Open Space Access
NEWS
SENSORICA was awarded a small grant, 10K, to work on this project in collaboration with eVision and Living Lab Montreal. See project page on SENSORICA's website. Feel free to join!
Description
This project is about socio-economic engineering of the open ecosystem in Montreal. It is driven by OuiShare Montreal.
Open and collaborative spaces (fablabs, makerspaces, hackerspaces, co-working spaces and other open initiatives and projects) in Montreal are locked into a competitive dynamic, due to their economic condition and the resultant business model. This cripples the local open ecosystem. In essence, these spaces function on a membership model: people pay membership fees for using the space. This leads to a captive membership base. In order to generate the funds to pay the bills, these spaces create diverse lock-in mechanisms for their members, some of them positive (offering diverse benefits to their members) and some of them negative (downgrading other spaces in the eyes of their members). The goal of this project is to redesign the revenue model in order to incite collaborative dynamics, which would benefit everyone in the ecosystem.
The idea is to create an Open Space Access pass for all Montrealers. Users will buy a monthly access pass to the Montreal open space network, and the fees will be distributed to open spaces in proportion to their use.
This system will produce space use data, which will be open to the public. The access pass can be extended to different forms of currencies (seen as symbolic systems that organize flows - see Art Brock’s vision of current-see).
Coordination and facilitation
SENSORICA's main collaboration space
[NOTE: can someone find a way to embed Trello boards into Google Site pages? There is a problem with displaying content from unsecured locations. See possible solutions]