open

Are you building a community or a club?

I’ve never been much for clubs. When I was young, I made a lousy cub scout. I wasn’t a real “joiner” in high school or college either (just enough to get by) and I still don’t get actively involved in many professional associations today.

But I’m a sucker for a noble mission. I find myself getting drawn into all sorts of things these days. Good causes, interesting projects, even big ideas like the reinvention of management all share my extra attention, brainpower, and resources.

I love to contribute to things I believe in.

So why don’t I care much for clubs or associations? They are typically groups of people who have come together to support a common purpose. Right?

I believe many of these groups have fallen into the trap of losing touch with the core purpose that brought the initial group of people together in the first place.

They have lost their raison d’etre.

In the beginning, most clubs start off as communities. In fact, the definition of a club is “an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal.” Which is pretty similar to this definition of a community: a “self-organized network of people with common agenda, cause, or interest, who collaborate by sharing ideas, information, and other resources.”

So what goes wrong? How and why do clubs and associations lose their sense of purpose?

First, let’s take a quick look at how a community might grow in an ideal setting. Watch the short animation below before you read on:

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

Five questions about open innovation with Stefan Lindegaard

On Wednesday, September 1, opensource.com will be hosting a webcast with Stefan Lindegaard, one of the world’s leading experts on open innovation.

If you want to bring in external partners to your innovation process, these partners expect that you have order in your own house. If you fail to work efficiently with these partners nothing happens in terms of outcome. Even worse, the word spreads that you are not a good innovation partner and thus you will have a harder time attracting future partners.

Some companies believe that if they just embrace open innovation, then all their internal innovation issues will be solved. This will not happen. Open innovation is not a holy grail.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

OpenIDEO: a new experiment in open innovation

This week, those smart folks over at IDEO launched a new project they are calling OpenIDEO. If you aren’t familiar with IDEO yet, you should be—they are the poster children for design thinking specifically and 21st century innovation more generally.

IDEO has been responsible for groundbreaking designs of everything from computer mice to toothbrushes to brand experiences, and it is the home of superstar thinkers like Tim Brown (author of the recent book called Change By Design) and Tom Kelley (author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation).

What is OpenIDEO? Here’s what the website says:

OpenIDEO is a place where people design better, together for social good. It’s an online platform for creative thinkers: the veteran designer and the new guy who just signed on, the critic and the MBA, the active participant and the curious lurker.

So it is basically an experiment in open innovation, a place where IDEO can be the catalyst of a conversation among really smart folks from different disciplines that might lead to solutions for big, complex social problems.

If you are a skeptic, you might immediately wonder what’s in it for IDEO. One person asked whether IDEO planned to make money with the “crowd’s” ideas, and Tim Brown answered like this:

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

Five questions about authenticity and the open source way with Jim Gilmore

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to meet Jim Gilmore, co-author (with Joseph Pine) of the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. I first read the book a few years ago, and it really struck a nerve for me—these guys were on to something.

So I convinced Jim to subject himself to a Five Questions interview about the place where authenticity and the open source way intersect.

CHRIS: After joining the open source world ten years ago, it didn’t take me long to figure out that most open source folks despise marketing as it is traditionally practiced. Is there something inherently inauthentic about the language of marketing? Perhaps open source folks have a low tolerance for inauthenticity?

JIM: I often quote from a letter-to-the-editor that appeared in the Harvard Business Review following the publication of our article, “Welcome to the Experience Economy.” In this letter, Robert Jones of Wolf-Olins shared his definition of a brand as “the promise of an experience.”

Joe Pine and I responded by saying Amen to that, but added that so often the actual experience fails to fulfill against the promise.  Indeed, marketing in general, and advertising in particular, has become a giant phoniness-generating machine.  And not just the language of marketing, but the very practice of marketing so often serves to erode the perception of authenticity among consumers—by making promises that bear little resemblance to the actual experience encountered.

So much creative talent today is engaged in making promises as marketing instead of being employed to create compelling experiences as actual output.  The experience itself should be the marketing.

My friend Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, is fond of saying, “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”  I feel that way about most marketing.  I’d like to see creative talent diverted from making messages about goods and services and used instead to help create truly remarkable experiences, ones so compelling that they command a fee as product.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

BusinessWeek turns an eye to open source beyond technology

On opensource.com, we aspire to take principles the open source software movement has applied to building better software faster and find more uses for them in business, education, government, the law, and generally in our lives.

So a few weeks back, I was excited to see that BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg BusinessWeek) ran a special report called Eye on: Open Source that also embraced the wider usage of open source principles in technology and beyond.

My personal opinion? I think a few of the articles in the special report confuse true community-driven open source innovation with concepts like user-driven product design, crowdsourcing, and design competitions. But it was still neat to see BusinessWeek recognize the applicability of open source principles beyond software.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

Community-building tip: surprise is the opposite of engagement

In the interview with Chris Blizzard I posted last week, near the end of the article Chris attributes a phrase to Mozilla CEO John Lilly:

“Surprise is the opposite of engagement.”

This may be one of the most simple, brilliant things I have ever heard someone say when it comes to creating engaged, active communities.

When we talk about building communities the open source way, we often mention transparency and openness as critical elements of any community strategy. But when I saw this quote, it reminded me why transparency and openness are so important.

When we are open with people, we avoid surprising them. We keep them in the loop.

Nothing kills someone’s desire to be an active contributor in a community more than when they feel like they’ve been blindsided. By a decision. By an announcement. By the introduction of a new community member.

Few things help a community get stronger faster than simply engaging community members every step of the way. Asking them for input first. Ensuring they are “in the know.”

When thinking about the community you are trying to create, maybe start asking yourself questions like:

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]