Open Sesame!

If only it could be that simple … Ali Baba learned the magic words that opened the treasure cave of the Forty Thieves. “Open Sesame.”

How do we find the magic words to open the treasure cave of our professional knowledge and practices?

I have been thinking about Luke Bird’s comment that is referenced in last week’s instalment of “Thought Leadership on Thursday”.

“We need an enabler … in the same way open source works.”

But what we are really discussing here is opening up the knowledge, and developing the culture that goes with that, rather than just how software source code is created, distributed and maintained.

What does it mean to be open?

Open Knowledge International (OKI) argue that open knowledge is empowering, but to do that it must be “useful, usable and used”. They subscribe to the Open Definition;

“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose”

Key messages here are that the content is freely available and that anybody can modify, alter and redistribute their work. Copyright and privately held Intellectual Property rights are issues that would be challenged on this path.

Back in 2010 I fell foul of this aspect when I wrote a series of posts that reviewed Australian Standard 5050 (Management of Disruption-related risk). I received a sharp email from the owner of this knowledge (Standards Australia) noting I had breached their copyright and had to pay to use those images. We need to clearly understand that this closed knowledge is a treasure cave for its owners – and those we buy access to that knowledge in order to re-sell it at a profit (e.g. selling seats at licensed training courses).

OKI support there ideals by promoting some important values that we need to embrace to make a model like this work;

• Respect and Tolerance – differences are a creative force.
• Collaboration not control – let ideas grow and fall where they will
• Pragmatic not fanatic – we are not seeking to establish moral authority
• Making and talking – equally appreciated, and thrive on the creative tension
• Change-making – real change, today not tomorrow.

Education is becoming open

To fully participate in the development of open knowledge we will need to broaden and deepen our educations. Education too is becoming open.

This presents an opportunity to fit education and learning into our busy working lives and professional development programs. Consider this use case;

• We work in and with Complex Adaptive Systems (often referred to as organisations), but do we understand the complexity science and how to approach these systems?
• The Santa Fe Institute offers open education on the subject. I have taken a couple of their online courses and recommend their Introduction to Complexity.
• The key enabler more many of these open programs is a technology innovation called Massive Open Online Course – or MOOC.

Even innovation is going “open”

Henry Chesbrough takes the credit for introducing the label “open innovation”. On the surface it would seem to be a very relevant idea for the BC/resilience domain as it was intended to bride the gap between academia and industry. To properly understand this model in our context we need to translate – where he talks about inside and outside “the firm”, we need to read that as inside/outside the institute (BCI/DRII) or standards authority.

There are some interesting graphics to explain this idea at OpenInnovation.eu – plus an interesting table of the comping open/closed principles (again remember to translate – work for us = our members/customers);

Closed Innovation Principles	Open Innovation Principles
The smart people in the field work for us.	Not all the smart people work for us, so owe must find and tap into the knowledge and expertise of bright individuals outside our company.
To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves.	External R&D can create significant value: internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.
If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to the market first.	We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it.
The company that gets an innovation to the market first will win.	Building a better business model is better than getting to the market first.
If we create the most and the best ideas in the industry, we will win.	If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win.
We should control our intellectual property (IP) so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas	We should profit from others’ use of our IP, and we should buy others’ IP whenever it advances our business model.

Essentially “open innovation” is about building on the best ideas around, not just those that are internal to the organisation or it’s existing body of knowledge. As a result new knowledge products are created that can meet the demands of different markets.

You can read more about this, with a number of case studies, at the Open Innovation Community.

Open Source software – enabling innovation

In 1991 a Finnish software engineering student posted this message on a USENET mailing list (Google it if you are not old enough to USENET);

“I’m doing a (free)operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional GNU) for 386(486) AT clones.”

His name was Linus Torvalds and many people all over the world got involved and shared their code and ideas. The operating system they created is called Linux. You may not know it but there is a good chance you use this operating system on your phone – Android is a derivative of Linux. In 2013 the Linux-based phones accounted for 80+% of the market.

Open source software established a platform that helps promote innovation. Rather than having to compete for scarce resources, innovators share their knowledge with others in order to create new resources – and then creating the opportunity for others build upon or benefit from these resources.

The basic methodologies of the open source community are simple, sharing, forking (taking a copy of the code and developing in a different direction, creating a potential new product variant), debating and involving stakeholders all along the route.

Some further reading if you are interested;

• Example of trying to develop an Open Source Model from 2003 at Continuity Central
• Sahana Open Source Disaster Management Software
• Resilience Network Initiative – collaboration of open software vendor Ushahidi and Rockefeller Foundation.
• 20 examples of open source innovation or communities

Would you like to try ‘Open’?

What if I said I was thinking of doing a resilience methodology (or good practice guide) – just as a hobby – would you want to get involved in an open source professional practice development?

Email, Twitter, LinkedIN – or just add a comment.

Let me know your thoughts.