The iPhone got “stolen” by Android. Sonos got allegedly stolen by Amazon and Google. And we can find fifty chinese companies selling the same chargers on Amazon, which means they pretty much all “steal” from each others’ designs. And more recently the Internet Archive opened a National Emergency Library with 1.4 million uncopyrighted books, and although most books are from …
Why following is the next big thing in leadership
As leaders or managers we sometimes want people to follow our orders. To follow the path we planned. I know I have. Or we believe that we have to be original, come up with the vision for change on our own and find ways to make others follow us. Or that we need loads of money, influence and a big …
Why leadership is scary, and doing it anyway
Do you want to make things happen? To lead change to a vision of a better world you can clearly picture in your mind? Many of us see what’s not working in the world and get frustrated at how things keep not changing. Bureaucracy, Climate Change, Inequality, Fossil Fuels, media polarisation tearing our society apart, plastic straws, tights that break …
How to make Money with open source and community building
Since the internet arrived, it’s been increasingly easier and cheaper to share our work with others. But the other side of the coin is that it is also super easy and cheap for others to copy what we do. If you’ve been attracted to give your ideas away and invite communities to work together, you’ve probably wondered: “How can I …
How to get others to spread and enrich your work?
One of the biggest mistakes in change-making projects is to give something away, and hope the world will use it and spread it. But that’s creating a one-direction channel, and this cuts you from the real value the world can give back to your project. To make this magic happen, you need to create bi-directional channels and carve the space …
What motivates a community to collaborate with you?
In previous articles we’ve seen what you can put in open source to start creating collaboration as well as how it can benefit your own project. You can find these articles here and here. And in the latest article, we saw where you can find a community who wants to collaborate, and how you can make it easy for them …
How can you gather a community to work with you?
Android has become 80% of the smartphone market, TED is now viewed by billions of people, and Let’s Do It is picking up tons of waste around the world thanks to the open philosophies that enable random strangers to collaborate with their projects. Openness coupled with a community is powerful. In the latest two posts here and here we saw …
What can you open source to create impactful and innovative communities? — Part 2
The Wikipedia took down the Encyclopedia Britannica. WordPress has taken away big chunks of attention from newspapers. Bitcoin might be taking banking over. Unsplash is taken over stock photography. You could say that “Open Source is going to eat the world”. If a market only has closed options there will always be someone willing to create an open alternative. Apple …
What can you open source to create impactful and innovative communities? (Part 1):
Robots and open source will make most goods and services available for free or close to free. Or so are the predictions of authors like Kevin Kelly or Jeremy Rifkin. Why? Because once there is an open source alternative of equal quality, the proprietary solutions will make no sense to be used. So most entrepreneurs will eventually default to sharing …
How to create change when you have a big idea but no skills or time
It was 2006. A young brit named Jono Bacon had been running the LugRadio podcast, a show about Free Software and Linux with three of his friends. The show had attracted a more than decent following and had an active community forum going on. But the irony of the show about Free Software is that it was recorded with a …