Opportunity development process

An image I found in a report of a friend who did an investigation on open innovation. Innovation or creativity can be initiated or improved by using such structured processes.

The proof for peer production

Mozilla, or as my father called it “Mozzarella”, is an open source project that allows anyone to contribute. The nice thing about the browser is not just that people can contribute code to the browser, but they can develop applications that run on the browser (Facebook, not open source, does the same for its social network). Today, Mozilla corporation announced that more than 1 billion addons have been downloaded by its users. I am not really surprised by this, because I could not go without FF addons, it is one of the main reasons I use this browser (rather than Chrome or Opera). I might post another blog with my favourite addons, including the Clipmarks addon I use for posting this message.

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

Mozilla today announced that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. Currently, Mozilla’s users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day.

PICNIC 2008 report

Open innovation at PICNIC 2008
Three sunny days in September. Thousands of sunny people, including myself, gather for a three day event at the Westerpark in Amsterdam. PICNIC 2008 has started, with a promising program filled with famous speakers, writers, businessmen and women, leaders, and interesting geeks. People who made it in business, technology, world peace, or online. Great to listen to, and above all, inspirational. A pretty expensive type of inspiration I must say, with people paying over €1200 to get a three day pass.

Fortunately, I was able to attend a special track, called Enquiring Minds, for researchers or people with an special academic interest in a relevant field. Which could be anything, considering the wide range of topics covered by the conference. 25 of us academic researchers, scientists, or all-round investigators gathered that beautiful morning in an old but nicely renovated building on terrain of the (late) Westergasfabriek.

Each participant was asked to explain his/her research to the others in three minutes. Some interesting topics were covered, ranging from the (the future of) arts and media, internet security, gaming and education, social software, co-evolution of knowledge production and ICT, and many more.

I explained the others that my own research aims at trying to describe and model the relationship between contributions (in online networks; i.e. blog posts) and the contributor in terms of trust, quality, and expertise. Have a look at the illustration below. It tries to depict a person who is contributing content in an online network, possibly within an organization. People, both experts and non-experts, may use (read/visit) and evaluate (rate) this content. How do expertise of the users of this content, and the type and intensity of use, can be used to profile both the contributor as well as the contribution? Quite a BIG question, I know, maybe that’s the reason I have not really started it yet (need some focus?!).

Unfortunately, I have not really been at talks of people really focusing on this topic (merely acknowledging the need for research, which is good), but there was a lot of action on social media, and success factors. In my job at a small software company (doing exactly the thing I intend to research), we create social software that empowers the user to contribute, the first and most essential step needed in order to measure the mentioned relationships (between “contribution-use/users-contributor”). It is therefore very important to know what makes software social, why people use it, when a social software project fails. So that’s has been the red line of my conference, and the subject of this short record of the event.

So what makes social software really social, what is successful and what is not?
I read several publications about this subject, and was interested in how these theoretical elaborations correspond with the recommendations, issues, and notes mentioned by some speakers on the conference. Some of these people were researchers, some of them were entrepreneurs who experienced success themselves. They explained trends and explained how the Internet and relating technologies offer great opportunities for more open, transparent, innovative, more efficient, and distributed ways of innovation and collaboration. And how we are moving towards a more people centered online environment, where friends in common, proximity, shared taste and objects matter. In the following sections, I deal with this in putting forward

• criteria that concern the design of the platform or processes that empower people to contribute and make connections, but also to sustain innovation and collaboration; and
• some examples that have been successful and explaining the reasons of their success.

These results are all derived from my experiences at PICNIC, so it will clearly lack in some respects, but I hope it gives a nice overview of the current mindset of online collaboration.

