Open Thinkering

Principles for Open Impact

• Everything Else, groups, networks, Open Impact, open working
Open is an Attitude
Image CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery for WAO

For the past few months, Tris Lumley has been convening Opening Up community calls. I’ve been to a few and given some advice about various things. It’s led to a previous post on this blog: Ethical Licensing for Impact Organisations.

Earlier this week, Tris posted the following on LinkedIn:

Principles for open impact After several community calls of the Opening Up Impact community, I've been thinking about what the core principles of our work, and the manifesto we've been talking about, might be. Here's a start. Please add what you think is needed, and tell me what you think of these starting points. 1. Everybody owns the great ideas - Enable collective accountability - Enable organisations as pieces of the overall puzzle 2. Common purpose through sharing in the Commons - Enable visibility, alignment and collaboration 3. Build community through active openness - Connect people with common goals to build relationships and trust - Network organisations as substrate of community 4. Enable collaboration over competition - Feeling part of a community encourages generous behaviours - Incentivise community through funding and investment

My first response was that “everybody owns all the ideas — good or bad.” I made a note to myself to come back to this, and the blog post you are reading comprises my further thoughts.

I consider the deliciously-named Fifty shades of open by Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek to be one of the seminal papers about thinking through what ‘openness’ means at a high level. The abstract states:

Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word “open” as it is used in a wide range of contexts.

The authors chart how the word ‘open’ has moved from the world of software into many other areas, noting the following uses:

  • Open means rights
  • Open means access
  • Open means use
  • Open means transparent
  • Open means participatory
  • Open means enabling openness
  • Open means philosophically aligned with open principles

I’ve used this approach before when helping design a free What We Talk About When We Talk About Open email-based course with We Are Open Co-op (WAO). It’s a good starting point, especially when used in conjunction with the following five principles of openness defined by The Open Organization Definition:

  1. Transparency
  2. Inclusivity
  3. Adaptability
  4. Collaboration
  5. Community

The thing is, though, that we usually think about openness being the property of an individual (“how open are they?”) or an organisation (“how open is it?”) rather than of groups or networks.

The difference between groups and networks is itself an interesting thing to consider. Almost two decades ago on this blog I quoted George Siemens summing up Stephen Downes’ distinction between the two (emphasis added by me):

‘Groups require unity, networks require diversity. Groups require coherence, networks require autonomy. Groups require privacy or segregation, networks require openness. Groups require focus of voice, networks require interaction.’

To avoid groupthink and in/out membership, networks rely on diversity, autonomy, openness, and interaction.

Groups vs Networks
CC BY-NC Stephen Downes

A good example of this would be the work around Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials which I’ve been part of for the last 15 years. It’s an open standard which can be used by anyone for anything. That means people from very diverse backgrounds, with different worldviews and incentives, have had to come into alignment to bring and sustain something useful for everybody.

This is why networks “require” openness. Everyone needs to be able to take part and see themselves as part of the network helping enable the bigger thing. So I think that three of the things that Tris highlights are a good start: collective ownership of ideas, building community, and enabling collaboration over competition.

But is “common purpose” necessary in working openly? Does everyone have to be working towards the same ends? Or can they find that the “technology” being used here (which can be a process as much as a standard) simply useful to further their own ends?

What I noticed with the Open Badges work was that the things that attracted me towards it — putting the means of credentialing into the hands of everyone, is actually what we would now term Open Recognition. There were plenty of people opposed that idea.

That idea — “the means of credentialing should be democratised” — can be separated out from the ability to issue credentials according to a technical standard. For example, governments around the world are exploring the use of Verifiable Credentials for digital identity management. This is quite far removed from the more philosophical conversations the Open Recognition crowd has about the power of everyday recognition practices to augment things like CVs and résumés.

Yet, because there’s a core standard behind all of this, we can all talk about something which is important to all of us. I think the same should be true when thinking about “Principles for Open Impact.”

All of which to say that I’d remix the great start that Tris has made in the following way to be less group-focused, and more network-focused:

  1. Openness is an attitude
  2. Ideas belong to everybody
  3. Community is based on trust
  4. Collaboration over competition
  5. Open licensing is how we roll

This kind of formulation seems good enough for now and safe enough to try. It’s productively ambiguous, enabling a broad tent with diverse opinions. Yet, I believe, it’s specific enough to be able to point out when people aren’t doing things of benefit to the whole network.

What do YOU think?