In particular grassroots communities of civic innovators, web entrepreneurs, hackers, geeks, SMES, open source and DIY makers,
For example, bringing together diagnostic computer programmes, call centres and nurses to provide new kinds of healthcare; bringing together the very old idea of‘circles of support'brought within the criminal justice system;
Examples include computers in classrooms, the use of assistive devices for the elderly, or implants to cut teenage pregnancy.
Through experiment it is discovered then how these work best (such as the discovery that giving computers to two children to share is more effective for education than giving them one each.
including software, gaming and music. Other landmark projects that gave people a licence to be creative in other fields include:
and the ideas being developed by Mydex that adapt vendor relationship-management software tools to put citizens in control of the personal data held by big firms and public agencies.
and Industry (now DBIS) and the Food Standards Agency. 68) Citizen's panels are similar to citizen juries
which was held in Second life. Participants attend as a‘virtual'version of themselves (an avatar), and 2 engage as these selves in cyberspace. 73) Webinars are a fairly simple device for organising seminars over the web.
and Global Warming, speaks to the crowd at Oneworld. net's‘Virtual Bali'initiative on Second life.
The best think tanks can act as catalysts, combining research, policy ideas, and prompts for practical innovation in advance of policy change.
but is used increasingly to refer to services as well. 82) Fast prototyping emerged first in the software field,
which brings people together from all around the world in conversation through the use of Telepresence screens.
A business model that runs parallel to the core idea of the venture and which sets out how it can become sustainable.
which core stakeholders can be incorporated in the structure of an organisation and its processes. These include the constitution
but the goal should always be to find ways for the core finance to come from those who share the venture's mission.
and trains suppliers in the use of the software of the bidding process. The auction takes from two hours to a few days
and is held together by a common core of meaning. Transmitters We look at platforms as the nodes of the new economy,
Image courtesy of The Climate Project. 5 SCALING AND DIFFUSION 97 Prize in conjunction with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for‘their efforts to build up
and Bed Zed in the UK. 254) Designing and trialling platforms to trigger systemic innovation including peer-to-peer models such as the School of Everything and digital learning environments such as colleges in second life. 255) Comprehensive pilots,
which brings together web designers and developers with those involved in meeting social needs to design web-based solutions to particular social challenges.
an event which takes place every month in London to connect start-ups, designers, programmers, and funders. 309) Platforms for aggregating action such as Pledgebank, an online platform
and open-source software such as the Linux operating system, the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the Apache web server.
These rely on a large and highly distributed community of programmers to develop, maintain, and improve the software.
Peer-to-peer platforms can be characterised by decentralisation, self-selected participation, self-allocated tasks, community based moderation,
and diversity of participants. However, none of these are of themselves defining features. 140 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION End notes 1. Sustainability (2008)‘ The Social Intrapreneur:
and are reluctant to provide core funding. Grantaided organisations are often the first to suffer in state budget cuts and economic recessions.
and the coverage of core costs. 4 403) Direct funding for individuals, including the grants given by Unltd, The Skoll Foundation,
volunteering and, in some cases, social uses of marginal business assets, such as Salesforce's provision of software to nonprofit organisations,
of alternative models for running schools in India. 455) Social uses of commercial technology such as IBM's use of translation software on its Meedan website of Arabic blogs,
One is new forms of mutual action between individuals whether in the form of open-source software,
Paris. 4 SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL OR HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY 197 providing others, selling information on users and so on. 1 In the field of opensource software,
99 Group Health 21 Hackney's Online Citizen Panel 43 Hammarby Sjöstad 112 Harvard university Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation 162 Hattie
200 Liftshare 198 Limited liability Partnerships (LLPS) 65 Linux 139 Live Work 31 London Climate Change Agency 158 Mapping 17-19
200 Open Organisation 74-77 Open Publication Licenses 200 Open source 154; 139 Open Space 45-46 Open Testing 53 Organisation 6-7;
(which combined the telephone, nurses, and diagnostic software); magazines sold by homeless people; the linkage of gay rights to marriage;
Businesses have adopted new devices like 3-dimensional printers, which have made it easier to turn ideas quickly into prototypes;
In business, the experiences of companies such as Microsoft, Procter & gamble, and Amazon suggests that pioneers that create markets through radical innovation are almost never the companies that go on to scale up
This phase involves consolidation around a few core principles that can be communicated easily. Then as the idea is implemented in new contexts,
software, cars, and retailing. Yet in most social fields, monopolistic governments sit alongside small units that are usually too small to innovate radically (schools, doctors surgeries, police stations),
For a thorough analysis of open source methods and their great potential, see G. Mulgan and T. Steinberg, Wide Open:
The Potential of Open source Methods (London, U k.:Demos and the Young Foundation, 2005). 19. In the U k.,the In Control pilots delivered under the government's policy Valuing People
1) the open hardware and free software communities,(2) the community of developers,(3) innovation labs, including Fab labs, Living Labs, Hackerspaces and Makerspaces (4) the open
the organisations and their activities fit under (open data, open networks, open knowledge, open hardware;
and open hardware, can potentially serve collective action and awareness. 7 However, to date it has failed to deliver anticipated solutions to tackle large-scale problems,
1) the open hardware and free software communities,(2) the community of developers,(3) innovation labs,(4) the open data and open knowledge community,(5) smart citizens,
the open source community, the developers'community, the innovation labs community, the open/big data community, the smart citizen/civic society community,
open hardware and open data infrastructures. The new front page has been redesigned to inspire visitors to learn about DSI and join the map..
