The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Open Source Business

A great combination: Open Source and business

  • The rise of open-source politics

    Politics today is mostly top-down. The parties/candidates and their advisors define the politics and the message, often not by talking to people but through polls.

    …top-down politics is all about maintaining control. “Think of an established brand with a lot invested in control of its image,” … “The idea of opening that up is scary.”

    But maybe we’re seeing a shift away from that towards open source politics. In an excellent article on the nation, Micah Sifry looks at the rise of open source politics:

    Using open-source coding as a model, it’s not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that’s appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it’s much more likely to stir up passions.

    Here’s my favourite quote from the article:

    In the same way that TV took politics away from the grassroots, the Internet will give it back.

    I’m really fired up by this vision, which melds perfectly with my dream of an open space-based political party. I think the internet can be an excellent medium, especially combined with regular meetings in physical space also. Something happens when people get together in the same room at the same time with a purpose that doesn’t as readily happen on-line.

  • Open Source

    Here’s another testament to the power of Open Source development. Sourceforge (home to 80.000+ Open Source Software projects) interviews the people behind Azureus, the project of the month, and check out this quote:

    What has been your biggest surprise?

    Olivier: When I started this project, I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world, at least not as a developer. My biggest surprise was to see how much support you can get, and how people can involve themselves into your project.

    Alon: The incredible community involvement that Open Source seems to bring. Besides the core developers, many other people donate their valuable time to submit patches, test code, write documentation, do translations, provide tech support, express their thoughts and recommendations, and even donate money. People love to get involved. Azureus was my first experience in Open Source development, and I’ve been very impressed with the process as a whole.

    The Open Source movement is based on the assumption that people want to be involved and are willing to give freely of their time. The currency in Open Source is not money but rather peer recognition and a sense of accomplishment, and I’m sure that as a model, it will be at least as succesful as the corporate model we’re currently familiar with.

    And why limit it to software development? I’m sure that wherever you can set up a similar system, you can get people to contribute in the same way. We’re doing just that with the Happy At Work Project, where all our intellectual source code is Open Source – we’ll give it away to anyone who wants to use it, and hope that they’ll make it even better.

  • Open Space world map

    Check out the new and improved Open Space World Map. It’s a seriously cool visualization of how Open Space Technology is spreading around the world.

  • An Economy for Giving Everything Away

    Chris linked to this text a while ago, and I’ve been chewing my way through it since then. It’s kinda long and full of important thoughts on living a life of giving, illustrated through the Open Source movement and through the life of the author himself, one Andrius Kulikauskas, the proprietor of Minciu Sodas. Minciu Sodas describe themselves as “an open laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers”, and surfing their website reveals a high occurrence of words like fractal, global, innovation and network. I have no idea what they’re about apart from that. Maybe they’re a fractal, global, innovation network :o)

    Anyway the article makes a starting point in the decision that “I accept the idea that I should give everything away”, and then examines what implications this may have on how you work and live. One conclusion: Wealth is relationships.

    This is really interesting to me, since one of the basic principles of the “Happy at work” project is that we’re open source. Everything we create, all the knowledge we gather is available to anyone for free. We’re about giving happiness away. Read it!!

  • Social entrepreneurship

    Thomas found this excellent article on social entrepreneurship, ie. the pursuit of a social mission using business-like methods.

    According to the article, the characteristics of social entrepreneurs are:
    * Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
    * Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
    * Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
    * Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
    * Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

    Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. This is exactly the territory I find myself exploring with the happy at work project. Yes, we operate as a business, charging companies for our services, but we’re not in it for the money, wa want to make people happy at work. It’s nice to see that someone has put some thought into this area, and I certainly recognize much of the thinking in the article.

  • The cult of the NDA

    Frozen North has an excellent piece which argues that a certain level of openness (as opposed to total secrecy) can actually be healthy for startups.

    This is right up my alley: I believe that openness and generosity (in many forms) is one of the ways to become happy at work – and to succeed!

  • How to make your own luck

    Fast Company have an article on how to court lady luck. And interestingly, the article claims that the key is openness, and that lucky people are simply open to the fortunate events that occur around all of us.

  • Democratic Management in the Real World

    I researched business democracy a little on the net, and I came acrosss this article on democracy in food coops. A teaser from the article: The best-run co-ops weave employee input into every aspect of operations. There is a culture of employee involvement in every decision that impacts working conditions.

  • Democracy in business

    Fast Company has a short piece about Traci Fenton, the founder & CEO of World Dynamics. She works as a consultant to promote democracy in organizations, based on a belief that “Never has there been a more important time to consider how organizational democracy can transform corporations AND produce the hard (and soft!) results stockholders, employees and customers are craving.“

    I couldn’t agree more. As a founder and former leader of a company that was run democratically, I can safely say that it is a great way to work. I can only hope that Traci is right, when she claims that “Democracy is inevitable. The companies that get this will lead their industry and ultimately build a more democratic world.”

  • Generosity in action

    My good friend Lars Pind runs a company, Collaboraid, which embodies generosity in a number of ways. They develop e-learning software based on an open source platform, which is generous in itself, since they spend time and energy not only on creating solutions for their customers (among which you’ll find MIT, Heidelberg University and Greenpeace), but also on improving the platform itself.

    And now they’ve taken it a step further, and have arranged a two-day conference about the technological platform for anyone who’s interested, and people are coming from all over the world. Cost of participation: Zero! They spend a lot of time arranging this event but won’t make a single buck on it. They do it simply for the sake of the community, and because they think it will be fun.

    What does it signify, when a company does something this generous?
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