The kicker at the moment is that the lady who owns the land for one of the tanks (most immediately above) now doesn’t want water being taken off her land for the community’s use. Her husband signed an agreement 14 years ago supposedly, but the widow was reportedly never aware of the contract. A bit of the disagreement:

My reason for being in Cajamarca this month is to solidify Oregon Direct Action‘s (ODA) project for the month of July. ODA is a student organization I started last May with Shane Lofgren and a few others. It’s based off of my experiences with Whitman Direct Action and concepts around an open source organization. Our goal is to bridge the gaps between education and international development, and use 12 months of effort from ambitious undergraduates to help solve some of the world’s most basic issues. In my opinion, though, it shouldn’t require a month of groundwork to figure out how we can contribute to efforts in San Pablo.

On Thursday, I had the chance to speak for an hour with Mark and Vinay of an innovative organization called Akvo. It’s goal is to open and simplify the reporting around water and sanitation projects and, in the process, improve the capacity of development organizations to achieve their goals. In my opinion, open source means transparency but it also means, and more importantly, open collaboration. By actively publishing what you’re working on, both the successes and challenges, you’re lending the opportunity for others to take part of the project too.

The first thing to address, however, is the paradigm shift from closed to open. In many sectors, it’s a scary thought to go from only publishing information through a communications manager (or some sort of filter) to making as much data available as possible. My opinion is, and I’ll get to this more in a later piece, that transparency is actually a competitive advantage, and that the first organizations to be as transparent as possible will gain an edge. Funders will become addicted to the wealth of information they have to make their decisions, and organizations that open up an order of magnitude more information for the funder to manipulate will be more desirable. Openness builds trust. The way that Akvo is going to be able to “sell” this, however, is by being able to attach some sort of economic benefit to their really simple, open reporting, both in the ability of the organization to generate more funding and also the value in open collaboration with peers, “pro-ams”, and other interested parties.

It’s also my opinion that Akvo needs to be able to sell their service in terms of being explicit about problem(s) they solve. This could be a 30 second video or two paragraphs, but I wasn’t able to find anything satisfactory on the website.

The second issue in opening up information, and making project data transparent, is determining the best format and means for doing so. I would start iterative reporting with the tool that comes most naturally: mobile (SMS, images, and video). Once you have a stream of information coming from a project, then you’ve got to figure out the context filters. When we started thinking about this at ODA, we broke down our data into four tiers: team, partners, community, and world. Of course, all of the information would be open and accessible, but there would be different delivery mechanisms (email, RSS, etc.) for ensuring you only received the information you needed.

It would be wonderful if Akvo could be the open database for synthesizing project information; and as a part of the workflow and processes, structure the project information such that it’s in a digestible, relevant format. It would be a project wiki that has: background information on the area (size of the community, primary livelihoods, average income, etc.), where the project currently stands (most recent updates via a blog and wiki), relevant budget and financial documents, podcast stream of reports from the field, and images and video which are geographically connected to the project. The important thing is that this database would be built on open standards. It should be the engine that connects you with the information you need, based on your context.

The advantages to open in reporting are many. Most significant to my situation is the ability for potential collaborators to contribute to development work. I still consider myself a student, I’m only 21, but I would like to break tradition and continue to learn in higher impact settings through experiential education. Just think of all of the essays that get printed and then go into the trash. Instead, that productive capacity should be put towards the really big problems we have in the world. If we could lower barriers for students to get involved with projects like Green Empowerment’s and others, the consequences could be tremendous. I think open sourcing development organizations one step in the right direction.

My quick analysis is two words: too big. While I commend the transparency, I think most observers are interested in getting involved with the project beyond simply donating. Those running the project, or at least the component of the project involved with getting information online, should view themselves as community managers, and not just information providers. The transparency underlying the project creates amazing potential for the project website to be a platform for collaboration. There’s still a lot of work that can be done.

We hope to change things up. 

Together we have strength. I think I can speak for everyone involved when I say that the collective vision of CoPress emphasizes the community, and how the community can work in harmony. Innovative, standards-compliant software is one immediate issue we’re trying to solve, but it isn’t the only one. Brian Murley, of the Center for Innovation in College Media, forwards that hosting is also an issue. From that discussion, we’ve also learned that supporting a piece of software with the technical expertise to keep it updated is critical. These problems will have to be addressed in order for any student newspaper to survive. It’s more powerful to work together than individually. We’re not profit driven, although the consortium will need to be financially sustainable. We’re driven by a genuine interest to work together because, when we do, we can create beautiful ways for student newspapers to flourish in the digital age. 

In the interest of radical collaborative openness, we’re doing as many things as transparently as possible. The motivation for this comes from a concept I call an “open source organization,” although I’m well aware “open source” has become a buzzword for many recent projects. It started with Whitman Direct Action, I’m evolving it with Oregon Direct Action, and I think is applicable here, too. The idea is simple: put all of the data about what you’re doing online, and structure the data such that your audience, let it be the team, the partners, or the community, can follow along to the degree they would like to participate. Clay Shirky says we have a lot of cognitive surplus floating around. It’s time we put it to use.

