In this page, you’ll find informations about work and research I’m currently doing.
Following principles of open source, I’m releasing data which is “beta” (in progress) and making it available as it is and so keep in mind it might be incomplete, inaccurate, …
I’m making it available under creative commons CC-BY-SA, so that it can be reused by anyone for any use, as long a the original source is cited.
Open Social Innovation
In this article I describe Open social innovation, a new intellectual framework to facilitate the sharing of social practices.
Although the concept described here has been proposed from a network of french social innovators, there are many many groups around the world who are already thinking along the same line. These groups don’t recognize each other because the lack a common framework and vocabulary. This article hopes to propose such a framework and open the discussion.
I would have liked to submit this article to a peer-reviewed journal, but this would have taken more time to proof-read it, add more references, perform more research and deeper fact-checking, and so on … It took me months to put these ideas together, and it would have taken me months again to be fully happy with the writing.
I felt for a long time that open social innovation is an idea that wants to come out, so I decided to apply the principle of “Good enough for now; safe enough to try” and release my current writing as it is, hoping to get feedback and constructive criticism.
Therefore although this article it is fairly advanced, I still see it as a draft, so take it as is.
Additionally I believe that, in the digital age where you can have access to the best mind of the planet, having an article reviewed by only two or three peers is a strange idea. Opening an article for review to all means anyone whether recognized officially as an expert or not, whether from one discipline or another, can give some input. The content is therefore driven by the ideas and arguments and not by personalities or some back office politics.
As an experiment I’m also releasing this text in Github a webtool that facilitate distributed collaboration. Unlike wikis that can only have “one true version”, Github allow multiple authors and parallel versions to feed from each others. Using Github, I hope to get suggestions to improve the article and/or translations.
So this article is an exploration of the concept of open social innovation as well as an open research experiment.
Hope you find it useful/interesting.
Permaculture Patterning, a design framework for systemic transformation
How do we change the system(s) we live in ? By essence a system is an inherently complex web of relationships. Systems thinking researcher Donella Meadows has given us a map of leverage points to act on a system but there is no practical plan as to where to start effectively to trigger systemic change.
Interestingly around the late seventies, two systems thinkers/practitioners developed practical design frameworks for systems transformation.
The first framework, Permaculture, is an integrated approach to designing agro-ecological systems developed by ecological scientist Bill Mollison. Permaculture focussed initially on developing a resilient “permanent-agriculture” but it was expanded to stand also for “permanent culture,” as it was seen that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system. Although it is still not widely recognized by either the scientific community or the general public, Permaculture has developed a very powerful set of analytical and design tools for whole systems transformation.
The second framework, Pattern Languages, was developed by architect Christopher Alexander to build human settlements and “living” architectural systems. If Alexander’s Pattern Language focusses on built structures, it also encompasses a social dimension. Although Alexander’s work hasn’t taken off in the architectural field it deeply inspired software programming and a growing number of disciplines.
Both frameworks share a common approach to systems design called patterning.
While design builds structures by assembling elements, patterning can be seen as a branch of design that builds systems by weaving relationships.
In this paper we look at the commonalities and differences between the two approaches, discuss how they could be used by systems thinking practitioners and propose Permaculture Patterning as a new framework for systems design and transformation.
Permaculture Patterning, a design framework for systemic transformation
Co-creative events pattern language
In the last few years various groups of people have invented new meeting formats to share ideas, learn, think and work together. Barcamp, World Café, Pecha Kucha, Hackathon, are just a few examples of these new co-creative events formats.
It would be interesting to list and document all these new formats and their best practices. The idea eventually is to produce a standard “recipe” for each format so that a group could choose one according the outcome they want (use the group collective power to communicate, solve a problem or actually produce something, …).
What’s interesting is a group could “hack” (modify, mix or combine) events: you could start by an “ice-breaking” format to introduce participants to each other in fun/friendly way, then follow with a “Café-Projets” to think collectively, then end with a “Hackathon” or a “coding-party” (to produce a software) or a “flash-mob” (for an artistic purpose), and so on…Having a set standards recipes for many different events formats would help people share a common vision and make Intentcasting/intentcatching easier
Below the article you’ll find a folder with my “raw data”.
Co-Creative event pattern language as a tool for group self-organization.