A pop-up box appers on the right hand side of the screen which contains a visualisation of the organisations DSI activities
The DSI team took part in panel session and presented project ambitions with the aim to engage the ICT community in the research.
Open Hardware and Open Knowledge need to overcome to scale their work and how they can do this.
we will do it Creation of the best idea internally Best from anywhere Choosing the best ideas among internal and external ideas Role of customers Passive recipients Active co-innovators Core competency Vertically integrated product
and service design Core competitive differentiation and collaborative partner management Innovation success metrics Increased margins/revenues,
facilities, and competences shared among the various actors form the core of ecosystems and define their innovation potential.
Almirall (2013) 4. 3 Communities in the innovation ecosystem In this section, we will refer to six specific communities that have a core role in the European innovation ecosystem.
This typology of communities matches the main technology trends emerging in the grassroots innovation space (e g. open data, open knowledge, open hardware, open networks),
The open hardware and free software communities The open source community is a broad-reaching community of individuals who share an open source philosophy/culture,
The open source culture is therefore one in which fixations (works entitled to copyright protection are made openly available.
Although in the beginning of the movement, a difference between hardware and software did not exist, nowadays,
we distinguish between the open source software community and the open source hardware community. The individuals who participate in the former support the use of open source licenses that make software available for anybody to use
or modify as its source code is made available. The open source software community is formed by programmers who support the open source philosophy
and that contribute to the community by voluntary writing and exchanging programming code for software development.
There are several examples of software that have been developed under an open source philosophy. Some of them are Mozilla, Apache, Openoffice. org, or PHP.
The open source hardware community is formed by individuals that design hardware (that is, tangible artefacts: machines, devices,
or other physical things) and make it publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make,
and sell the design or hardware based on that design. Often, individuals gather around specific organisations or projects.
This is the case for Arduino, an open source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software,
which is intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interacting objects or environments.
Through and entity called Helsinki Region Infoshare37 Helsinki and three of its neighbouring cities publish all of their data in formats that make it easy for software developers
Communities Focal actors Enablers Governance Failures Open source hardware and software Open source activists Firms supporting open source activists Communities Open source platforms Peer governance
analysis of the innovation ecosystem The open source hardware and software communities Within this wider community,
the open source software community and the open source hardware community. In both cases, the focal actors are the activists:
either they support the use of open source licenses that make software available for anybody to use
or modify as its source code is made available (open source software activists) or they support the open source philosophy
and contribute to the community by voluntary writing and exchanging programming code for software development (the open source hardware activists).
Firms, organisations, and not-for-profit communities supporting open source activists are considered enablers within the open source community.
For example, Canonical40 was created alongside Ubuntu to help it reach a wider market. They ensure that Ubuntu runs reliably on every platform from the PC and the smartphone to the server and the cloud.
Along the same lines, the development of Arduino41 has taken place around a community of Arduino enthusiasts that includes region-specific groups and special interest groups.
The P2p Foundation42 is a third example of an organisation that supports the open source community and is
Among some of its guiding ideas, the P2p Foundation supports the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public License,
and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements. It believes that these principles provide for models that can be used in other areas of 29 social and productive life.
One last example is that of the Open source Initiative43, a Californian public benefit corporation, founded in 1998,
and advocating for the benefits of open source and at building bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.
Open source platforms are also enablers within the open source community. The best example of them is Github44 a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use Git, an open source version control.
It is home to over 13.1 million repositories, making it the largest code host in the world.