Our conference calls are recorded and available as a MP3 download, with near future plans to create a podcast that will make listening in even easier. We synthesize research and coordinate efforts on our wiki. Information is also expressed with Twitter, delicious, and Flickr. We connect via a Google Group and, if you don’t find a piece of information you need, you’re more than welcome to contact CoPress.

At the moment, we’re working on a few things. First, we’re beginning to research the software options we’re most interested in: WordPress, Drupal, and the Populous Project (built on Django). CoPress would love to support the Populous Project, another student project, and eagerly awaits their alpha release in the coming weeks. WordPress and Drupal, however, have deployability and hackability characteristics that will be hard to match. Second, we’re compiling the names of online editors, webmasters, and internet geeks at student newspapers around the country who might have interest in what CoPress will have to offer. From this, our hope is to do a series of surveys gauging the technical expertise in today’s newsroom. We want to make sure as best we can that we’re serving the needs of everyone, not just ourselves. Last but not least, we’re continually evolving our web presence as a tool to help better achieve our aims.

And this is just the beginning. Thanks to Adam Hemphill, Greg Linch, Kevin Koehler, Joey Baker, Bryan Murley, Jared Silfies, Albert Sun, the Populous Team, and anyone I’ve missed. I look forward to working closely with you and others in the coming months to make all of these ideas and more our collective reality.

A month or so ago, I was hit with the notion that the open-source movement might be applicable to systems beyond software. What I quickly realised, much like when I “invented” the word guesstimate, is that someone had probably already thought of this idea. Undaunted, I began to brainstorm on how I might apply it to an organization I’m working with called Whitman Direct Action, primarily because I feel the concept behind the organization itself is revolutionary and could prove to be a useful model for other colleges and universities to build upon.

For those who are not well-versed in open-source’s history, the philosophy could be argued to have gone pop culture with Linux, a free-to-use and distribute operating system licensed under the GNU Public License. The idea of free software had existed long before Linus Torvald started working on his operating system but, from my uneducated viewpoint, that’s when it began to go mainstream. At present, Linux has become the dominant operating system for many of the internet’s web servers, and a popular distro called Ubuntu is rapidly gaining popularity as a free and open alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Windows operating system. Unless the trend changes, and again from my viewpoint, open-source architecture will continue moving broadening its marketshare because of the speed at which intellectual property now moves across the internet, as well as the apparent mutual advantages to people who collaborate on open-source projects.

This change in scenery is also apparent with the rapid rise of Wikipedia, a system that encourages adapting and building upon intellectual material. Wikipedia, for those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, is “the free dictionary” where anyone can edit and improve upon its articles. It relies on the collective intelligence of the masses, something normally believed to be inferior to a professional editor. However, a recent study found the Encyclopaedia Britannica had just a small percentage less errors per article than the seven year-old Wikipedia. Considering Wikipedia now has 8.29 million articles in 253 languages compared to the Britannica’s 29 print volumes, it’s no stretch to say the writing is on the wall.

Open-source is a tricky concept to explain to people who have little to no experience with programming. For those beginners, the term “source” refers to the structure of commands which lie behind any digitally created object and “open” implies that the code is free to use and distribute. Take, for instance, the construction of an automobile. Most cars and trucks have, among other things, an engine, a drivetrain, and a way to control the vehicle, sometimes called the wheel, gas pedal, and brake. Those systems are parallel conceptually to code in the digital world because they are the means to an end. They determine the overall output of the product. When you apply open-source to a car or truck, this means that the parts, or information to create the parts, is to be freely used and distributed. If person B wants to improve upon person A’s automobile, they would be free to copy and adapt person A’s orginal designs. Of course, persons C and A could then have access to the adaptations as well. In fact, a system like the one illustrated is beginning to take place in China. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything documents how businessmen in China have opted to open-source the designs of their motorcycles to cut down on the costs associated with developing intellectual property. Working together is now becoming a very smart business decision.

In another example, this piece of writing is being published by the open-source blogging software WordPress, and some of its research has been done on Wikipedia. The list goes on.

Jumping the fence from open-sourcing intellectual property such as code and blueprints to the functional structure of an organization has only recently become possible; thanks for the ability to do this goes to the spreading ubiquity of the internet, and the brilliant tools some companies are building on top of it. An open-source organization is one which seeks to become completely transparent to the public, meaning that any or all of its processes are easily visible and adaptable.

With Whitman Direct Action, or at least initially, we hope to:

• Podcast all and any of our staff meetings or phone calls
• Transform the departamental update emails into blog posts, and encourage interstaff discussion in the form of comments
• Make our financial strategies and budget freely available online
• License applicable content through Creative Commons
• Actively seek feedback from the community on any aspect of our organization, and make that conversation open to anyone

The driving philosophy, of course, is to make our organization “open-source” in the same sense of any software code: free to use, distribute, or modify.