Chris Grams

hi bruce-- this is where things get murky... the open source way in my mind is where collaboration, transparency, and meritocracy (plus some other stuff you'll see written about here: http://www.theopensourceway.org/book ) intersect.

By this definition, you are right, good collaborative design companies were doing this long before the term open source was even coined.

For me the rubber hits the road when you can do things the open source way *beyond the walls of your company*. So not just being transparent about your work internally, but working with others to create something larger than your company could create on its own.

So within the company, applying the open source way means doing many of the things that good collaborators have always done, but many not-so-good collaborators don't yet do (that's why the lessons are still important, and why the open source software metaphors help so much).

Outside the company walls (or even transcending company walls)... this is what the open source software world has done in such an innovative way... and I'm not sure how designers in non open source software projects can be incented to follow yet-- I'm not seeing much evidence in crowdsourcing practices, that's for sure... meritocracy maybe, transparency maybe, but not when it comes to collaboration.

Hey, partner, thanks for the great thoughts! Seeing as how you are the person who taught me to run a creative project the way you've outlined above, i'm in totally digging where you are coming from.

Your comment made me start thinking through why this kind of collaborative process works within a creative organization, but doesn't work when someone tries to collaborate beyond their corporate walls.

It strikes me that it comes down to shared incentives... in your graphic design firm (or in New Kind, for that matter), the creatives were free to collaborate on a project in the way you outlined because they shared the same group incentive-- if everyone collectively created a great piece of work, everyone got paid!

The incentive model for a "crowdsourcing design" site like 99designs.com fundamentally breaks any possibility of Burney design-like collaboration. Only one person gets paid, even if 200 people are working on the design for the client. Which means if two people decide to collaborate, or work on each others ideas, one of them is going to get taken advantage of financially.

The site that dff pointed out (www.quirky.com) starts us in this direction... I'd love to see more ideas that take it further... and no, I don't think money needs to be the only shared incentive (it's more than just money for many open source software contributors, after all).