We had a chance to meet Jean-Noel de Linares during Digital Shoreditch few months ago. The young man was exploring Brand Strategy for Open Source communities, using design to stimulate online collaboration. We helped him with some of our best practices and some client cases and we were really impressed by his final paper.
In your last paper, you talk about using design to stimulate online collaboration: what does it mean?
Collaboration between people who don’t know each other, online, without any management or a “boss”, doesn’t happen naturally. Or when it does, it is a big piece of luck. Linux is a great and thriving community, but it’s a success that won’t be easily repeatable. It involves many different constraints, technical, economical, social, legal, you name it, and these should be addressed strategically. Stimulating online collaboration means setting up the favourable environment for people to be willing to interact with each other and give their spare time and energy to the project. In my paper, I showed how design, that is strategic design, can be used to raise interest in the project, create trust between members, suggest the future directions for the individuals and the whole community, convey the brand values, all that in one go, as we say, at the strategic level. And if these are done efficiently and in a coherent way, a way that makes sense, there is a great deal achieved in stimulating online collaboration. And a great deal achieved in building the community’s brand as well.
You’ve been studying a lot of open source communities: what were the most surprising insights you got?
I found that open source communities are dramatically different from each other, in their purpose, in their organisational structure, decision making process, socio-demographic type of contributors. I actually got surprised all the time! But the one thing that surprised me most is the sense of social responsibility that drives many contributions. A lot of scholar I could read of during this project tends to deny it, saying that people are always driven by their ego, that there is no such thing as true altruism, and try to put individual drivers and motivations behind every contribution they see. On the contrary, I was told by an insider, and I could see it myself in numerous open source communities, that helping newcomers as you were helped when you were new yourself often supercedes any cost of contribution. In other words, in much cases people are willing to do more than their own business just because they want to give back to the community what they got from it. And this is something that can be enhanced by design. For instance, I could see many open source communities where some tasks are mentored, which means that a senior member is assigned to help newcomers performig this task. This lead me to consider the importance of both helping newcomers getting started on the project and giving responsibilites to members to sustain their interest.
When it comes to brands, we at RE-UP try to create “socially designed’ brand experience: do you have some examples of brands who successfully implement this approach?
I got the chance to speak with Anna Meroni, design researcher at Politecnico Milan, about her theories on community-centred design. I don’t know exactly what you mean by socially designed brand experience, but my guess is that it relates to this concept. In short, community-centred design attempts to integrate members of the community of stakeholders in the design process so that the design solution perfectly suits the community’s specificities. I encourage you to have a look at her work, especially with the Milan’s farmers community and food supply-chain. Community-centred design was used in order to bring more social interaction in the process of growing, supplying and buying food. This project, called Nutrire Milan, is a great example of how to design a brand in a way that social interactions happen naturally around it and its product/service. (presentation accessible on http://hcdi.brunel.ac.uk/seminardetails.aspx?sid=32 see slides 144 to end) Her design process involve 8 steps in which the designer engage progressively with the community, starting from a handful of selected pro-active members to a broader audience. Of course this community is not an online one, although it might include online interactions. But, hey, you didn’t ask specifically for an online brand :). But there is much to learn from it about social design. In open source communities, too, the experience of participating largely depends on the kind of social interactions one has with other members. Therefore, it is vital that members, because they deliver the brand experience as much as they live it, should be integrated in the design process. Unfortunately I couldn’t get deep enough in these communities to witness how socially designed the experience was. In fact, besides Mozilla, I can’t think of any open source brand in which the experience is really designed. I won’t paraphrase Anna Meroni’s work, but I would say that if an online community should be designed, it could very well follow the steps she brought froward.
If a brand wants to implement an open-source community, what should be the very first steps?
I think we need to clarify what open source community means.
First of all, we cannot talk about an open source community unless the product the community works on is open source per se. Open source describes a certain type of licensing in which the product is released with all the necessary elements for anyone to modify it and release it on their own. For example the source code for a software, the vector files for a font type, the recipe for a beverage, and so on. Then the open source community can gather around it. Therefore the first step to take when creating an open source community is to release all the necessary files and material to give the freedom for anyone to modify the product. It seems obvious but there are a lot of brands around who try to create collaborative communities around their products, while they control the material and the community’s activities and they own the outcome. This isn’t an open source community, it serves a different purpose. The community needs to own the project if they are to produce real radically innovative work. But I would say this is step 0, what I call invitation to experiment, and it is surely not enough. If you ask me for the first step, it is to make people interested. People will ask you “what’s in there for me?” and you must be able to answer this question specifically for as many kind of people as possible. For that, list the different reasons why it would be beneficial for someone to contribute and the different skills that can be put to contribution for the project. Aggregate all this into meaningful clusters, and formulate these clusters as different roles. People must see the role they can play in the community, and they will choose this role based on their own skills and what they would like to take from it. For an example, you may want to see Mozilla’s contributor portal, they do that marvelously. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
Again, this is not enough. In my research I highlighted 6 different steps to create an attractive open source community. I gave you 2! You’re welcome to have a look at the full summary of my research on my LinkedIn uk.linkedin.com/pub/jean-noel-gonzalez-de-linares/38/a82/a72/.