OpenWear
Description
Massimo Menichinelli:
"Openwear is the new open source concept and community in course of developing by EDUfashion, a two-year project for the development of a collaborative platform for fashion creation and continuous education emphasizing skill-sharing and ethical branding. It is born out of the collaboration of Poper - a social communication studio based in Ljubljana – Ethical Economy – the company based in London providing web tools to build ethically significant relations, and 3 universities from Italy (Faculty of Political Science in Milano), Slovenia (Faculty of Natural Sciences in Ljubljana) and Denmark (Copenhagen Business School).
In Openwear’s online space, small fashion producers, designers, stylists, students, interns,tailors, photographers, models, crafters, sewing cafes, silk-screen printers, fashion schools and others will all be able to open their own web space and personal profile, have access to the service and tools made available by the community, network, learn but also take part to the first collaborative, peer-produced, open-source fashion brand and its collections.
For the first time, the result of the innovative process of crowdsourcing will not be owned by a particular firm or company because the owners will be the community itself."
Interview
Zoe Romano: How does the European funded project Openwear experiment these theories (on the Ethical Economy)?
Adam Arvidsson: In order to create an open and collaborative brand built on ‘productive publics’, we need to establish an economy of reputation. Openwear (http://www.openwear.org/) is trying to build a global community of fashion designers and textile workers in which design is made through collaboration and production develops locally. The only way to ensure the trust and quality of such open systems is by measuring the reputation of each actor, by referring to the conventional value established by the community. This is also how eBay works. Without the rating of sellers and buyers, an open marketplace like eBay would not be possible. Openwear oes one a step further as the ethical capital that you accumulate can be used to produce, and not only to sell. For example, a big ethical capital stock would give you the opportunity to attract the best designers, suppliers and makers to create your fashion collection. In addition, measuring the peer-based reputation also enables Openwear to reallocate its profits to its own community, calculated on the base of the level of value that every individual contributed to make.” (http://openwear.org/blog/?p=1535)
More Information
- Openwear is mentioned here at http://www.openp2pdesign.org/2011/open-design/business-models-for-diy-craft/
- Interview with co-founders Zoe Romano and Bertram Niessen, at http://www.openp2pdesign.org/2011/open-design/openwear-org-zoe-romano-bertram-niessen-interview-about-diy-craft-fashion-microproductions/