lots of problems regarding the rewards participation in product development, when in the end, someone is making money out of the ideas generated buy contributors around the globe.
Thats where Kluster gets my consideration and I will explain why. Kluster is a brand new company launched on 18th of February. It is a social network focussed on the development of products (which can be anything, from mp3 players and logos to events) which aims to reward every contribution to projects with some kind of monetary participation of the total value of the project.
I will tell a little bit of my impressions as I (of course) tryed it out.
First, I was amazed by how easy it is to setup everything and to start working on on going projects. The idea is that every project is broken down in phases which have a time stamp and a Reward is good to make complex tasks manageable. If you have an idea (called “spark”) you can contribute right away. If your “Sparks” follows to the next phase you automatically already wins participation on the gains on the end of the project. If you see a “Spark” from someone else, you can them suggest improvents “Amps”, which if are also aproved, you get participation points called “Watts”.
“Watts” are the currency inside of Kluster which can be changed in to Real money like the “Linden dollars” of second Life.
This is where Kluster starts to get real interest and where I think it has its potential. Once you have “watts” and you receive them by contributing to a project or to simply completing your profile you can “Invest” them on the Ideas “Sparks” of others, If there Sparks advance, you also get participation points “watts”. But if they don’t advance, you lose your invested “Watts”. This is a great incentive for people to vote on other ideas, and to vote well, because otherwise, you are using what you invested, your watts, your work hours.
In 45 minutes, I filled my profile, Contributed with “Sparks” for 3 Projects, Invested some “watts” in 3 other “Sparks” and Invited friends to participate and made 2670 “watts”.
Then I questioned my self, how many dollars does one “Watt” gives me?? Maybe some of you can answer this. I just don’t know.
But to finalize this post:
I think Kluster is an amazing experiment in this new world of wikinomics and hope to learn more about it as I try it. Will it survive the real world? Will it empower people to solve more problems? Will companies use it as a tool for developing products?
Here is a view of my profile page in Kluster
I would love to here some comments here at letsevo so I pass the MIC now. Peace
I just had to try to build something in 3dvia Shape to see what it can do. I was also curious to test 3dvia`s uploading process. After downloading their Shape sofware, which didn`t take more than a minute, the program prompted me with a screen to login the system. After typing in my 3dvia username and password I could start playing with the functions of the software…there are not many I have to tell… and 3dvia has some video tutorials about using the software which I didn`t check, accept for the one about applying textures.
I was set up to build a 3D modell of skateboard bmx ramp for all the brothers and sisters who like to go big virtually. I just had to do it!
I started out by drawing the side view line and then extruded them to give some volume. After photoshoping a EVO skateboards logo to one off my wood texture files I was prepared to give this ramp a unique look. Pretty simple and not much of novelty in this. Applying the textures was pretty easy so was scaling and rotating it to match the scale of the Ramp. After being pleased how it looked, I just hit the Publish button and I was taken to their website where I could fill some details about the 3d model I was uploading. You can choose publish your model for everyone or to keep it private which means only you or who you want to show/give can see/download (this is nice if you want to keep it hidden before you have everything build or even if you want to collaborate in top secret style with other people) You can set a creative commons license and tags to make your model easily searchable. The modell is added to your profile page and can be at any given time edited again.
Here is a link to a screenshot of the 3d ramp in 3dvia shape
Everything is still pretty ruff, there isn’t much accuracy in building as a product designer would like.Lets hope Dassaut systemes, responsible for the software bring some functionality to the game. I think it only then it could be an awesome tool for collaboration projects like the ecosk8 project that has been happening at Lets Evo since 2006.
Some questions to start a discussion about the impact of such tools into the design process:
What benefits could it bring to companies?
Are user really motivated to participate?
Will 3dvia Shape develop itself into a tool for designers and engineers and users to communicate in real products?
Are we designers going to get used to interacting so early with users about design decisions?
