We’ve been busy preparing the tools and the documentation for starting the discussion about the Open Design definition, but now we are ready to start!

After checking the different technical solutions for handling a distributed discussion about the Open Design definition, the best option turned out to be using Git as a distributed version control system and Github as the online platform. Github is really popular for developing open source applications, and the platform is really well developed for collective discussion and easiness of use.

You can read this article about Github on Wired, which was then published as a Github repository as well. Furthermore, this will also mean having a real open source and collaborative process and experience! If you don’t know Git and Github already, don’t worry, we will provide you with information and help, and the process will start with easy tasks. We also chose Github for its semplicity!

We have created then an organization account in Github for our group:
https://github.com/organizations/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup

And there we’ve just launched the repository for developing collaboratively the Open Design Definition with all the information necessary to start the process: https://github.com/OpenDesign-WorkingGroup/Open-Design-Definition

What can you do next?

1. Create your own basic / free Github user.
2. Send your username to the mailing list so that we can add you to the group and the repository (only the username, no passwords!!).
3. Start reading the documentation about the whole process that’s in the repository.
4. Start reading the existing Open definitions already in the repository, and for any comments open an issue ticket on Github.
5. If you need help, just send an e-mail to the mailing list.

This week we are going to have an Open Design Definition workshop at Fab* in Manchester, the first meeting of the European FabLabs and part of the Future Everything Festival! If you cannot attend it, don’t worry: the most important part of the process is the online discussion. The local workshops are very useful for speeding up the process and help people jump in the Github platform, but we want to have as many participants as possible with the online discussion!

Image taken from an article about fellow Open Design practitioner Peter Troxler.