Open Source Blog

“The board of the Open Source Initiative has largely concluded that we have reached a point of organizational and contextual maturity. Namely, that open source has been defined, and a relatively large constituency of people have accepted that definition. So far, so good. What we have not done, however, is to make the OSI representative of that constituency,” writes Tiemann.

“We believe that one way to address this is to transform ourselves into some kind of membership (or other representative) organization. But what, precisely, should be the goal? And what should be the process? And how should it be done? And how can we protect ourselves if 50,000 people who want to destroy open source decide they want to join and vote us into the ground?”

In order to come up with a solution, Tiemann is to host two sessions at the forthcoming O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

“The first session will be a primer on Design Thinking: what it is, how to do it, what not to do, some examples of successful design thinking. The second session will be the application of design thinking to the following problem: How Should The OSI Transition to a Membership Organization?”

If you don’t think that the OSI should transition to a membership organization, the design thinking approach means that there will be the opportunity to change the problem, however.

“In my experience, 80% of all design thinking sessions I've attended result in a redefinition of the problem statement because in the process, we realized that we started off trying to solve the wrong problem. This is why problem definition is a part of the process, not an input to the process,” adds Tiemann.