This is the P2PU Archive. If you want the current site, go to www.p2pu.org!
Prototyping (the) Innovation Ecology
My recent threads
You haven't posted any discussions yet.
Recently updated threads
- Which innovation system are you part of / do you want to be part of? Sun, 2011-05-22 18:55
- Starting and running the course ... all you need to know or want to ask -- please reply! Tue, 2011-05-10 00:29
- Pre-Registration Questions Wed, 2011-04-27 04:54
- Would you say that SourceForge.net is an innovation "ecosystem"? Mon, 2011-04-25 22:13
Would you say that SourceForge.net is an innovation "ecosystem"?
Here is a link to a typical sourceforge project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/ . You can also have an idea of the services offered by sourceforge to the owners of the hosted projects:
We can see that sourceforge provides:
- access to support services ensured by the project owners
- user satisfaction evaluation through reviews
- user-driven feature development through feature requests
- customer support
- community building though forums
- collaborative software development support through Software Configuration Management
It's arguable that the collaborative software development support provided by sourceforge.net may allow users to innovate (new concepts/patterns implemented in code? ) . The forums may also be spaces where ideas are debated, changed, agregated (?) or created (?). In the feature request support I see at type of "mission-pull" originated innovation, if innovation is required to deliver a new feature of course. It's good to realise that most services, if not all, provided by sourceforge are realized through open source softwares (ex: Mercurial for SCM). I find it interesting to think of projects as the living organisms in the sourceforge.net environment, while inanimate objects or substrata would be the services (SCM engine, Forums engine, Review engine etc.)
As you point out, Sourceforge provides a number of tools that support projects which can be innovative.
Sourceforge creates an environment, where people can converge on a innovation project and work towards its completion -- or development -- as you highlight in your post.
When thinking of "innovation ecology", some questions would be:
- how does Sourceforge attract primary users (those who are developing SW)?
- how do Sourceforge users attract followers who contribute to the development project in forums etc.
and along another line of argument:
- how does Sourceforge sustain itself?
Hi Peter, it's interesting how I rarely thought seriously about how open source SW projects with a large community of users/participants came to be. This is definitely something for me to tackle. Today people would probably tend to point to social networking as the right tool to gather critical "community mass". But, this is disputable since linux existed long before the web 2.0 "buzz". So yeah, I'll have to look for answers.
Same for how Sourceforge sustains itself. I have an intuition: through ads and pay-for services.
I just finished reading your paper (BENDING THE RULES: THE FAB LAB INNOVATION ECOLOGY) and I was interested by the distinction you make between the Fab Lab as "cost-effective production facility" versus the Fab Lab as "innovation lab" business models.
This cast a new light on how I view Sourceforge. I realize that Sourceforge is like a one-stop shop for the SW project team (convenient). Best for productivity to have everything a SW project team need one click away? maybe.
It's also interesting to see how the categorization and search capabilities of Sourceforge allow projects members to find other projects with similar or related projects. Maybe is there cross-pollination happening at this level? That is, that project members, project leads, directly engage in conversations and exchange ideas, best practices and code across project boundaries? If yes, this is probably entirely community driven and probably does not involve anyone in the Sourceforge staff. Dare I say that Sourceforge in that sense is, potentially, adopting a SW "innovation" lab approach?
Oops , forgot: my timezone is GMT