Regarding governance, the open source community works under the principles of peer governance a bottomup mode of participatory decision-making.
In open source projects, equipotential participants self select themselves to the section to which they want to contribute.
Bruns (2008) also characterizes open source communities as heterarchies meaning that they operate in a much looser environment,
According to Fogel (2006), the possibility to fork45 is central to the governance of any open source community,
although the author particularly refers to open source software communities. The shared ownership of open source projects allows anyone to fork a project at any time.
Therefore, no one person or group has a magical hold over the Project. Since a fork involving a split of the community can hurt overall productivity
Finally, Stadler (2008) submits that leadership in open source projects is not egalitarian, but meritocratic. In this respect, Coffin (2006) highlights the necessity for a benevolent dictator, who is the leader of the project
Often, this authority is a natural consequence of the leader being the founder of the project, such as Linus Torvalds for Linux or Jimmy wales for Wikipedia.
Despite its many benefits, open source communities also experience some drawbacks. The following are some of the most significant:
anyone can be part of an open source hardware or an open source software community but in order to be engaged actively,
good technological skills are needed. That is why many texts and documents refer to individual open source activists as programmers committed to the open source philosophy.
The level of contributions or the type/strength of technological skills seem not to matter that much
because as previously stated, there is equipotentiality in an open source community. Lack of conflict-resolution mechanisms:
like Linux, invest one developer (or a subgroup of developers) with the authority to accept
tech (software/Internet), biotech, clean tech, natural foods, and lifestyles of health and sustainability. Feld (2012) states that these clusters can be considered as networks for their members do not lend themselves to a command and control system.
It is equipped generally with an array of flexible computer-controlled tools that cover several different length scales
with 80%of paid Android apps being downloaded fewer than 100 times. In addition, they noted that even successful apps, such as Mycityway81
Communities Instruments Motivations Incentives Open source hardware and software Government contracts and procurement Creating fast growing platforms (companies) Reducing costs (companies) Capturing value (companies) Reputation
Micro level analysis of the innovation ecosystem The open source hardware and software communities In terms of instruments, usually, open source products are free.
For example, open source software and its supporting code are generally free of cost to download, use and modify.
However, individuals and for-profit businesses can charge for specialised training or for developing new extensions of the core code.
For instance, R is an open source environment and programming language for statistical computing that is also free of cost. While R offers no cost access to its software and source code
Revolution R Enterprise92, a proprietary spin-off, markets a faster version of R. The company can process very large data sets and offers, for a fee, training, consulting,
In this respect, governments might be interested in signing contracts with open source developers for 37 governments are, more and more,
turning to open source. This has clearly been the case regarding open source software. In January 2011
the Australian Government released an open source software policy and guidance documentation for Australian government agencies to inform their use, modification and development of open source software.
In April 2012, the United kingdom released the second version of the document Open source software options for government.
In December 2013, the Italian government issued final rules implementing a change to procurement law that now requires all public administrations in the country to first consider reused
or free software before committing to proprietary licenses. Open source hardware is not that popular among governments although there a few interesting examples.
We have referred already to the Flok Society in Ecuador93. Working with an academic partner the Government of Ecuador has launched a major strategic research project to fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador, based on the principles of open source:
networks, peer production, and commoning. Ecuador has been the first country in the world which has committed itself to the creation of an open commons knowledge based society.
During 2013, they distributed 3, 000 open hardware kits (the Civic Information Starter Kits), open hardware and software packages for citizen-led environmental data collection supported by a small data platform for analysis and advocacy.
This tool enables civic-minded groups to empirically verify government data and inaugurating a new generation of civic information tools to hold government accountable.
because of governments'interest in open source, contracts and government procurement are important tools within this community.
A lot has been written on the motivations of members of the open source communities. Most literature on motivations is based on empirical surveys (Vainio & Vadén, 2006.
Intrinsic motivations include open source politics (working on open source to limit the power of large companies, particularly software companies,
and because individuals think software and hardware should not be proprietary goods), community identification (for open source development communities are not communities only in a technical sense of the word but also in terms of identity:
being part of the community is sometimes part of the developer's identity), and peer-recognition and respect.
Extrinsic motivations include user needs (developments take place as a result of a personal need for a tool and, then,
and contributing to open source and do not subscribe to many social motivations that are, by contrast, typical of individual programmers.
According to the authors, promoting innovation by and small companies seems to be the most important motivation
Vici (2008) also analyses firms'motivations to participate in the open source community and states that, at the beginning,
and in general, supporting open source was justified merely by the need of answering to the increasing requests of improved quality products.