Criteria for designing the software and the processes
Software alone may be engaging and provide with incentives for people to share and connect, but some institutional mechanisms and process rules should be built in as well to sustain and improve collaboration. The last section, with examples, show how different initiatives have adopted these criteria;

• Recognition; people want recognition for their contributions. Recognition from peers is even a more powerful incentive and mechanisms must be built in to ensure this;
• Social object; without a social object that connects the users of the platform, you have a problem. This theme was recurrent and relates to having a shared purpose and focus;
• Processes and tools for contributing; there are numerous tools available that can empower people to connect, contribute, and share. Still, these should be designed and named such that it truly corresponds to the ideas, wishes, and incentives of the users. This means accommodating for different types of contexts and users, and their respective motivation;
• Different task sizes (contribute more or less), like in Open Source communities;
• Modularity of contributions allow you to connect and combine contributions to increase the aggregate value and let people built on top of each other´s contributions;
• Language that corresponds with the social context of the users: It has to be crystal clear what a service offers (like eBay website: Buy|Sell), what you can do on a platform, and what the added value is;
• Involve people differently, and in different stages of the process;
• Create different roles based on previous contributions and feedback by the community.
• Nodal points refer to the methods and intensity of interactions of the service and user: What should trigger interaction or intervention with the user? When should you send an update, and notification, or something else? It is important only to give information the user cares about. Nodal points are the filters that are used to put forward only the relevant stuff for every occasion.
• Policies and structures for making decisions prevent chaos, as can be seen at Wikipedia. This remains an extremely difficult challenge (Wikipedia is an ongoing design effort) for the future of collaboration.

Clearly, the above list is not extensive, but it’s what I picked up by listening to the people on stage. More lessons can be drawn by looking at the various examples.

Examples of social software
We have many examples of services where there is a very specific and clear social object that connects the users, including the relevant tools (and right language used) to incentivize contributions, sharing, and creation of more value. Dopplr (frequent travelers), Nikeplus (running), and MiMoA (modern architecture and traveling) are just a few of them.

Furthermore, there are numerous projects that not so much focus on a shared social object or purpose, but offer the tools for collaboration and intend to crowdsource their communities.

• Mechanical Turk is a service offered by Amazon to distribute tasks among a huge online community. The most important characteristic of the success of this service is the granularity of tasks, and the ability to combine tasks to make the whole larger than the sum of all parts.
• Nederland P is a Dutch initiative for user-generated videos, an advanced YouTube, that offers a distribution channel and support for people who contribute high-quality content. Additionally, they have different roles that are based on reputation, number of subscribers, etc.
• Aswarmofangels.com intends to create a movie for one million English pounds (1.8 million US dollars) by sourcing contributions (financial and in terms of decision-making) of a thousands of people worldwide. In this project, the focus is not on getting as many participants as possible, but slowing the participation down by focusing more on quality.
• Openad.net is a successful crowdsourcing advertisement project that allows anyone to really make money out of open and closed assignments. An interesting aspect is that it does not intend to replace the existing marketing industry, but it rather partners with it, changing the organizational structures and vision.
• Similarly, Sellaband.com is a successful startup in the music business that sources the musical creativity of anyone with a computer. Anyone can invest (community funding) in an artist or group in order to make this group successful and share in the revenues.
• Blurb.com is just a nice tool to create online books and portfolios, but it also keeps the creations for sale in their online shop, with all revenues going to the creators.
• Finally, Blender.org concerns a true open source project creating open source animation, and also advancing the open source tools and software to be able to create the animation. This reinforces each other, and the availability of support and tools contribute to the success of the initiative.

Like most of the mentioned initiatives, you can see a shared self-interest of the users, which is important to consider. This can be money (Mechanical Turk, OpenAd), but also something very different like seeing nice new architecture when you visit a city in Europe (MiMoA). This concludes the overview of ideas and lessons learned at PICNIC ‘08 about succesful social applications for online collaboration, innovation, and other activities. As said, literature will offer more perspectives, but it’s interesting to see which things are brought forward by speakers on a innovative conference as PICNIC.

Democratizing Innovation.. 3D printing

Amazing technology, wonder what the possibilities are.. Now these printers are not so functional, and rather expensive ($3000). But in 10 years…?

Pretty cool that this guy makes the software open source as well.

