Architecture Goes Open Source to Promote Social Good

As we have examined in various posts the open source phenomenon has extended far from its roots in software to launch new businesses and revitalize old ones using more open business models, product or service design and production processes, and online community.

Open source online community is often created and promoted separately from mainstream association activities.

Today we look at the Open Architecture Network (see link from Social Responsibility in right hand column) – an open source online community dedicated to the promotion of an architectural revolution to “improve living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.” OAN founders seek to help 100 million slum dwellers improve their lives through improving the built environment around them.

OAN was created by Architecture for Humanity and volunteers from its local chapters. AH is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization founded in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises. Through competitions, workshops, educational forums, partnerships with aid organizations and other activities, Architecture for Humanity creates opportunities for architects and designers from around the world to help communities in need. OAN grew out of the collective frustration in sharing ideas and trying to work together to address shelter needs after disaster in informal settlements and in our own communities.

OAN was founded with support from the prestigious TED Prize (from the TED Conference – see previous posts on TED). Sun Microsystems, Hot Studio, Creative Commons, and AMD joined Architecture for Humanity to launch a beta version of the Open Architecture Network: the first site to offer open source architectural plans and blueprints on the web.

Interested architects and designers are able to:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons “some rights reserved” licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future

OAN sees other stakeholder involvement from across a wide global spectrum to include: community leaders, nonprofit groups, volunteer organizations, government agencies, technology partners, healthcare workers, and educators.

OAN’s goal is to “allow people to work together in a whole new way, a way that enables 5 billion potential clients to access their skills and expertise… and to generate not one idea but the hundreds of thousands of design ideas needed to improve living conditions for all.”

Presently, OAN has over 5,000 registered users working on 209 projects in:

• Design development (169)
• Design complete (38)
• In construction (32)
• Construction complete (33) for all

Across all global regions:

• Africa & Arab States (34)
• Asia & Pacific (21)
• Europe & Former Soviet States (19)
• Latin America & the Caribbean (9)
• North America (55)

To alleviate the following social needs:

• Accessibility (22)
• Adaptive Re-use (12)
• Affordable/Cost-effective (53)
• Agit Prop/Policy/Politics (10)
• Agriculture/Food (9)
• Biomimicry (3)

Lessons Learned

The Architecture Network offers some good reminders as association executives study how best to use open source strategies:

1. Online community runs at the heart of good open source strategy and engages stakeholder groups outside your own traditional member base.
2. Community business opportunity are stakeholder outcome-based, meaning collaboration has a purpose that is tangible and measurable.
3. Sponsoring organizations see themselves as facilitators and respect average participant expertise and experience while designing experiences that empower registered users.
4. Knowledge is collected, organized and shared.
5. The experience lets people or businesses pursue and apply their passions and expertise and profit from them however their motivations are defined.

Constructing Customer Conversation with New Media the Open Source Way

Open Source Radio’s lead in of its radio broadcast from inside Second Life.

“Ready, Fire, Aim” or “Pitch, Revise, Report”

Your communication and media can’t just be a like a bullhorn anymore. It has to be an invitation, a conversation or it misses out on the ability to create life around your content.

Would you be brave enough to “let go” by constructing a new, more dynamic two way conversation with your information consumers like this?

• Every time you have an idea for a story you post it to the website for member comment. The story idea will not be produced for another month because the direction of the story isn’t finished until suggestions or questions from members on the story concept are considered and followed up.

• You know that quite often your consumers have more expertise and experience on any story than you do – so you invite them to share it BEFORE the story is written.

• You’re willing to tap the blogosphere to find someone with the “local” knowledge on the content you plan to report. In fact, you make sure at least one blogger is included in the story itself as it never hurts to generate word of mouth marketing for your stories.
• You let your consumers pitch story ideas. Every day one of your editors reads the submissions and responds in the thread. You make sure to read every suggestion and respond to as many as you can.
• Editors take pitches that could make a good story and present them to the editorial staff in a story meeting. If the rest of the staff thinks the story might work too, you prepare a short description and post the idea as a new story on the website.
• The story is completed and posted while you facilitate continuous discussion on its content.

