We are planning to submit a proposal for a research project to create a “Lean” Open Value Ecosystem (LOVE): a set of open tools to assess the value(s) generated by communities and contributors, thereby leading to the establishment of a fair and more sustainable ecosystem for commons-based peer production communities. LOVE will provide tools to: · Build metrics to measure community value and make it comprehensible. · Promote inclusion, participation and improve the resilience of Digital Social Innovation (DSI). · Elaborate innovative economic models to support DSI sustainability through interactions with the Market and the State. Given the current crisis and high unemployment rate in Europe, citizens trying to earn a living and/or communities wishing to sustain themselves through Digital Social Innovation (DSI) have limited options to do so. There are currently only fragmented attempts to measure the value of - or produced by - DSI communities. Metrics such as Alexa for web relevance, or OpenHub for FLOSS contributions are proprietary and fail to properly reflect the open dynamics and different value dimensions of DSI. Community-centric attempts at measuring and rewarding value creation are very limited (e.g. Stack Exchange gamification, P2PUniversity badges, Wikipedia thanks) and do not provide any viable mechanism for DSI communities and contributors. The growth of DSI (see the manifesto, https://www.dsimanifesto.eu/manifesto/ ) will depend on being able to solve this problem. Although applicable to any type of DSI, the LOVE project will focus particularly on commons-based DSI communities, concerned with the provision of open and freely reusable resources, and based on a more community-driven governance model. Highlighting the growing importance of “open commons” in the emerging information and knowledge society, LOVE will identify the DSI practices with the most potential for economic renewal and institutional change, with a view to providing an alternative framework for the provision of public goods and services, based on shared forms of ownership and value creation. We are the team that worked on the P2Pvalue project https://p2pvalue.eu/ . LOVE develops the ideas and software from that project. We now invite you to participate in LOVE. In exchange for allowing us to interview you to see how you are measuring and developing value within your community, we could offer you early access to our research results. These will include suggestions about how to measure the different types of value that communities produce, how they can reward contributors (and how they shouldn't), and how they can benefit from relations with the market and public. Early access to the software the project will be developing may be also useful to you, to advertise the different ways your organization produces value, and to experiment with rewards for contributors. You will be able to influence how these software applications evolve, and make sure they incorporate your needs. To accept this invitation, all we need is a contact name and email, your website, a copy of your logo and 100 words describing your activities and community to include in the proposal. But we need it now – we need to receive these by April 16th. Please send them by email to me. You do not have to commit to anything at this stage; we are only hoping that you will be happy to cooperate with us if the project goes ahead. We hope you can join us. Nigel Gilbert and the LOVE team _______________________________________________ Bah-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/bah-general