HOW AN OPEN SOURCE DESIGN COMMUNITY WORKS: THE CASE OF OPEN SOURCE ECOLOGY
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Francesca Montagna
Author: Macul, Víctor; Rozenfeld, Henrique
Series: ICED
Institution: University of São Paulo, Brazil
Section: Design Organisation and Management
Page(s): 359-366
ISBN: 978-1-904670-66-7
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Literature presents a huge number of studies related with the design process, but the open source design may present an environment fundamentally different. The involvement of a large number of people self-organized in the design process may generate some negative effects. Therefore, there is a necessity of better understanding of the open source design process and the tools that aid this process management. The objective of this paper is to increase the understanding on open source design and identifies research questions in this field. In order to achieve the proposed objective was realized an ethnographic case study in a non-profit organization called Open Source Ecology (OSE), which included an extensive document analysis added to about 800 hours of participant observation over a period of three months. We identified some big challenges faced by OSE regarding the design process, community, platform and business, which were deployed in some open research questions. Our findings indicate that, even though many accomplishments have been achieved, the open source design movement still has a low level of maturity, and is far from showing its full potential.
Keywords: Open Source Design, Collaborative Design, Design Process, Business Models And Considerations