Could the principles of 'open source' - collaborative forms of creating knowledge pioneered in software development - have a transforming impact on many areas of business, government and daily life?
This is an edited extract from 'Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential', written by Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation and former Head of Policy in the Prime Minister's Office, and Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.
A full copy of the report, published by Demos, can be downloaded at www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/wideopen
Musings about the applicability of open source methods in new fields have appeared in The Economist, Newsweek International, the American Prospect and the NewScientist. We now hear of 'open source' trade unionism, biotechnology and even religion. South Korea's OhmyNews is widely cited as leading the way for fully open news reporting.
While open source may be the inspiration for new ways of thinking about politics or religion it does not follow that an initiative launched under the banner is open source. Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to call anything open source that doesn't have source code. Given that 'open source' is a relatively recent term with a clear and useful definition set up by an eponymous organisation, we feel that muddying the waters by applying it in non-software areas is unhelpful for all involved. We therefore need new terms which acknowledge the growing diversity of open methods.
In the pamphlet 'Wide Open: Open Source Methods and their Future Potential', we suggest three broad categories of activity observed in projects inspired by open source ideas. In some cases all three can be found in the same project, and all are at least partially transferable to non-software areas:
- Open knowledge. These are projects where knowledge is provided freely, and shaped, vetted and in some cases used by a wide community of participants. In these cases the common value of the knowledge being created is the primary concern.
- Open team working. The loose communities of interest that work together through the internet to build projects like Wikipedia and Linux merge into a wider family of semi-open teams rooted in organisations. These generally have a clearly defined end goal.
- Open conversations. These extend traditional forms of public discussion by constructing online conversations capable of handing more participants in more effective ways than previously possible. In these cases the process is as important as any goal.
All can be very open, but most will rest on the quality of their leaders as well as their participants. Like most networks they depend on some people’s willingness and ability to act as guardians of their values and qualities. In the following section we will look at this three-part schema and see how it applies to current non-software projects that are using the term open source.
Open knowledge
A new area of innovation within bioscience (and science more generally) is that of organisations that are trying to transfer the benefits of open source licensing systems to non-software spheres. There are now two initiatives, the CAMBIA BIOS initiative and the Science Commons, that are using open source techniques to offer new kinds of licence which are more flexible and conducive to collaborative work than traditional copyright and patenting systems. These aim to provide common knowledge for use globally, and to mobilise a wide community of participants. These innovative approaches to the creation of new knowledge share a variety of open characteristics, while in many ways being blocked from true open source status by their high barriers of capital and qualification requirements. However, depending on their exact criteria for participation, most of these projects do fall under our definition of open teams and open knowledge.
Open team working
Within government, open methods are just beginning to transform the business of policy- making
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Within government, open methods are just beginning to transform the business of policy-making. At a global level huge communities of experts are now involved in decision-making and assessment. The International Panel on Climate Change is one particularly striking example (involving reputation, incremental knowledge and a huge community of participants).
Governments and public organisations are beginning to be more open about their data and internal processes, partly spurred on by freedom of information laws and by the advent of much more ubiquitous data. The UK's Strategy Unit for example often publishes detailed work plans, working papers and analyses, alongside open consultations. In many countries, smarter governments are seeking ways to introduce open methods which will add value to public data and services that they provide. Strictly, though, openness of this sort is not related to open source derived methods. The government’s commission on sustainability has employed a wiki, but the public sector is only just starting to get the hang of these extremely new and sometimes challenging approaches.
For examples of real open methods in the public sector, we have to look at the new interface between government and voluntary groups, like the open volunteer team which built TheyWorkForYou.com, the annotated, open knowledge version of Hansard, the UK’s parliamentary record. On a smaller scale, the TalkEuro project is building an annotated version of the European constitution, to improve its intelligibility, and to attempt a better quality of debate over its clauses than could be managed through traditional media.
All of these methods discomfort some politicians and officials since they appear to reduce control. But as in the case of open source development projects on the internet, the involvement of more players tends to improve the quality of what is done, without necessarily reducing the room for leadership.
Some have also applied the term open source to fairly conventional open methods of innovation: for example public services that give some autonomy to frontline units to develop different ways of organising themselves, and then try to capture and share the insights these bring. Such methods are helpful, and are advances over tightly constrained hierarchy. But they are better understood as ways of opening up processes – and they rarely, if ever, open up decision-making power.
Another set of innovations apply some open source principles within organisations. Within private companies or public organisations there are obvious attractions in establishing open knowledge sites on intranets to encourage collaborative problem-solving.
The open company is also becoming a possibility - where shareholders see themselves, and are treated, as members, sharing in discussions about corporate priorities and ethics. This model is likely to spread primarily in fields where there is a clear sense of common purpose (for example fair trade, or environmental companies) and where there is less threat of competitors taking advantage of inside knowledge.
These examples illuminate both the potential and the limits of open source ideas. In competitive for-profit environments there are bound to be significant limits to how far good ideas can be aired and shared. But just as business hierarchies have learned how to make use of networks in a myriad of forms so is it likely that pyramidal business organisations will also find some ways to make use of more open methods of collaboration.
Open conversations
The internet has made all sorts of open conversation possible
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The internet has made all sorts of open conversation possible: linking people together, and managing reputation and usefulness. Many newspapers and broadcasters now support varying types of conversation on their websites. The British Labour Party attempted through its 'Big Conversation' to organise a mix of face-to-face and web-based conversations to shape its election manifesto.
The BBC’s iCan project is an innovative infrastructure which makes it easy for citizens to form common projects and campaigns. Its software is not open source, but its approach combines open knowledge (for example, collaboratively authored guidance to achieve local goals) with local conversations (with people discussing local issues). Like other kinds of social software it provides a space in which a myriad of open conversations can be undertaken according to some reasonably flexible shared rules. And the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has funded a series of ‘Issues Forums’, bringing local people, most of whom don’t know each other, together on mailing lists to discuss local issues. These lists are free to join, and open to anyone prepared to obey the simple rule structure.
These various methods for organising large communities in a single conversation overlap with the traditions of scholarship and peer review in academia and with interpretation in religion. They also potentially overlap with the more challenging idea of open decision-making methods which involve large numbers of people in taking decisions (for example participative budgeting, deliberative polls and citizen’s juries). Achieving legitimising levels of representativeness in decision-making processes using open methods, though, is a challenge which should not be underestimated. Constantly asking 'What can we learn from Big Brother?' does not actually shed any light on the real potential for open conversations.