Open Source Radio does all this.

In their own words:

“Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.”

In their case, the medium is audio podcasts wrapped around a community of engaged listener-contributors who post ideas, thoughts and questions – before, during and after the shows are produced. Recommendation tools help fellow listeners follow the most popular content. A profile system helps users learn and build relationships with other listeners.

250,000 + listeners from the US, Canada, Australia, Spain United Kingdom and more…

It’s time to take your listserv software behind the woodshed and shoot it dead.

You can’t bring your content to life unless you create experiences that fully integrate different kinds of content (in this case posted text and photos with podcasts) to create a contextual experience that will make it compelling.

As we saw with Gannett’s new news production strategy, you will need a different approach to satisfy the “lean in audience” who want to interact with their content versus the old “lean back” crowd who were satisfied with being “talked at.”

Those days are fading away.

Global Standards & Certified Practices That Promote Sustainable Business

As we have seen from earlier US studies from Pew and the National Consumers League and Fleishman-Hillard International Communications, the consumer appetite for buying from sustainable businesses is growing as a key factor in their purchasing decision.

But confusion reins when it comes to understanding what products or businesses represent “truly” sustainable products and services.

Just like the world’s version of the Baldrige Award, ISO 9000 reflects a standard of global scale recognized for quality. The next few years will witness many businesses and products seeking third party validation of their sustainable business practices to eliminate this confusion and create more separation among competitors who meet more rigorous standards and practices.

Previous posts have demonstrated how “social responsibility” is evolving mainstream business strategy and practice as executives realize the profit potential of redesigning business to become more sustainable economically, socially and environmentally.

Dramatic new business and product design management initiatives such as McDonough and Braungart’s “Cradle to Cradle” protocol or the European’s “Industrial Symbiosis” are some of the leading examples that I urge you to examine more fully (Visit the links under Social Responsibility off the right column to learn more).

Demand for more global standards and practices have driven a variety of exciting efforts by stakeholders in business, academia, nonprofits and government throughout the world.

The following is a list of some of these ongoing efforts leading the way to improve business efficiency and productivity. Please note that although some of these certifications often refer to themselves as “green,” they are in fact focused on economic and social sustainable management practices in addition to environmental ones.

ISO 26000

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is developing an International Standard providing guidelines for social responsibility (SR). The guidance standard will be published in 2008 as ISO 26000 and be voluntary to use. The intent is to “encourage voluntary commitment to social responsibility and will lead to common guidance on concepts, definitions and methods of evaluation.”

Stakeholders developing this guidance standard include: industry, government, labor, consumers, nongovernmental organizations and strives for a geographical and gender-based balance.

US-based American Society for Quality is the coordinating body of the US Technical Advisory Group that will help guide US contributions to ISO 26000. If you would like to participate as a US-based organization, contact ASQ directly.

ISO 14000 & 14001

ISO 14000 is a series of international standards on environmental management. It provides a framework for the development of an environmental management system and the supporting audit program for an enterprise.

ISO 14001 was first published in 1996 and specifies the actual requirements for an enterprise environmental management system focusing on “aspects which the organization has control and over which it can be expected to have an influence.”

ISO 14001 is the only ISO 14000 standard that can be certified against by an external certification authority although it does not itself state specific environmental performance criteria.

The purpose of this standard is to help all types of organizations to protect the environment, to prevent pollution, and to improve their environmental performance through creating environmental: management systems, policy, planning, resource and structures, monitoring and measurement, and management reviews.

Cradle to Cradle Certification

One of the leading business and product design certifications gaining traction globally, C2C provides a means to tangibly, credibly measure achievement in “eco-effective design” and helps customers purchase and specify products that are pursuing a broader definition of quality.

