Open Artifacts
Implement open projects so teams can collaborate with others across time and space.
it’s important to find people who live near you to work with—Local Commonships—but you may not be able to find enough expertise to take on some of the problems that need solving. As the old saying goes, we want to act locally, but in order to think globally, we may need a global community of thinkers. That’s where Commonships of the Future and this pattern come in.
Institutions like NGOs and charities aren’t designed to use the best ideas and skills of individuals unless they’re a formal part of the organization. The energy and ideas of skilled people who want to contribute part-time is lost because we don’t know how to harness it.
Collaborating across time and distance is tricky thing, yet that is exactly what we need to be able to do. If someone in the U.S. is collaborating with someone in Kenya, the different timezones make it difficult to do it directly. In addition, people who are contributing need to have flexibility; if they’re working during the day, for example, they may need to make their contributions in the late hours after their kids are in bed or they get home from the club.
Fortunately, we have a model for long-term collaboration over time and space: the open source software movement. The open source software movement has revolutionized how software is created, shared and sold. The same thing is needed for artifacts that are not software. We should be generating all kinds of open projects to harness the power of minds all over the world toward solutions, and to share those solutions around the world.
An open artifacts project is a way to do distributed design. An artifact is designed in a shared space with full transparency. Multiple contributors can add new ideas and make changes asynchronously. By creating a community around a particular problem, we can distribute our cognition, we can create a larger network of thinking.
The open source software community has developed software tools that make asynchronous collaboration easier: version control systems allow multiple people to make changes in their own time, then commit those changes to the project without concern that their changes will interfere with those of another contributor. Any conflicts (i.e. two people making different changes to the same part of the project) are detected and can easily be resolved.
Open Source Software is aided by the fact that software is digital and therefore easily transferred around the world to anyone with a computer. Software is also written using plain text, which makes it more cross-platform compatible and less likely to be made obsolete by proprietary software changes.
With those considerations in mind, we can create similar kinds of projects that can have nothing to do with software. The ability to digitize information through scanning, computer-aided design (CAD) tools, text editors and the like makes it possible to share ideas and solutions across the world. Since they are separate and more generalized from open source software, and “source code” is part of the software model, I call these kinds of projects Open Artifacts projects.
Open artifacts can include any project that is free (in the sense of free speech, not free beer, as the software folks like to say), and there are a lot of different groups creating them under a bunch of different names: open data, open science, open education, open source appropriate technology, and websites that allow for sharing work among Makers, like Thingiverse, Instructibles, and more.
Different projects have different amounts of openness. There is a grid that is published by SPARC that tries to detail the many ways that openness can be limited. It’s a complicated situation involving whether the resource can be read free of charge and if so, after how much time, whether the resource can be reused, remixed and shared with others, what copyrights and other rights are retained for the work, and more. For this kind of project, I think the most important things are:
-
that individuals have the ability to contribute to the project. It’s great if something like a textbook is made freely available, but there should be a way to send feedback that can be integrated into future editions.
-
that a project can be forked, to use the language of version control software. That means that if you want to start with an existing project but take it in a different direction, you’re free to do so. In terms of licenses, that is the ability to reuse and remix a project.
Open artifacts projects can be designed to be flexible. A solution that works in one part of the world, with a specific culture, climate, educational system and so on, may not work very well in another part of the world where those things are different. Like an open software project, open artifacts can be forked and changed for local conditions. In addition, they could be designed with flexibility built in. For example, instead of defining exactly how a community garden should be arranged, a pattern language could be provided that allows to the local community to design the garden together themselves.
The goal of an open artifacts project is to facilitate and document the design process, making it possible for people from all over the world to contribute to a single goal, for the benefit of everyone.
An open artifacts project would usually take the form of a website with an associated “repository” storing the project files in a “version control system” like Git. To contribute, project members could pull down a copy of all the files, make changes and then merge their changes back into the main repository when they’re ready.
On the website (the files for which could also be in the Git repository) would a way to introduce your project to new contributors and possible users. As such, it might contain a Q&A page that will get them oriented and possibly a discussion board (or social media group page) to make it easier for members to communicate about ideas and questions.
In terms of files, create documents for your open artifacts project containing these kinds of artifacts: a digital version of the Preferred State, a list of organizations working on similar problems (these are potential collaborators for your project. They also ensure you’ve researched whether anyone else is already doing what you’re doing), research on existing solutions to the problem you’re trying to solve, proposed solutions that may or may not be explored, and educational materials to help new project members get up to speed.
Of course, in addition to all the support documents, you would have the main project files; in essence the [[ Artifact ]] that you’re creating. It might take the form of a book, or building plans, or even a business plan. It might be simple or very complex depending on what is needed.
Therefore:
Create and participate in open artifacts projects so you can collaborate with others across time and space.
Open artifacts projects can support work being done in all three movements, helping people make a shift in consciousness—Collective Actualization—through books, workbooks, seminar designs, and more; helping design revolutionaries—Design Revolution—through defining inventions, writing policy, and more; and helping the Global Regeneration though defining how to build ecosystems, gathering data for holding actions, coordinating action across long distances to create wildlife corridors, and more. Use the open artifacts project to facilitate and document the Design process, including your Preferred State, analysis of Past Forces, your reasoning about what warrants your Proactive Urgency, and the results of the Start With Universe exercises. In terms of existing projects, participate in Local Commonships as a way of implementing an open artifacts project in your local community. By creating a local instance of the project, you’ll find ways it can be improved or ways that it needs to be adapted for your local conditions. Make sure you contribute what you learn back to the project.