User Led Innovation Report from Down Under

(via Smart Mobs) I came across this interesting report from Darren Sharp and Mandy Salomon at Smart Internet Technology CRC in Australia: “User-led Innovation: A New Framework for Co-creating Business and Social Value.” (PDF link).

The first half of the study results from qualitative interviews with “experts on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation”, specifically:

• Eric von Hippel
• Yochai Benkler
• Jimmy Wales
• Michel Bauwens
• Siva Vaidhyanathan
• John Howkins
• Mitch Kapor

The second half of the study focuses on Second Life as a case study or example of the impact of user-led innovation in actual practice.

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IxDA Interaction 08

Damn, wish I had been there. Interaction08, The first annual conference from IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, was held last weekend (Feb 08-10) in Savannah, at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

The videos from IxDA are being uploaded and will end up on the Interaction08 site, but for now you can preview them in this Brightcove Channel.

Here’s Alan Cooper’s Keynote video, titled “An Insurgency of Quality,” in which he argues we should focus on Best to Market, not First to market.

He makes a strong argument for the importance of “post-industrial craftsmen” in the software industry. (Though I actually liked my Archos Jukebox for many years, I can see that it wasn’t best-to-market, and it has ended up sitting on the shelf while I use the iPod instead).

I love his pointing out the artificial scarcity of time and money, and the way in which culture conflict is what leads to zero sum negotiation.

Resources for Designing Online Communities or Social Web Applications

A couple of recent publications on designing / building social web applications that you should check out. More to say about each after the jump.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

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Open Source, Freedom 0, and Mac OS X

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on this blog post from Coding Horror: Why Doesn’t Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero?

Atwood argues that:

when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.

and that:

When the dongle– or, if you prefer, the “Apple Mac”– is present, OS X and Apple software runs. It’s a remarkably pretty, well-designed machine, to be sure. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s also one hell of a dongle.

I’m a Free Software Foundation member, and a big supporter of Free and Open Source Software. But I’m also a Mac user. More accurately, I use – at various points and for various projects – Windows XP, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux – typically Ubuntu. But I recently switched back to Mac OS as my primary environment, on a new MacBook Pro.

So is it that I don’t care about Freedom Zero?

Not at all. I think Freedom Zero is important – in fact, using Mac OS and VMWare Fusion lets me run all three operating systems named above on the same machine, and that’s part of what attracts me to it. I refuse to buy songs from the iTunes store because they contain and encourage DRM (and hide the urls for podcasts to make it difficult to switch podcatchers), and run Rockbox on my iPod.

But Atwood’s right, that in switching to a MacBook Pro I’m supporting (indirectly, since it is really an Optaros laptop I get to use) proprietary development models, paying Apple Inc. for software I don’t get source code to, can’t run on my other machines, and can’t (legally) modify even for my own use.

But the combination of Apple’s user experience smarts and a BSD core, which lets me run X11 apps from the GNU/Linux world, is seductively attractive, and I can run the GIMP and NeoOffice (based on Open Office) and Firefox and Miro, and do PHP/MySQL development.

It’s a weird kind of lock in – I can bring virtually anything in (running many open source apps and frameworks in OS X directly, or worst case running them in virtualization) but there are some things I can’t take out (the proprietary Apple bits, other third party software).

Any piece of software I might write (yeah, like I’ve got time these days to create a software application) or contribute to (that may be possible) can retain Freedom Zero – I wouldn’t necessarily want to create or contribute something that only other Mac OS X users could run.

So, to get to the point, does the increasing popularity (at least perceived – look around at the crowd next time you’re at a *camp or an open source conference) of the Mac as a hardware platform reflect a general lack of concern over Freedom Zero, even among groups of developers who are otherwise insistent about freedom in the FSF sense?

Drupalcon Boston 2008

Looking forward to the upcoming Drupalcon:

Drupalcon Boston 2008 takes place from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center. There will also be a Drupal Code Sprint on March 7 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge.

Drupalcon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss & advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. With sessions targeted at everyone from novice to expert attendees, Drupalcon is where you go to advance your understanding and use of Drupal.

Note: Deadline is Today, Feb 11th, for submitting proposals.

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