As I blogged previously, I'm doing a series of short pieces that look under the hood at the day to day work of the Shuttleworth Foundation. As the opening blurb to my first article says:
How We Work is a series of occasional articles that take a critical look at one aspect of our open philanthropy practice. Our aim is to reflect and improve upon our efforts while also sharing what we've learned with others.
The first target (or 'victim'?) of this process was the Foundation's open licensing policy. The whole team met back in January to reflect on our policy, talk about what is working and what isn't and to dream up ideas for how to do it all better. I've just finished a draft write up from this conversation, with the main points summarized in the introduction:
The Shuttleworth Foundation believes in open innovation. It is core to the society we want to build. Early on, we made a decision that what we do and fund should be under an open license. Our goal was to make it easy for people to use, adapt and improve whatever our staff and partners created. We wanted maximum viral impact, and we saw open licensing as the first step in this direction.
As it turns out, making open licensing work isn't easy, and going viral is even tougher. In the three years since embracing open licensing, we've bumped up against confusion over IP ownership, partners who are not willing to share, and lawyers who don't 'get' open. Also, in many cases, we've simply lost track of materials our partners have created. They may be open, but no one can find them. Not even us.
The good news is we're pushing past all of this, putting in place more systematic open licensing and archiving policies. As we do this, we thought we should write down how things have gone so far and explain where we are headed in the future. Hopefully, this will help others move into open licensing more quickly and successfully in the future.
Bottom line lessons and advice for other foundations are included briefly at the end of the article:
If you do decide to 'go open', it's important to take the time to be thoughtful about how it happens. Our experience suggests that there are three issues to pay particular attention to: license choice (choose a license like CC BY SA that has maximum viral impact); ownership (think about who has a stake in making ideas travel and keeping them open; and accessibility (make a clear plan for access and archiving). These are three areas we tripped up on, and that we're now working to improve.
There is a full version of the draft on Google Docs. I'd love to get comments and feedback on this as I will be doing at least one more version before we 'publish' it.
Processwise, I still like the idea of the How We Work series. The face-to-face team discussion was especially good, putting us all on the same page (or close to it) in terms of open licensing. It also surfaced some internal controversy on when our partners should own IP and when we should steward it ourselves. As a result, we were able to tweak our new open licensing policy so that it meets a broader set of needs and circumstances.
I'm less than sure on the write up format. It's good to have a formal, reflective article. The process of writing something like this deepens the thinking and even had an impact back on the follow up policy discussions. However, all the back and forth (and my own delays) made the whole process feel really felt slowwwwwwww. For the next topic (internal learning?), I may blog out loud early in the process and then come out with a more formal article a little later. I'd love comments on whether or not this mixed formal / informal writing strategy sounds useful.