Our Blog

Slides up from last Friday’s Open Hardware conference at Nesta Hq. It was a really interesting day, engaging conversations and some (telling) arguments! All in all, It was very useful for me to reflect on the differences between the co-creation and crowdsourcing models on one side and the opensource model/community on the other side.

Most of the friction seemed to emerge around two cornerstones of co-creation: 1) rewarding the people involved in the process 2) involving consumers as active equals, at the same level of designers, coders and creatives.

The idea of rewarding the people involved in the co-creation project with incentives (cash or prizes) was seen by some as a deal-breaker: it “kills the magic of the collaboration” and outsmarts the “love” element in the motivation. But I think since most brands are nowhere near the idea of giving away their IP and go opensource, it is fair and crucial to reward the people involved for their time and effort.

It also makes sense to remember that a big part of the opensource workforce is made of paid developers (just think about Mozilla) and I would argue that certainly they mustn’t love their job less because they get paid to work on something they consider a cause. So, I think cash doesn’t exclude love/glory/fun. As a matter of fact it probably multiplies the three of them. Or at least it would in my case (if it wasn’t clear enough already).

The second friction-generator was the idea of involving in the process consumers/users at the same level as designers/coders/creatives. Some of the coders involved thought that (non-skilled) consumers/users should just be involved as testers, once the strategic and creative work has been done by “the experts”.

This is a kind of resistance we encounter quite often over any co-creation process. It may vary in degree but the idea of having non-skilled consumers coming up with ideas and “tasking” skilled developers/designers/creatives doesn’t go down well. So, it wasn’t big news, but what surprised me was that this resistance was coming from people that live and breath in the open source world.

So I decided to dig it up. And after discussing and arguing the various points, pint after pint, one of the explanations I was given is that the open source collaboration process is based on a principle of equal contribution while the co-creation one is potentially asymmetric. So if you’re not contributing enough to the open source community, or as much as the others, you’re not going to be taken seriously and you shouldn’t have the right to be tasking other users. But again, if I look at how opensource communities work I’m not sure symmetry and equal contribution are religiously observed. Also, the presence of paid developers in the open source community kind of compromise the “equal contribution” argument.

All in all, I think it’s important to have different types of co-creators, with different sets of skills, contributing to different stages of the process in different ways. Throwing them all together without a structure, a solid process and diversified roles it’s just not going to fly. And that’s why leadership is so important for any opensource community.