THE LAB

I encountered this amazing website recently: an open source project that has set out to make Green Maps all over the world.

According to their website, “Green Map System promotes inclusive participation in sustainable community development worldwide, using mapmaking as our medium.” Their purpose is to:

• Strengthen local-global sustainability networks
• Expand the demand for healthier, greener choices
• Help successful initiatives spread to even more communities

Since the project began in 1995, the green mapping movement has spread to over 500 cities, towns and villages in 54 countries. While of course it’s not perfect, the great thing about open source is that it can be built upon. It’s a pretty amazing idea, don’t you think?

Check it out and see if there’s one in your area. And if not, you can start creating one!

Does this remind you of Walk Score a bit? Hmmm… Considering both are utilizing Google as a part of their platform, I wonder if someone might combine Green Map with Walk Score to create a more powerful  and usable community portrait…  Food for thought.

When I originally wrote about the Green Map system at One Green Generation, Founder and Director Wendy Brower informed me their full-featured Open Green Map System will be launching on June 5th.  Sounds like we can look forward to more innovation from this New York non-profit.

Have fun checking it out!

As we’re still ironing out the kinks here at BLAB LAB, last week the following article was posted with the second half missing. The following is the entirety of Kevin’s Software As Community. Apologies for any confusion! – Melinda, Editor

I’m writing this post in WordPress, an open source blog engine. WordPress is written in PHP, an open source programming language. Our blog is running on an Apache web server using a MySQL database, both open source. All on top of the Linux operating system – perhaps the most famous open source project.

Our newly launched web site also uses MySQL and Apache. I’ve developed it in Ruby on Rails, using a number of popular community extensions. I’ve tested it in FireFox, using the amazing FireBug plug-in. Yup, all open source.

What’s Open Source?

Open source is free software. But, as the community cliche goes, it’s free as in speech, not free as in beer. Or, as the founder of the free software movement puts it, free as in freedom.

The official definition:

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free.

You use open source software everyday you’re on the web. It’s increasingly likely you’re using an open source browser like FireFox. If not, most of the web pages you visit leverage open source.

The community of collaborators that have formed around open source projects is fascinating – and perhaps surprising. Linux is a great example. A list of contributing companies from April 2008 includes IBM, Intel, HP, Oracle, Novell, and Cisco – companies that are fiercely competitive with each other in a number of areas. Yet regarding the Linux Kernel, they are happy to share resources and intellectual property.

Why?

I would claim for the same reason that competing restaurants or clothing stores join the same chamber of commerce: common needs and shared goals.

In many contexts, collaboration – even with your greatest nemesis – makes more than good sense.

This philosophy has taken a while to evolve, though. For decades software systems were closed and proprietary. Software – no matter how common it’s function – was often considered “special sauce” and something to be guarded.

Recently, though, a philosophy around shared infrastructure has evolved. Starbucks and Tully’s might compete on location and price, but they both pay taxes that contributed to shared transportation infrastructure – roads, subways and sidewalks that deliver employees, customers, and coffee beans.

This philosophy has now extended to operating systems, databases, and web servers. The sharing is transparent and voluntary, without government playing the middle-man.

What a concept!

Open source can teach us a lot. I think – and hope – that more businesses will approach their problems, challenges, and opportunities as shared problems, challenges, and opportunities.

There is much more to gain than lose.

After all, we are all in this together.

Written by Kevin Moore

I’m writing this post in WordPress, an open source blog engine. WordPress is written in PHP, an open source programming language. Our blog is running on an Apache web server using a MySQL database, both open source. All on top of the Linux operating system – perhaps the most famous open source project.

Our soon-to-launch web site also uses MySQL and Apache. I’m developing it in Ruby on Rails, using a number of popular community extensions. I’m testing it in FireFox, using the amazing FireBug plug-in. Yup, all open source.

What’s open source?

Open source is free software. But, as the community cliche goes, it’s free as in speech, not free as in beer. Or, as the founder of the free software movement puts it, free as in freedom.

The official definition:

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free.

You use open source software everyday you’re on the web. It’s increasingly likely you’re using an open source browser like FireFox. If not, most of the web pages you visit leverage open source.

Written by Kevin Moore

This article in Globe and Mail points out that everyone is searching for ways to solve problems in one of the most difficult economic climates in generations.  The temptation for institutional traditionalists is to sink further into their bunker while (paradoxically) looking for a new way forward.  This is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this mess.

We need leaders to start looking for something more, and the author notes:

The key to finding that “something more” may well lie in “open-source problem solving” – a technique employed by Toronto executive Rob McEwen more than a decade ago to revitalize a dying gold mine at Red Lake, Ont., and turn it into one of the most productive lowest-cost gold mines in the world. (The story is well told in the book Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.)

When Mr. McEwen took over the Red Lake mine, the gold market was depressed, the mine’s costs were out of sight and its union refused to make concessions. It looked like the end was near. (Sound familiar?) But Mr. McEwen believed there was gold to be found. He gave his geologists a “stimulus package” – $10-million for further exploration – and his faith was rewarded when they brought in test results indicating rich new deposits on the Red Lake property. But getting an accurate estimate of the gold’s location and value, and proceeding with development, proved frustratingly elusive.

Then, in 1999, Mr. McEwen attended a seminar for young presidents at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He listened to the story of Linus Torvalds and how he had assembled a world-class computer system over the Internet by using the “open source” technique. At its heart was Mr. Torvalds’s willingness to reveal his computer code to the world and invite thousands of anonymous programmers to vet and improve it.

Open-source problem solving! Expose your goal, your problems and all your data on the Internet. Invite proposals from anyone. Offer clear guidelines and substantial financial incentives to induce quality responses, and act on the best proposals received.

So, Mr. McEwen offered $575,000 in prize money to participants with the best proposals for developing his mining property. To the horror of his company’s old guard, he posted all the proprietary geological data on the Red Lake property on the Internet, inviting analysis from geologists and other experts all over the world. Responses flooded in identifying target sites for development, only half of which had been identified by the company. To make a long story short, the open-source collaborative process aided Red Lake in finding and extracting more than eight million ounces of gold and in re-establishing the mine on a more prosperous footing than it had ever enjoyed before.

It is possible to build innovation and increase productivity even by sharing a company’s previously proprietary information, if it includes inviting ideas from outsiders and breaking down artificial barriers between them.  The big problems are going to take a more comprehensive approach, and one way to get us all working on solutions is to embrace open source problem solving.

You can find more about Wikinomics here.