Open collaborative design/Why is this a good thing?
For the nascent field of open collaborative design, advanced open-source CAD software will allow anyone, not just designers and engineers, to easily create new or variant designs, choosing from a vast array of 'copylefted' components, assemblies and whole artefacts from the universal commons that they can make use of. This not only means that people can customise things for their own needs (and tastes) but should make the design process much more efficient and help avoid the huge duplication of effort that occurs in design and engineering currently.
These principles can apply to designing the simplest things that can be made by individuals, solutions for communities in the developing world, all the way up to complex large-scale systems of national or global infrastructure involving thousands of people. Because the designs are not closed or proprietary, people are encouraged to contribute knowing their involvement not only benefits themselves but anyone else might use the results of their efforts. It also means that designs will evolve far faster because of the huge amount of parallel development that is likely to occur.
Giving these designs physical form will become fast and easy due to emerging high-speed, flexible manufacturing techniques. As a result the open design ecosystem will effectively become an internet for physical items — and the impact on society is likely to be as great as the web has been with respect to information.
Economic realities discourage large corporations from being really innovative. Corporations are unlikely to risk spending money to develop anything for which there is not a proven market. However, enthusiasts and consumer/producers who make things for their own personal use are often highly innovative and willing to make very novel products. Music is a good example of this: corporate-produced pop music is repetitive and without imagination; innovative music only comes from amateurs who are doing it out of passion. Therefore an open collaborative economy allows faster and greater innovation than a profit-driven economy.
The 21st century is an era of torrential, rapid change in every area. Everything is changing now in a way that has never been seen before in history. Medicine, science, technology, art, social structures and even consciousness are taking on new forms every few years. Perhaps the single greatest requirement for the organizational structure around these things is the ability to keep up with change. Yet in many areas, we are stuck with 18th or 19th century administrative models that take far too long to change. (A democracy that polls its people only every few years is a good example.) These models were fine in the days when information could not be conveyed faster than a horse could travel, but in an age of rapid evolution and light-speed communication, they are dangerously obsolete. With open collaboration, organizations can change as rapidly as the human knowledge-base changes. This theme will be returned to again and again throughout this wiki, when considering the various areas to which open collaboration can be applied.