Moreover, contributions and feedbacks from the open source community allow a reduction in R&d costs and an enlargement of the network size, amplifying the positive effect due to network externalities.
Adopting open source principles also increases the likelihood of attracting skilled developers and thereby achieving a higher pace of technological development and quality level.
Avenali et al (2010), in their study on open software and hardware innovation platforms, point to economic incentives (that may result in a increase of profit),
In this respect, government attitude towards the open source community is fundamental and may have an effect in terms of scalability for governments are in a unique position in almost any industry.
In the field of software, public services, organisations and territorial administrations collectively represent a major software user with great impact on the software market:
when an agency adopts open software, it also forces its contractors to adopt the government's platform of choice
test core assumptions and iterate before building out an entire project). In India in March 2014, Vodafone launched its developer platform to empower the community of developers.
In February 2014, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IBM promoted its Watson Mobile Developer Challenge,
IBM would choose three winning teams and provide seed funding for their businesses. Building and growing a company
Leaving aside portals that display public open data, previously analysed, governments use transparency portals as well,
The speakers, all leading DSI practitioners highlighted how digital social innovation is enabled often by open data, free software,
and open hardware platforms. In many cases, new services cannot be envisaged at the time that these open tools are developed,
Citizens engagement and feedback Democratic and distributed social network Social network based on open source code to promote the most interesting news decided by the people,
Based on the open source code of Meneame. net, but with a new user interface more similar to actual social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
and banning software patents Banning software patents and continue to campaign for the internet to remain a neutral space.
Software packages that are patented can be expensive making them less accessible and not affordable to potential individual innovators.
whilst Apple, Amazon and Microsoft controlling the mobile market and cloud-based services platforms). Furthermore, the Digital economy is now mainly based on business models that aggregate,
European SMES, developers and social innovators are innovating with cheap open hardware, open source software, open knowledge, open data and analytics faster,
or Android) as a kind of regulated monopoly able to ensure some basic services at European level,
based on open source and open hardware developments. 2. The need for privacy-aware technologies based on trust and ethics is recognised.
or plastic with a chip) into an open source mesh-networked device (a chip with a screen).
For example, Open Knowledge Foundation and Forum Virium are both not part of the core DSI study team
cohort/panel study, regular interval surveying Level 3 You can demonstrate that your product/service is causing the impact,
when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software (Wikipedia) 47. http://www. barcelonastartupfestival. com/48. http://startupfestival. com/home/)67 49. http
://inspiration. entrepreneur. com/50. http://www. startupnation. com/51. http://steveblank. com/52. http://joel. is/),53. http://ryancarson. com/)54
however, the automotive industry shows a very attractive outlook 3 Sources: Reuters, FT, IHS Global Insight Growth driven mainly by developing regions
and maintained including having the latest driving software Help car owners earn extra money by renting their unused cars out to strangers Capture new
and Proliferate Social Constructivism Multiple and Subjective Descriptions Open source in Digital Ecosystems 17 Open Knowledge, Open Governance and Community 18 References 20 Table of contents 6introductionthis introductory paper summarises the needs and the processes that have led to the concept of digital
by leveraging an evolutionary and open knowledge approach we have been able to engage diverse communities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMES) in several regions of Europe in the adoption of state-of-the-art business modelling, software development,
and its frequent forays into very theoretical research as well as very applied and action-oriented research (Lewin, 946) through direct engagement with the software industry and socioeconomic stakeholders,
Economic empowerment Production capacity Open source tools and processes for the collective representation and formalisation of knowledge Economic developmentict s Systems theory 2nd-order cybernetics Structural determinism
the technical infrastructure, based on a P2p distributed software technology that transports, finds, and connects services
and processed (by computer software and/or humans), e g. software applications, services, knowledge, taxonomies, folksonomies, ontologies, descriptions of skills, reputation and trust relationships, training modules, contractual frameworks, laws.
Also, in the case of Digital Business Ecosystem, an isomorphic model between biological behaviour and the behaviour of the software, based on theoretical computer science implications and leading to an evolutionary, self-organising,
business models, training modules, skill descriptions, digital contracts, software services, ontologies, dynamic semantic networks and taxonomies, folksonomies, tag clouds...
For example research conducted in the context of the DBE IP has highlighted the importance of Regional Catalysts and other intermediary actors such as professional associations or volunteer open source communities.
Computing environments likewise spilled over from the single computer to the local area network (LAN) at first, and eventually to the global Internet.