OpenEd week 13 - The OpenCourseWars

The OpenCourseWars (13 pages) is a short story depicting a possible future for open education from a historical perspective. Written by David Wiley, it is both highly entertaining and informative. It not only has given me more insight in some problematic issues of open licensing and consequences, but also shows interesting and appealing futures of learning with in an open education landscape. After an overview of the most important issues, and some personal reactions, I describe my personal ideas about the future of open education, from a slightly different persective than David’s.

2005 – 2012: The OpenCourseWars

The initial beauty of open education quite rapidly turns grey with problems of the NC license again, with public opinion turning against OCW. Problems with defining Non-Commercial quickly becomes not only a theoretical problem, but a real problem indeed:

Creative Commons’ own publicly posted discussion draft of Proposed Best Practice Guidelines to Clarify the Meaning of Non-Commercial in the Creative Commons Licenses suggested we approach the meaning of the term noncommercial from the “Nature of the User”. To put it simply, the guidelines asked if the would-be user of the noncommercially-licensed material was an individual or non-profit institution. If so, everything was kosher. If not (if the would-be user was a for-profit company), then they were not permitted to use materials. Seems very straightforward, right? MIT OCW, however, saw things in a very different way. They provided their own definition of Noncommercial, in which they said, “Determination of commercial vs. non-commercial purpose is based on the use, not the user”, and that as long as you’re not trying to make money off of their materials, they were cool with whatever else you did.

So on the one hand you had Creative Commons suggesting that Noncommercial should be determined by the nature of the user, and on the other hand you had MIT OCW defining the very same clause of the very same license in the completely opposite way. I had known about this problem for years, and had email discussions with a number of people at both Creative Commons and MIT hoping to get it fixed. But the problem was extremely thorny politically, and nothing had happened yet.

The publishers, clearly not very happy with the whole open education movement, follow with a brilliant strategy attacking the NC clause, and win in court: the NC clause is struck down, and all the content that used to be licensed only for non-commercial use, suddenly became available for commercial use. After this apparent success by the publishers, they could now use and commercially distribute the OCW content, which they did. Still, they would be obliged to mention the Creative Commons license, and share the (now commercial) content under the same open license (Share-Alike). Surprisingly, they even ignored this clause, and they did not Share-Alike, because the publishers thought they could attack and bring down the SA clause as well… but to no avail, and to their own demise.

This lack of judgment started a great new movement in open education, led by students, who happily participated in creating a vast infrastructure of open content. But… another licensing war mounted the surface: CC versus GFDL. This was settled as well, finally, and then there was the dawn of a beautiful period in open education: power to the people, in this case students. David uses the following quote to explain that younger university faculty started to ignore the standard opencoursewares altogether in favor of working:

Putting professors’ lecture notes and things on an university website where students can’t trib test questions and photos and things makes about as much sense as using email. It’s for old people who just don’t get it. I mean, even this eBook reader thing I just got from my sister (who finally graduated, by the way) is pointless. Why would anyone use a device that won’t let you trib

Tribbing is contributing, as you might expect. On the other hand, the opencoursewares are R/O, or read-only, and is “associated with the kind of “authority” young folks want to rebel against, and embodies an entire generation’s frustration with top-down, un-democratic, un-participatory approaches generally.”

Following the pandemonium concerning licensing, opencoursewares, and learner participation, a new kind of university emerged: the competency-based university, where students only had to pass a test or exam to be accredited. One of the first universities adopting this model, a traditional online university, started an IBM/Linux like collaboration with the largest site for open content educational materials, creating an enormous synergy; increasing the quality of learning materials, and cost savings for the university itself. A spin-off of the university provided an additional service, where students could approach experts worldwide through Skype for personalized support, paying a certain fee. This service initiated a kind of e-lance economy in itself, because anyone could be an expert. These experts, most of them students, were not inclined to give bad service, because they would be rated by the user, and bad ratings lowered their future chance on flexible employment.

