OSCON Day 1: Participate08

I had the pleasure of attending both the morning and afternoon sessions of Participate08;  A one day "summit" hosted by Microsoft in coordination with the O'Reilly OSCON.  The morning session was quite interesting to me.  It had less to do with "Open Source" per say, and more to do with "distributed innovation" models, or "User Innovation Networks" as they are termed by some. This notion of User Innovation Networks (UIN) fascinates me, and Open Source communities are the best and most mature manifestations of this phenomena.  The ingredients for a UIN are intellectual property creators and consumers (they can often be both at the same time), and a method, infrastructure, and tooling for fast, efficient communication, and collaboration. Again, FOSS projects fall into this category, but there are many other UINs out there that have nothing to do with software such as WikiPedia,  Flickr, and one you may not of heard of called threadless.com.  Threadless was the subject of the morning session at Participate08. In short, threadless.com is a company that has grown a community of intellectual property suppliers in the form of Tee Shirt Graphic Art Designers and has amassed a solid customer base of folks who want cool, unique, self-reflective Tee-Shirts for personal wear and/or gifts for family & friends.  Threadless.com gets over 100 tee shirt designs submitted each and every day of the week.  They have a community of roughly 1/2 million people, 20,000 of which have submitted at least one  tee-shirt design for consideration.  The users vote on the submitted designs on a weekly basis (I believe), then the top 10 or so are finally selected based on votes from the user community and from the threadless.com staff.  Those shirts get printed, and the designers for the shirts get a $2500 prize. To facilitate the community, there are the typical "Web2.0" features on the site such as a blog area, RSS feed, Twitter feed etc.  Using these tools Tee-Shirt reviewers/voters/buyers have direct correspondence with the designers.  Threadless doesn't directly employee any designers.  They also use outside printing companies to print their winning designs onto the Tee Shirts.  They are just a facilitator for a group of IP suppliers and a channel to the IP consumers.  They recognize this, and consider their "community" to be their most valuable asset.  The company is very transparent, showing it's culture, value system, ethics, and "character" to it's community at every possible chance.  The owners feel this is mandatory to foster the trust relationship needed for the community to thrive. The group at Participate08 spent the first hour or so watching videoed interviews of the threadless.com senior management, some of the designers, and some of the customers.  Ultimately threadless.com was faced with the "opportunity"  to sell some of their tee shirts to a national retail chain.   Part of the morning's assignment was to come up with a recommendation as to if that would be a good idea or not. The conversations that progressed through out the morning brought out some interesting tidbits for me.  They were: - Like many open source projects, a large funnel of IP was created (~800 shirt designs per week) but only a very small fraction of that was ever monetized. - The chance of a shirt design going to print was 0.06%.  Those are absolutely horrible odds.  The designers though had nearly no financial risk in submitting the designs, enjoyed the artistic outlet for themselves, and were able to test their creations on a group of people and receive feedback as to what was good and bad about their work.  This opportunity for the designers along with the sense of "community participation" was a good draw to keep them coming back. - The users, enjoyed both the ability to vote for, and converse with the designers as well as have a supply of tee shirts that were rare and uncommon. - The notion that the company threadless.com appreciated it's designers and customers and maintained a persona of open, and honest behaviors with that community was of the utmost importance. The afternoon session that was open to the public was not nearly as interesting to me.  They had a solid panel of speakers, but as Zack Urlocker said the discussion just kind of meandered through the topics of Hybrid Models, Inclusion, Motivation, and Intellectual Property.  A couple of tidbits I pulled from the talk however included: - FOSS developers often have a 'humanitarian" aka "good for the world and mankind" philosophy and motive behind their "contribution" to the FOSS community in which they participate.  I know that I have personally seen this in many of my FOSS developer encounters. - Often, when possible, FOSS developers are more committed to the FOSS project than they are to their employer, where if necessary, they will change employers while still working on the same FOSS project.  I've known some developers to do this, but I also know many developers that are more loyal to their employers than to their FOSS community.  It depends on the individual. - Finally, a book was mentioned that delves into the motivations and underpinnings as to why people participate in such communities. The book is "NonZero - The logic of human destiny".  I haven't read it, so I can't recommend it yet.  But I did order it. There you have my summation of Participate08.  I want to thank Microsoft for hosting this event, and Karim Lakhani for facilitating an excellent discussion.  Microsoft has clearly moved past the "be afraid of it and kill it" phase and into the "need to understand it" phase when it comes to FOSS and User Innovation Networks.  I hope the points surfaced in the morning about the absolute necessity for a participating corporate entity to take great pains to be totally open and honest with it's community of users and contributors can be spread far and wide within Microsoft by Sam Ramji and Bryan Kirschner.  They are starting from a bit of a deficit in the "Trust" category with the FOSS community and only time and good deeds will improve that situation.