Business benefits include:

• Liability and risk reduction
• Regulatory cost reduction
• Product and service innovation
• Product and brand differentiation
• Customer relationships extending beyond the sale
• Increased competitive advantage
• Tangible social responsibility

Leaders who have embraced C2C protocols include: Herman-Miller, Nike, Steelcase, Ford, and the Chinese government. The latter will build 6 new cities designed from the C2C protocol.

The Natural Step

Since 1988, The Natural Step has worked to accelerate global sustainability by guiding companies, communities and governments on an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable path. A nonprofit, the Natural Step was founded in Sweden in 1989 by Swedish scientist, Karl-Henrik Robèrt.

The science based TNS Framework helps solve problems in a way that avoids new problems, develops an organizational vision and core values within a framework for social and ecological sustainability, and refreshes a vision in a step-by-step way while doing good business.

You can read more about TNS here.

US Green Building Council

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is the US benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance.

LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality.

Forest Stewardship Council

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a non-profit organization devoted to encouraging the responsible management of the world’s forests. FSC sets high standards that ensure forestry is practiced in an environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable way.

Landowners and companies that sell timber or forest products seek certification as a way to verify to consumers that they have practiced forestry consistent with FSC standards. Independent, certification organizations are accredited by FSC to carry out assessments of forest management to determine if standards have been met. These certifiers also verify that companies claiming to sell FSC certified products have tracked their supply back to FSC certified sources. This chain of custody certification assures that consumers can trust the FSC label.

Fair Trade Certified

The Fair Trade Certified label is a leading independent, third-party consumer guarantee that companies have complied with strict economic, social and environmental criteria for particular products, thereby creating a more equitable and sustainable trade system for producers.

The principal criteria of Fair Trade certification are:

• Direct trade with farmer organizations, bypassing unnecessary middlemen
• Fair prices for farmers, and decent working and living conditions for workers
• Free association of workers and farmers, with structures for democratic decision-making
• Access to pre-financing, and additional premiums for community and business development
• Sustainable agricultural and farm management practices, including restricted use of agrochemicals and no GMOs

When consumers see a product with the Fair Trade Certified label, they are guaranteed that farmers received a fair price and all of the other benefits of the Fair Trade system. To date, sales of Fair Trade Certified products have supplied nearly $80 million in above-market revenue to millions of farmers, workers and their families in over 50 developing countries worldwide.

Green Guard Environmental Institute

The mission of GREENGUARD Environmental Institute (GEI) is to improve public health and quality of life through programs that improve indoor air. In accordance with that mission, GEI currently has three third-party certification programs.

• GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified – Product certification program for low emitting interior building materials, furnishings, and finish systems.
• GREENGUARD for Children & Schools – Product certification program for low emitting interior building materials, furnishings, and finish systems used in educational (daycare and K-12) environments.
• GREENGUARD for Building Construction – Building certification program for newly constructed multifamily and commercial properties that follow best practice guidelines for preventing mold during the design, construction and ongoing operations.

Food Alliance

A nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable agriculture by recognizing and rewarding farmers who produce food in environmentally friendly and socially responsible ways, and educating consumers and others in the food system about the benefits of sustainable agriculture.

Food Alliance operates the most comprehensive third-party certification program in North America for sustainably produced food. Food Alliance Certified distinguishes foods produced by farmers, ranchers and food processors who use environmentally and socially responsible practices. FA runs the Farm and Ranch Certification Program and Handler Certification Program.

Green Globe

Green Globe is the worldwide benchmarking and certification program for the travel and tourism industry.

Green Globes environmental reports demonstrate responsible behavior across the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental management. Green Globe states that partnering with Green Globe will help a business increase and sustain its profits while meeting Corporate Social Responsibility obligations.

The Rainforest Alliance

Works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior. Companies, cooperatives and landowners that participate in our programs meet rigorous standards that conserve biodiversity and provide sustainable livelihoods.

The Rainforest Alliance Certified seal of approval makes it easy for consumers to know they are buying a product that has been grown or made sustainably. The companies who sell these products also make sure their customers know they are good neighbors in their communities and that they take care of their workers and protect the environment.