What is Open Social Innovation and why we need free/libre recipes

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.

Open Social Innovation: open-sourcing social innovation to promote sharing of sustainable social practices.