I am in a train to Helsinki. Again. But let’s start with what I wrote a week ago:

I am in a train to Helsinki heading for a what seems to be a very interesting two weekend workshop organized by Pixelache, it’s about Open P2P Design. I met Massimo shortly at the OKCon in Berlin this past June/July and he told me about this workshop. Many times when I travel abroad I hear about Pixelache, Alt Party or Assembly, but this is the first time I participate in meetings organized by the Helsinki visual school. Well, besides Open Data stuff in fact.

I don’t know much what to expect, I know very little about Open P2P Design. But I like it all, open is cool, P2P is the future, and Design is beautiful. So expectations are high. I am not aware that any of my friends would be joining the sessions, so it’s also exciting to meet new people.

After doing a little a research, I come across following questions in Massimo’s presentation about Open P2P Design:

How can we design projects for a locality and its community?
How can we enable the participation of a community in the design process?

I find these questions very triggering. Because I think what we really need is more collaboration locally. And that is the hardest part. It’s easy to go and travel and meet cool people, but when it’s time to make a difference at your home it can be very hard. The most local is the most systemic says Peter Senge. Local is the only thing we have. Local is our playground. How can we bring people together and make things happen?

I am going to participate in these workshops with Mental Models Game in my mind. The idea is to build it with Open Source / free software philosophy. I am not sure though what it means in practice. But just recently I can say that we’ve got the open hardware side on it, too. In practice, our friends Theresia and Florian have found carpenters in Germany to build a game for them. Let’s see when we get instructables online either from our prototype made by Janne, or the ones made in Germany.

So, now it’s time for the second weekend of the course. It’s been fun, I have learnt in theory and practice (a little) how the open source projects are being managed. How to work with revision control systems and software. I think all this will be useful for the future where I see us collaborating more and more globally. Working on a same project but based in different locations.

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