Open P2P Design

= thesis, book, project, and website on Open Design, by Massimo Menichinelli (Italy)

Thesis Description

URL = http://www.scribd.com/doc/7419637/openp2pdesignorg-11-in-English

"This short book represents a summed up and multilingual version of my thesis, and also as an introduction to the openp2pdesign.org website (with its 1.1 version). My research behind openp2pdesign.org, in fact, arose from my master degree "Reti Collaborative. Il design per una auto-organizzazione Open Peer-to-Peer" ("Collaborative Networks. Design for an Open Peer-to-Peer self-organization"), with prof. Ezio Manzini as a tutor at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design (you can find it here on my Scribd page, in Italian). This research started from the relationship between design and local dimension, through design for a community, and then design and community-based organizational forms like Free Software, Open Source, Peer-to-Peer and Web 2.0 (or, Open Peer-to-Peer).

This thesis has represented a huge opportunity to observe a phenomenon as the passage of Open Source and Peer-to-Peer organizational forms from the field of IT and ICT to a much broader number of fields, yet when the term Web 2.0 was in his first months of life and YouTube had not yet become famous. Therefore I had the opportunity to know these trends and their opportunities at their birth, but I could also start to think and understand how we could learn from them and use them in the Design field.

openp2pdesign.org was born in order to publish, disseminate and develop further my thesis, and to stimulate on it a collective discussion. The intention is to render the ideas behind the thesis not as property of a single person, but to share them collectively within a community. The thesis as the first source code on which to develop a community: this is why it has been translated to English and Spanish too.

This publication is a summary of the thesis and a snapshot of openp2pdesign.org after a year and half from its birth; a transposition of the blog format in a book format, in an attempt to maintain the most interesting elements of both media. There is a space for comments, and in each chapter you can find the link to the online version, and then leave a comment or look at the old comments, to enable a collective discussion about an Open and Peer-to-Peer Design theory and practice." (http://www.scribd.com/doc/7419637/openp2pdesignorg-11-in-English)

Website/Blog Description

URL = http://www.openp2pdesign.org/blog/

Massimo Menichinelli about the openp2pdesign.org project:

"This project started on march 2005 with my master degree thesis, where I developed a design methodology for co-designing with a community open and p2p organizational forms with an open and p2p design process.

It's a way to co-design a collaborative activity with/for a community that can use it for self-organizing itself and solve its specific problems. Open P2P Design starts from Service Design and it's aimed at collaborative activities (not products!), this means that it can be applied to a broad range of activities: public services (extending for example Open Government towards cases like this http://www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/health/ ), enterprises (extending for example the Enterprise 2.0 concept) or Design (and then we can apply it to Open Design too). The main idea behind Open P2P Design is that technology, tools and the sharing of information alone are not enough for setting up successful open organizations, and that we can co-design such open organizations, tools and technologies with the active participation of communities.

Here are two presentations you may find helpful about openp2pdesign.org: the Media Ecologies Workshop one (http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/open-p2p-design-metadesign-for-open-design-projects)

and a Keynote Speech at Open 2009, University of Art and Design Helsinki: http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/metadesign-and-strategic-design-for-open-design-projects-open-2009-helsinki

And you can check also all the other presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/openp2pdesign/presentations

Among other publications, I wrote a small book (around 115 pages) about the openp2pdesign.org project so far (well it's more than one year old now):

• http://www.scribd.com/doc/7419637/openp2pdesignorg-11-in-English
• http://issuu.com/openp2pdesign/docs/openp2pdesign.org_1.1_english "