Opening Up Design

One of the most fascinating aspects of open source is how its key ideas are being applied elsewhere. Obvious examples include open content - things like Wikipedia - open data, open access and open science, but there are also moves to apply them to more specialised business disciplines like design.

Recently, a book called “Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive” was published, which provided the first in-depth look at this world. As you might hope given its subject-matter, the essays that go to make it up are also being made available online under a Creative Commons licence - but with a twist:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why not Participatory Medicine?

If this participation thing is so great, why don't we apply it to something really important, like medicine? Why not, indeed?

Welcome to JoPM, a New Peer-Reviewed, Open Access Journal

Our mission is to transform the culture of medicine to be more participatory. This special introductory issue is a collection of essays that will serve as the 'launch pad' from which the journal will grow. We invite you to participate as we create a robust journal to empower and connect patients, caregivers, and health professionals.

More specifically:

Because the Journal of Participatory Medicine is a new journal publishing multidisciplinary articles on topics within a new, not yet defined field, we have established draft parameters that define the journal’s range of interest. We anticipate that these parameters will change somewhat as the field develops. In the meantime, the following characterize the field of participatory medicine.

I particularly liked the following section, with its emphasis on openness:

New Knowledge Creation stems from the collaboration of researchers and patients, as individuals and as groups.

1. Health professionals and patients sharing in the discussion of scientific methods, including open discussion about the level of evidence of the research

2. Open, transparent process that demonstrates collaboration and participation in research

3. Patients with significant interest in a topic joining together to create repositories for research, including (but not limited to) registries, tissue banks and genetic databases; demonstrating mutual respect for the contributions of the data owners and health research professionals with the tools to gain insight from those repositories. Interpretation of results and conclusions including involvement of all stakeholders.

Important stuff, worth a read.

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Green Government, Open Government

Talking of open government:

To Chance in particular, and the Greens in general, the promoting of FOSS is ultimately the promotion of the party's own values. Simply encouraging the use of FOSS in public institutions, he suggests, would improve government, "both because it would be more focused on a just, equitable, and sustainable future and because it would force government to be more open, transparent, and participatory. We suffer from an incredibly centralized, opaque, and disempowering government in England and Wales. We desperately need the participatory ethic of free software to transform government."

Can ICANN Open Up?

I've been fairly hard on ICANN on this blog - hard but fair, given it's pretty appalling track record in terms of openness. But lo! two glimmers of light on the horizon. ICANN has suddenly got intelligent, and appointed the fine UK hack Kieren McCarthy as General Manager, Public Participation (sounds so grand). It also seems to have sprouted a blog. Here's hoping.

Programs, Participation and People

One of the central themes of this blog is how the ideas at the heart of free software - collaborative, participatory, distributed development - are gradually seeping out into other areas, with dramatic effects. Mostly I write about the obvious examples - open access, open content, open genomics etc. - but occasionally I slip in instances popping up in areas that seem to have little to do with software and yet are obviously still highly germane.

An example is this report called People and Participation. It comes from the dubiously-named "Involve", which sounds like a front for some bunch of religious nutters, but as a page entitled "Connectivity" makes clear, it has some interesting ideas that, er, plug straight into the technological origins of these movements:

The 21st century is delivering endless opportunities to connect with one another wherever we are. The new technology that fills our pockets allows us 24/7 contact with friends, family and work; it is also central to Digital Britain, the second stage of the digital revolution that could transform the lives of everyone in the UK. But this new culture of connection is not limited to bluetooth and WiFi, connectivity also underpins the enabling state, the Government vision of a modern social contract.

(Via P2P Foundation.)