Spent the middle part of today in a working session, lead by IDEO facilitators, to tackle a few of the big questions in front of setiQuest and the Seti Institute.
How do we enable developers and designers to contribute back to setiQuest in a way that benefits all involved?
How do we share the SETI vision with the world, so that conversation can come back and support people wanting to find ways to participate?
The community building problems are pretty straightforward, the kind of thing we cover in The Open Source Way (TOSW). In fact, I’m going to follow up this meeting by joining a working group to help setiQuest architect the community structure and seed the leadership team/interim board. I intend to create and use some checklists and so forth derived from TOSW handbook. To me, it’s a great chance to take the principles in TOSW and see them applied in another domain while at the same time applying them to actually new open source and open data.
Another stroke of luck, one of the IDEO people I met today works on OpenIDEO, their new project to open the design thinking process. I’m excited to get to follow up with them, find out more about how they want to grow the OpenIDEO community, and how that can feed in to and learn from a “Design the open source way” chapter in The Open Source Way. It will be an interesting conversation, since I intend to press on the license and terms used by OpenIDEO in comparison to the open nature of the site’s purpose. At the same time, I hope to learn about more about the challenges of design and free/open business models, and learn more about how to make The Open Source Way a better book.
I’ll write more about this as it develops.
Comments closed — Trackbacks closed RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Saturday, August 14, 2010, at 6:18 pm by quaid. Filed in Community, Fedora, Leadership and tagged science, SETI, setiQuest, the open source way.
Bingo. I think I find myself in the middle here, but I don’t have any more answers than “follow the open source way” and ask lots of questions. At the Summit, I agreed to form a working group on architecting a community leadership council/board of some sort. Something that can get in to a position to start fielding questions, guiding decisions, and making a process to replace itself with something selected from/by the open community ASAP.