A couple of months ago I wrote in a post my humble manifesto to democratization of design, claiming that we “hyperlinked” kids want to influence more and more how products are. I also wrote in another post about the changes that simple free CAD software could bring to the product development process alowing brands to collaborate with its most valuable asset: its users.
Dassaut systemes is aiming to grasp the user-generated design wave by enabling everyone to create 3d Modells and share them in their platform just like you do with your pictures by flickr. So at www.3dvia.com anyone can login and start creating, sharing and rating each others design.
Google started ahead with its Sketchup software and 3dWarehouse but deliver very low-quality graphics and accuracy to build real stuff with it. I found it so bad I didn’t even boder writing about it here in Letsevo. Now 3dvia Shape sofware, seems to have has a lot more graphic power than google`s software. One thing that bodered me is that even dough you can see amazing models made by some users in their gallery, I can seem to imagine that they were build right inside of the program. I may be wrong but by looking at the avaiable tutorials in their website it seems like their software still lack a lot of the building tools most of the product design software have (Sweep along rail, Lofts, fillets….) meaning you cannot build complex shapes right away. Lets hope they increment it right away.
But what really sets 3dvia apart from google is it´s nice social network features where users can build profiles and embed 3d models as widgets in other websites just like youtube. You still need to download a plugin to view it but it is awesome.
Download the player and check the following out:
This guy build a sweet bmx bike!! That could be the user of the future saying: look! BRAND, this is how I want my product, are you going to ignore me? I think this is going to be awesome, this platform can serve as place to exchange files with other designers, engineers and to also show the users what is beeing done and have there comments write on the spot!
Sweet huhn? Now in my opnion its is going to be a long way for it to be reallity, but I have the feeling they are in the right track.
My two hints for Dassaut Systemes are:
1.Let people import and export geometrical data from other 3d sofwares like .iges, .dwg, .3dm ( don´t try to be like sony and the blue-ray disc!!!) If you let us use your software to read existing data than design companies are going to take this serious. Until then it will be only internet hype not a social revolution.
2.If you want to be really a tool for the product design STARTUP companies in the the collaboration era, think wiki or basecamp for product design: 3d files with construction history and the ability to handle multiple layers. To help my point picture this scenario. I want to build an electric bike and I am only a designer. I have some nice design ideas and I find in the internet a couple companies that procuce batteries, other companies produce motors….other build suspension forks…I call them up and invite them for a project hosted at your site and we all start uploadings components in to one file having the power to collaborate in real time! How cool would that be!? Content Central and e-drawings for the masses?
Give us the tools and we are gonna build stuff you could never imagine of! Yeah.
When a first saw this two years ago I though it was just another internet “waist my time hype”. In deed it can actually fall into this category if you aren’t interested in how collective creation can be achieved. The fact is that Peter Edmunds’ Swarm Sketch it’s actually damn good example of the collective power of the internet.
SwarmSketch uses the concept of a drawing task to visualize the power of collective organization. It does so setting the rules into which collective intelligent can exist.
This is how it works:
Every week a randomly subject is chosen to become the Drawing task for the week. Every visitor can contribute with a new line to the sketch. Following that, the visitor can vote for the relevance of the lines of other visitors, giving a opacity level to them. The darkness of each line represents the average of other visitor’s votes. In this way visitors help to moderate the direction in which the drawing is going (self regulation). After a week or when the Sketch reaches 1000 lines, the final result is shown and a new is started.
The gallery of the project shows every subject that was collective sketched since the start of it in 2005. A nice animation from the beginning to the end of each sketch can be seen along with all statistics about it.
Swarm Sketch of a Squid – Image source: swarmsketch.com
Charles Leadbeater’s speech at TED about creative collaboration and user generated innovation, gives us a brilliant overview about how innovation is more and more coming from passionate users other than from closed laboratories inside of big companies R&D departments.
Anyone interested in the influence of this thoughts in new kinds of businesses should definitely watch it over and over again. Charles Leadbeater, Lets Evo loves you. Thank you.
