Hi everyone,
Starting Apr. 7th, 2010, I'll be hosting a weekly event tentatively called "Wednesday Drupal Hack Nights" (WDHN) (Just changed it to "Wednesday Drupal 'Hook' Night :P ). (Update 2: Moving it to Thursdays due to key members availability... so now it's TDHN) The goal is to bring people together and do "hands-on" work together building the "Open Hippel" user innovation platform.
Open Hippel - CUUSOO.com and Open User Innovation
"Open Hippel" is named after MIT professor Eric Von Hippel (Eric's MIT homepage, Wikipedia entry), who is the leading figure in open innovation studies and coined the term "User Innovation". Kohei Nishiyama (Co-creation at MUJI and LEGO, Fast Company Top 100 Most Creative People in Business, "Participatory innovation" (LIft Asia09 Speech)) is the visionary who created the Design-To-Order process and started CUUSOO.com. CUUSOO.com is the only company in the world that has the complete - "Users Co-create Products -> Rights Management -> Licensing -> Royalties Sharing" system, however, CUUSOO.com itself was started in 1998 and as you can see, its website is behind the current times. In order to keep up with the ever changing web, CUUSOO.com needs a better, sustainable web strategy.
My role in this is to choose the right path for the future of CUUSOO.com. So why do I choose Drupal and open up development to create Open Hippel? Well, first of all, it makes simple sense to leverage the framework that Drupal provides, so we don't have to worry about the basic things like user managements and security. By using Drupal, you gain the experience of many iterations of real usage by large & small websites... so the product is more tested, more secure, and its design more insightful and future-proof than what a few developers can build in a closed environment.
Secondly, we at CUUSOO.com are trying to do something good for the world. What we have developed over the years is a set of Intellectual Properties Rules, similar to what Creative Commons is doing for copyrights... but CC can only cover pictures and texts, it cannot protect an idea. Ideas need Patents, and the CUUSOO IP Rules can provide that. For example, TED ideas are great!... but they can be copied without the original owner's consent. Now if TED ideas are submitted on the Open Hippel platform, the CUUSOO IP Rules will be able to protect it, so it can be shared and developed, while the original owner can be credited for it. This is why we want to make Open Hippel as freely available as possible, so that even small villages in remote, developing countries can share their ideas, and these people can basically start micro-businesses from their ideas, therefore improving their lives.
So, what I'm trying to do now is to attract people who are passionate about what we're trying to do... and do it together. I'm calling it "Passionsourcing". I'm connecting with people who have similar visions of changing people's behavior and making the world a better place ~ starting from Japan! So far, TEDxTokyo and K. International School are joining us every week to create this platform, as they'll need a platform for budding innovators / school students to join together and work on great new ideas! Others participants include the Denmark JOIN (Danish government user innovation project), UNESCO Japan, NetSquared Japan, Architecture for Humanity, Startup Weekend Tokyo, KEIO University and Tokyo Hackerspace.
Open Hippel Platform - Technical Details
First, I would like to emphasize that the spirit of TDHN will be OPEN and GENEROUS. It doesn't matter if you're a Drupal guru or you don't even know what Drupal is. As long as you're interested in "Open Innovation", and have some ideas about how you would like to use an online platform to share ideas and form communities to work together, you will be able to contribute to the creation of Open Hippel!!
Technically, I think the base platform should have 2 main features: (See the comments below to see the evolution of features as we moved along with the help of UX Designer David Siren Eisner.)
- Groups - obviously, for people to self organizer and gather like minded folks. Within a group, members can submit pictures to a central group pool (a picture is worth a thousand words), and your run of the mill "Discussions, Polls and Events"
- A basic, user customizable theme - a clean canvas with basic adjustable settings, so that users who are not technical can still customize it to look good for his own organization.
- Other additional features can be added as "Features" using the feature module or in other ways, so they can be separately installed if the users choose to. (Also the added benefit of separately versioned on Github.)
My hope is that once we have a basic platform like this, and it's proven to be useful by CUUSOO.com, TEDxTokyo, and may be other big names like MIT, LEGO, MUJI... etc, it gains more creditability and more companies will be willing to use it... so all of us in the Drupal community can pick up businesses customizing and deploying it to these companies... and therefore also benefit the whole community and Drupal itself!
(Also, I truly believe in using Open Participatory, Open Innovation to make paradigm shifts in how people work and how people consume! Thus making the world a better place! So, I hope by opening "Open Hippel", some of you can share my vision... and if I get run over by a truck tomorrow and die, you guys can continue and change the world!) (I'll try not to get run over though :)
Meeting Location and Info
The first meeting will take place at Cuusoo.com's office - http://www.elephant-design.com/corp/en_access.html / GMap - http://bit.ly/by7amX
Future meetings can take place in turns in our / your place! The first option is Tokyo Hackerspace, we may be going there one Wednesday every month to tap into their talents! Let's aim to turn this into a stable, long-term meetup that can benefit a lot of the Open Source and "Open Minded" communities.
Cross posting note:
Cross posted to HKDUG, I'll start a video chat room on http://www.tokbox.com/ so up to 20 people can participate remotely - Join us 6:30pm HKT at http://www.tokbox.com/cloneofsnake/Open-Hippel-Weekly
Looking forward to seeing y'all,
Nicholas Wang aka @cloneofsnake