Networked computers motivated the development of distributed architectures and shared resources, culminating in the peer-to-peer (P2p) model.
and ideas in order to understand how we could succeed in developing practical software technologies that reflect the social and economic relationships between people and economic actors,
It asks questions about Open source and the Linux phenomenon in the same breath as Schumpeter's (942) oversubscribed creative destruction from IBM to Microsoft to Google.
combining an open source shared middleware infrastructure with software services, models and information that compete on the revenue models
An open source ecosystem-oriented architecture provides, indeed, a distributed middleware that acts as a new ICT commons,
and the tactic of using Regional Catalysts) as an effective methodology to achieve sustainable socioeconomic development at the regional scale.
and processed (by computer software and/or humans); potentially any description of the economic and social actors, their capacities, skills and the relationships between them (EC 2005a.
The open source initial implementation is freely available (http://swallow. sourceforge. net/,http://dbestudio. sourceforege. net,
and the software services where there is a greater probability of their use. From the organisational perspective these principles imply the need for balanced
Computer science is concerned with the construction of new languages and algorithms in order to produce novel desired computer behaviours.
whether computer processes, humans, or a mixture thereof. 18 In the Web, due to the pressure of user needs, we see a continuous evolution of the protocols and artificial languages.
In other words, having embraced a holistic approach that highlights the dependence of the business models and interactions and of their formalisation into software services on their socioeconomic and cultural context,
Technology here is meant in a wider sense that encompasses the distributed infrastructure and middleware, the software services and applications, all the attendant web technologies,
and all the software development, requirements capture, and business modelling tools up to the boundary with natural language.
automating the generation of the software to interface to the underlying mediating technology through appropriate transformations.
The translation of this power into a mode of economic production is the central question of open source research. 20 Open source in Digital Ecosystemstwo of the three26 deep trends due to which, according to Dalle et al.
The Open source approach has thus been the only possible choice for the Digital Ecosystem infrastructure,
There are many factors that influence the uptake of open source by companies, such as their connections in the open source community,
or the know-how of the way the open source process works and the implications of different types of licences.
Digital Ecosystems can then be seen as the structure that connects and mobilises such knowledge and that facilitates such processes.
and hence of real space then open source systems become capable of alleviating some of the fears that arise
Open source communities are epistemic communities28 (Edwards, 200) organised as a distributed network of agents that are not just based on altruism, reputation or hacker ethics.
The key actors in the development of an open source product are the individual contributors companies (for profit and nonprofit) and researchers.
All sets of actors respond to the legal incentives embodied in open source production. Up to now economic theory suggests that long-term incentives are stronger under three conditions:
'programmers will want to work on software projects that will attract a large number of other programmers. Lerner, 2006) 26) The third reason is simply the very large amount of empirical data on open source communities and software production,
which is certainly important for social scientists but less relevant to this discussion. 27) The acronym FLOSS stands For free/Libre/Open-source Software 28) An‘epistemic community'is a network of knowledge-based experts or groups with an authoritative claim to policy
-relevant knowledge within the domain of their expertise. Members hold a common set of causal beliefs and share notions of validity based on internally defined criteria for evaluation, common policy projects
and process view of a Digital Ecosystem that is compatible with the latest software and web technologies, with social systems and social processes,
and economically viable freestanding business model for free and open source software, one uncoupled to any complementary commercial activity,
the apparent willingness of profit-seeking producers of complementary goods and services to source software (Dalle 2005). 22 also express a process.
or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, Yale Law Journal, Vol 2, pp 369-446.30) REDEN:
Regional Digital Ecosystem Network, http://reden. opaals. org Process Digital Ecosystems Structure Function Evolution Self-organisation Design Software Technology Model Community
Language Organisational Structure P2p Open source Power Mediation Open Governance & Institutional Innovation Equilibrium, Institutionalisation Collective Intelligence Memory Trust Transparency & Accountability Open
Open source Software: Free Provision of Complex Public Goods, SSRN-id588763. http://citeseer. ist. psu. edu/bessen02open. html, last accessed/7/07.
Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open-source Software Mode of Production, in How Open is the Future?
Towards a Critique of the Political economy of Free/Open source Software and Peer-to-peer File sharing Networks, Cornell University. http://www. shaydavid. info/indexpapers. html, last accessed/7/07.
Epistemic Communities, Situated Learning and Open source Software Development, Working Paper, Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, Technical University of Denmark.
Extremadura and the Revolution of Free Software, in How Open is the Future? M Wynants and J Cornelis Eds.
Understanding Computers and Cognition, A new foundation for Design, Noorwood, Newyersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation
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