Keeping Social Innovation Real (selfaccelerating social innovation accelerator vol4)

Terminology:

• OPENSOURCE: tools and products which both business- and non-businessworld can use & modify
• SIC: social innovative concept
• RESTAPI: popular way to distribute and share online data
• BOTTOM-UP: Team members are invited to participate in every step of the management process

The above illustrated cyclic flow (or parts of it) could happen thru human interaction and/or software. Therefore, a house with people could also simply represent a database.

Stop black/white thinking

As Peter Wolkowinski pointed out to me:

“In siliconvalley/opensource softwareworld there’s no such thing as true failure.”

Technology is just technology, which people can make better, faster, stronger. Today’s failure is tomorrow’s improvement. Therefore, people in the softwareworld are very tolerant to things going wrong:

• start building, fail hard, fail fast
• Things need to go wrong in order to improve
• The more things go wrong, the faster things can get fixed.
• The faster things get fixed, the faster stability is reached
• When stability is reached, focus can go elsewhere (repeat the above cycle)

Software development is cyclical, not linear

How does the softwareworld do this?

Simple, in opensource softwareworld, a project doesn’t have an public start/end, it has :

• activity based on projectdata changes/updates
• a projectrelated forum
• participants

Participants in total are responsible for a project’s:

• requests to update the project with certain researchdata/info
• number of likes
• number of followers (who’ll receive email notifications when project gets updated)
• questions and answers on the projectrelated forum

Inspired by

This article has been greatly inspired by talks with the wonderful people of:

Credits: Arjan Biemans, Erna Bosschart, Bonno Pel, Kaat Peters, Liisa Joutsenjarvi, Christoph Grud, Ivan Kepecs, Oscar Racke, Anne Paavolainen, Peter Wolkowinski, Jonas Bylund, Peter van de Glind, and probably a lot of people I forgot.