Open Everything Fair
This is just a concept at this stage.
Description
1. Preamble: some historical analogies
People in their fifties and older may recall a substantial cultural revolution which took place in western countries, which started in the seventies and matured in the eighties. This is the movement which was broadly called 'new age', which grew to maturity in the 80s and is now part of mainstream culture, with its own sections in bookshops etc ... In the broad sense, it was a new structure of feeling which combined several elements of reaction to the previous dominant culture that had culminated in the fifties. It combined alternative eduction methods, complementary medicine, healing and bodywork techniques, human potential and transpersonal psychology approaches, an interest in both eastern and western esoteric spiritual traditions ... Each of these fields existed separately but were also brought together in connection in huge fairs that took place in western countries, and it is now part of the fabric of many U.S. and European countries
In the 90s, a similar phenomenom occured with 'ethical investments' and alternative consumerism, again bringing together already existing strands, such as ethical finance, fair trade, community-supported agriculture, and the like; and also now expressed in huge fairs attracting tens of thousands of visitors (I attented Terra Futura recently in Florence, as a current example).
2. Today: Open Everything
Something very similar is occurring today. The collaborative economy, i.e. consisting of processes participatory peer production, crowdsourcing, open innovation and other related practices, is emerging not just for the production of knowledge and software (Wikipedia and Linux as examples), but also increasingly for manufacturing and making (Arduino). This is creating a huge field of inter-related social and economic practices, which may exist independently, but also find themselves related by the adherence towards common values such as open participation, community dynamics using Web 2.0 technologies, transparency, etc ..
Examples are the fair use and open content economy, already responsible for one sixth of GDP, the open source and free software economy, collaborative consumption and product-service systems (carsharing), new ways of social and p2p lending, new common infrastructures for physical cooperation (coworking, hackerspaces, fablabs), new methods of distributed manufacturing (personal fabrication, collaborative lifestyles based on sharing (neighborgoods, etc..), socialized marketplaces (Etsy) ...
3. The proposal
There is I believe an opportunity to bring all these strands together in a huge and pioneering fair, which would host both a producer-to-user/consumer fair, and a conference, and this has not been done before. The P2P Foundation, through its in-depth knowledge of the emerging space, and its network of contacts, along with possible partners such as Shareable magazine, would be uniquely placed to assist in the organisation of such an event, which would both be a boost to that emerging economy, attract vendors and users/consumers, and be a cultural and intellectual milestone through its associated conference. It would likely be the beginning of a set of fairs and conference that would expand globally.