NB.Despite the beauty of the above depicted future, I have an extra note about the accreditation-only model: it will only be valuable if the diploma itself represents value, which depends on the type of assessment: if it is personal, competency-based, and practical, I think these universities might have a chance for survival. If they don’t, and assess students with normal exams and tests, I see little future in this model.

An important quote in the postlude represents the most important difficulty with current OCW initiatives:

Generally speaking, OCWs were difficult-to-sustain R/O endeavors that relied on relatively small numbers of university employees and outside funding. As important as they were, they could never scale and were unsustainable in the ways their original funders wanted them to be. On the other hand, OER projects were generally democratic remix projects that lived and died on the quality of the trib’ing.

Embracing the trib culture, David says, opens up opportunities for new business models and new ways of learning, something I totally agree with. He created a very interesting future history of open educational resources, going through different transitions, mentioning important problems in licensing, student contribution, and describing great opportunities in learning, competition, and creating value in society. In all, the end depicts a very similar look on the future as I have described earlier (and just posted on this blog), about “How I want to wake up one day…”.

Criticisms and additions

I will provide some additions and criticisms to the very interesting view on the future of open education, by using the same narrating style David uses.

The shift from a teacher-centered university, with professors standing on a stage and transferring knowledge, towards a learner-centered university happened slowly but steadily, when experts are no longer able to transfer knowledge any better than high quality video and multimedia learning materials. In addition, traditional classes turned into some kind of open (and closed) discussion groups in an online virtual world, and face-to-face interaction started to happen in smaller groups for brainstorming and praxis, and large groups in conference like gatherings, organized by students.

Decentralization started to spread into all facets of the learning process, including curricula: students were more and more able to follow learning tracks personalized for them. When the point was reached that faculty and university educators were no longer able to make personalized tracks for each and every one of them, this process is finally decentralized and students were able to make their own learning profile and track, changing and adapting it along the way. Any student could make any track he or she wanted, by aggregating courses, and finding experts to help him (gain knowledge, get employed). These experts were initially paid by universities to do this, but later on another mechanism started to mount, replacing this financial incentive with another one. Lifelong learners got involved in this process, and learning networks came into existence where different facets of society are represented: industry, university, and lifelong learners (including students as we know them today).

Facing quite some opposition, the replacement of normal faculty by these learning networks (ranging from a few to thousands of people) took some time. Learning networks gradually overtook the role assumed for so long by universities: they started to accredit the people in their networks, and were responsible for creating meaningful resources for learning, including challenges and prize competitions, something that became very popular in these learning networks. Universities changed their business models, and flexibly offered hardware (rooms, technology, labs, etc.) and services (creating high-quality materials from bare content, catering, human resource management, etc.) to these learning networks.

New diplomas and certificates were popping up everywhere online, and it seemed that any group was able to give out diplomas, creating quite a disturbance and call for the past. It was not long before a standard appeared, a kind of Netiquette, applying to these diplomas. Diplomas were still given in abundance, but the information relevant to the diplomas were instantly available and linked to the diploma. A group of open source software developers, linked with the group responsible for the diploma Netiquette, created software that aggregated the information of different online diplomas and certificates, automatically scrutinizing them with a number of criteria. Their site, http://cert-check.org, became the number one portal for certification quality check. In the years to come, they developed an advanced technology that could provide anyone with advise on career and learning, based on all the aggregated information.

When trust in diplomas and certificates was restored, other facets became more important. Since any learner was putting their learner results directly on the web, data about their added value was much more consistent and valid than any diploma, which soon assumed a decorative role, a kind of achievement award, only to be given to persons really having shown something, and usually in combination with some kind of research fund. Someone’s online ID, being aggregated by more and more advanced machines, took over the role of certification, and after the students, the companies and industry quickly became aware of this. For persons in a learning network, this created another incentive to add value to a network, because added value would return to you in employment opportunities, and/or access to expertise. Adding value clearly happens not just personal social networks, but merely in professional learning networks. A person’s online ID, combined with the social and professional “tacit” contacts, provided everything a person needed. If someone was not inclined to help anyone in his or her learning (and, by now employment network), (s)he was probably not helped either.

