How can we confront the complex problems of towns and regions, among local and global problems and resources?
The communities of Open Source software and P2P have shown that through active participation and open and peer-to-peer tools and organisational forms it is possible to carry out complex projects and solve complex problems. For this reason these organisational forms and tools have been adopted in many fields apart from that of software programming, such as hardware, biotechnology, jurisprudence, content and knowledge production, universities, design, public services, commerce and economics models, scientific research. In this way open and peer-to-peer organisational forms and their processes and tools have been recognised as being highly promising to help the active and collaborative participation of large numbers of people in order to solve problems and successfully carry out projects.
It’s within this context that people speak of open innovation, group intelligence, mass collaboration, crowdsourcing: all are ways of helping participants and their social networks and communities to propose innovations and solutions from a creativity distributed over a region.
Thus it is possible to think that we can make the most of these organisational forms and tools to set up participative, active and collaborative processes to help people solve the problems in their town/region in a creative and collaborative way, building local and global networks and valuing local resources at the same time.
A process with active and collaborative participants needs new forms and tools, transforming itself into a process of collaborative co-design. For this reason in this workshop we are going to learn how to plan a process of co-design of an open and peer-to-peer collaborative activity with a community, starting with its analysis, then going on to develop a project concept and finishing with the organisation of the process of co-design and its execution with/for a community.
