i, quaid

Spent the middle part of today in a working session, lead by IDEO facilitators, to tackle a few of the big questions in front of setiQuest and the Seti Institute.

The two big questions were generally:

• How do we enable developers and designers to contribute back to setiQuest in a way that benefits all involved?
• How do we share the SETI vision with the world, so that conversation can come back and support people wanting to find ways to participate?

The community building problems are pretty straightforward, the kind of thing we cover in The Open Source Way (TOSW).  In fact, I’m going to follow up this meeting by joining a working group to help setiQuest architect the community structure and seed the leadership team/interim board.  I intend to create and use some checklists and so forth derived from TOSW handbook. To me, it’s a great chance to take the principles in TOSW and see them applied in another domain while at the same time applying them to actually new open source and open data.

Another stroke of luck, one of the IDEO people I met today works on OpenIDEO, their new project to open the design thinking process.  I’m excited to get to follow up with them, find out more about how they want to grow the OpenIDEO community, and how that can feed in to and learn from a “Design the open source way” chapter in The Open Source Way.  It will be an interesting conversation, since I intend to press on the license and terms used by OpenIDEO in comparison to the open nature of the site’s purpose.  At the same time, I hope to learn about more about the challenges of design and free/open business models, and learn more about how to make The Open Source Way a better book.

I’ll write more about this as it develops.