OpenLearn 2007 - Learning the open source way (day 1)

Ellen Sjoer and I went to the OpenLearn conference last week in Milton Keynes, England. The conference about open content in education had four main themes;

• Research agenda
• Models of informal learning in the world of open education.
• Cross-cultural issues of open education.
• Research methods for online research of informal learning.

• Sustainability
• Sustainability models for open educational resources.
• Production approaches and costs for open educational resources.
• Methods for embedding open content in education.

• User experience
• User experience with open content.
• Case studies illustrating user models.
• Accessibility of open education.

• Software and tools
• Tools and software supporting open education.
• Social software for open education.
• Mobile technologies in open education.

This post will treat the experiences of the first day: a FLOSScom meeting about the principles of open source, and how these can be applied in a formal educational context.

With some delay Ellen and I arrived at the session that concerned the question whether open source (OS) principles can be applied in educational settings, specifically for the creation of open content. An interesting topic introduced by researcher Andreas Meiszner of FLOSSCom. FLOSS means Free-Libre Open Source Software. His research focuses on

1. Identification of factors that contribute to successful knowledge construction in informal learning communities, such as the FLOSS communities.
   
2. Analysis of the effectiveness of FLOSS-like learning communities in a formal educational setting.
   
3. Provision of case studies, scenarios and guidelines for teachers and decision-makers on how to successfully embed such learning communities within formal educational environments to enhance student progression, retention and achievement.
   
4. Evaluation of the project and dissemination of the results of the project to the wider community.
   

Andreas prepared two presentations to support this workshop. The first one is a basic overview on learning related aspects within open source software communities and the second one tries to model FLOSS-like learning scenarios for educational settings. In explaining the characteristics of learning in OS communities and formal education, he mentions the following;

Andreas made a very interesting overview of applying FLOSS principles in a formal educational environment and explains how such an environment will overcome some of the mentioned problems:

The discussion touched upon different relevant issues:

• Quality assurance and evaluation
  (for both content and learner). Some emphasized the high importance of experts, and doubted that an anarchistic OS environment for learning would enhance learning and learning resources. Others explained that
  
• a faster feedback loop on resources and questions/problems improves quality;
• quality depends on the context of learning, hence cannot be determined for others;
  
• advanced rating and tagging mechanisms can be implemented to overcome some of these perceived issues;
  
• there is a social element of learning embedded in OS communities;
• experts (old foxes) and leaders play an important role in OS communities as well, next to roles and task assignment. (Connexions research).
  
• The need to meet a given curriculum, setting ground rules
• Making a metalayer or learning contexts on how to make resources and combine them, focusing less on content.
• Cultural resistance to change, and community development aspects
• Culture of learning versus accreditation. Next generation university: exam-only + external bodies for learning?
• Interface management is crucial in creating learning objects in an open source way :: “Modularity reduces the costs of coordination, but is only possible when the interfaces between the modules are clearly defined.” (Understanding Open Source Communities, van Wendel de Joode 2005, p.85)
• Difference between open source and (formal) education
  
• Richard Heller said that there is a foundational difference between OS and OER.
  Within OS is the software the end, but for education the learning process is considered more important. OER cannot be considered the end, rather the education process that surrounds it. I am not sure whether I agree with it, and not because I think that learning objects or resources are more important than the process. Rather, I think that software creation in OS communities is not an end either. People and machines in this respect can be treated in the same way: software feeds the machine to work better, educational resources feed the human machine to function better in society.
• Getting passionate users in an OER community, like within OS communities
  
• Andreas explained the so-called “Onion Model”, with 2% of the community core programmers making more than half of the code (OER: educators), and the rest of the code (45%) being made by passionate users. A third group is formed by the passive users. Andreas argues that within OER initiatives we miss this group of passionate users. We have 2% educators responsible for the content, but no tools, manuals, incentives for the users of the content to become active and passionate
  contributors as well.