Mozilla OI Update from the Open and User Innovation Conference 2017
Written by Rosana Ardila and Rina Jensen
For second successive year we attended the Open and User Innovation Conference (The OUI Conference) — the leading conference in the field — held this year in the beautiful city of Innsbruck, Austria.
A few of our highlights:
Success through building movements
When HTT joined Elon Musk’s hyperloop challenge they knew that getting to a solution with their current limited resources alone was unrealistic. Instead, they took learnings from activist grassroot groups and growing crowdsourcing projects and focused on building a movement. They did this by focusing on 5 design principles that reject traditional organisational design, all focusing on different ways of organising in the open, principles they have label Wicked Goal Design. Implementing these design principles allowed HTT to gather top engineers across different fields and disciplines to help work on the problem in their spare time, by setting up clear structures for engagement such as donating personal time and money to get the opportunity to work on the project. The project has had remarkable effects, growing the movement to a community of 40.000 screened and selected individuals, of which 800 are bought in collaborators. They also build up a solid network of key partners who contribute much of the work. In 2018 they are expected to test their first passenger system.
Source: http://hyperloop.global/team/
A healthy community is a strong network
The R community, is an open source community building a system for statistical computing. It has had tremendous success because of the tight networks and the ever increasing partner pool that help them develop the technology in new and interesting directions. For us, this highlighted the need to think about a healthy open source community, not as the sum of individuals contained within it, but also by the networks and ecosystems that surround it and support it.
Source: R Community Presentation
HeroX and the search for diversity
HeroX is a crowdsourcing platform specialising in many types of competitions, prizes and challenges. As such, they have a great need for a diverse community but the HeroX platform shows much lower contribution rates from women than men. The team therefore started a project experimenting with the effects on diversity from having in-person expert mentors help new members. We will follow with interest to see the results of the remote mentorship model.
Co-creation, rather than just sharing information, maintains productive communities
A current theme is the role of co-creation in open communities. Thomas Maillart from the University of Geneva found that co-creation, in the form of hackathons, leads to creative outbursts in communities, this can only be sustained through continuous feedback and follow up. A netnographic study of the Open Energy Monitor community, looked into what triggers successful prototyping and came to similar findings. Asking and receiving feedback are the most important actions to trigger successful prototyping. Finally, Maria Halbinger from CUNY uncovered in her study of makerspaces that while identifying with a community decreases entrepreneurship in individuals, co-creation can actually mitigate this effect. This research highlights that communities thrive when they are creating together, rather than just sharing information, spaces or social bonds. A lesson for Mozilla communities is that a thriving community goes beyond identifying with the mission. It comes down to solving problems and creating together.
Overall we can see that open innovation, including open source and crowdsourcing, are exploding as areas of research. If you are interested in more details about the specific papers you can check out the Book of abstracts.
