Open source software seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. There is such a modern tendency to make projects more open. The reasons for it are: increasing demand for speed of project launch; global competition; Internet as a medium for communication.
Actually, all Enterprise 2.0 aspects overlap with ‘openness’ issue. Personally me, I love the term ‘freeconomics’ instead of Enterprise 2.0. You can choose whatever is better for you.
The goal of this post is to investigate the requirements to a platform for open projects and open organizations.
Speaking of open source software, the most comprehensive guide is written by Karl Fogel in his book ‘Producing Open Source Software’. The questions covered are good enough to be listed here:
- Starting Open Source Software Project
- Technical Infrastructure
- Money
- Communications
- Packaging, Releasing, and Daily Development
- Managing Volunteers
- Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents
But we’re sure there are more people interested in ‘openness’ then software developers. Moreover, it’s not necessarily ‘open source’ people who need to be open.
If you’re proud of what you’re doing. If you do not separate your business life from your friends life (you do projects with friends, yeah). If you want the best talents and experts to help you in making your project. If your business is searching for investors, partners and new specialists to work with. There’s no other way but to go into the global sea of communicating with people 
There’re beautiful samples of non-software open projects done as businesses: ‘Elephants Dream’, the first open movie; Engineers Without Borders, semi-volunteers work across the globe, dmoz and many more.
So, here’re our requirements to Enterprise 2.0 technical platform:
- There are several layers of ‘visibility’ that company may maintain: inner workers, partners, investors, friends, other world. All items below may apply in different way to these layers.
- Anyone can see participating people (team) and talk to them directly
- The processes that are run in organization, are visible to whole world. ‘Visible’ may include even online video from your office. If you want
- The artifacts of your processes are visible: documents, source code, decisions. Unless you’re an CIA unit, of course.
- It’s easy to invite someone to the team using social networking mechanism
- All the layers of communication should be tracked: face-to-face, video conferencing, emails, instant messangers.
Well, I’m not a zealot of total openness. If your business idea should remain secret, let it be secret. But remember, it won’t last for long.
