Open Source is more than free software

The open source movement has been popularised by the geeks, who benefited immensely from the collaborative power of the internet. The notion of open source has been around for centuries albeit in small communities where knowledge sharing was a way of life. The concept of bartering and peer production was given shape in the late 19th century. And in 2003, collaborative projects like Wikipedia emerged and have proven to be quite successful.

Yochai Benkler points out in his TED talk, that "social production" is the long term disprutive force that will challenge the players in the commercial market place. Benkler's book "The Wealth of Networks" is made available as a source for open discussion using Yale's annotation platform.

So as the Internet continues its growth, the notion of an open source is moving to other domains. Like the Open Architecture Network that provides solutions to a wider audience. Peer production is here to stay... and a key question is to figure how commercial players and the public sector would respond to this disruption.

Consumer Centered Service Development - First Tuesday 23rd may 2006

As social media technologies build for interoperability, interesting things can happen. This presentation is 3 1/2 years old, but posted to slideshare 3 weeks ago. And now being linked to my blog.

Am just curious to see how this works in pratice.

Consumer Centered Service Development - First Tuesday 23rd may 2006

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Designing public services

I have earlier blogged about service design and last week at the 1st Nordic conference on Service Design and Service Innovation conference I met a number of very skilled people from different domains. It just reinforced my thinking about the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to address the challenges of designing services.

My own contribution on Day 2 was during the workshop on "Designing public services" was enlightening. My role was not as an expert in service design, but as a consumer-citizen; a c-c trying to make a case for participatory design. I am even more convinced that consumer-centered design is critical in the design of services and even more so in the design of public services. This blog was taglined "citizen-driven design. Shaping the agenda for Society 2.0" some years ago and my search for methods and practices for citizen involvement continues. It's not a question of "getting there" -- but more on evolving democratic processes to capture the "requirements" from citizens.

My presentation - that focused on scenarios for health care and wellness - was actually making a point around "capture of requirements". I used scenarios as a means to convey "requirements -- while making the point that we need to be more intention-oriented in understanding services. I view intentions as an abstraction above needs and requirements and suspect intention-orientation will open for citizen participation while also providing a means to "manage" the design process using conventional practices like "requirements management". Besides citizen participation, intention-orientation will also help unify practices from the different disciplines involved in service design.
So it is with some expectations I will be attending Dugnadssamfunnet 2.0 (Norwegian) arranged by the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform.