PROJECT DESCR. – The Open Source Circular Economy Days is a global project and community exploring Open Source methodologies for the development of sustainable circular economy that is capable of fighting climate change, resource depletion and and species extinction. The project started in 2015 with a global event. Over the past 3 years over 100 people in over 100 cities got involved. But there is a lot of work to do to progress in the future! WEBSITE: https://oscedays.org RELEASE Core of OSCEdays still is the facilitation of a global event. We change and adapt it all the time to the things we learned in the year before. This year we need to focus much more on implementation (instead of invention) of solutions and building lasting relationships to a larger part of the people that get involved. JOIN All collaboration happens online in an open forum. People can read (almost) everything there and plug in to the discussion at any given moment. The international group of people driving the project - The Board Of Stewardship - is open for new members constantly. OPEN All resources created are open. Everything is about Open Source. The whole collaboration process creating the project happens in the open. There is a long list of benefits of this openness for the project some are shared here in this blogpost: https://oscedays.org/the-way-we-work-in-the-oscedays-or-what-is-open-source/ An important one is and always was that it is much easier and quicker to onboard new people - because everything is documented. WHY OPEN I think Openness is the key to deal with all sustainability and privacy issues on this planet and therefor the only way I can see right now that might allow us to create a free and peaceful future on a planet still beautiful and worth living on. WHAT TO LEARN How to manage community better and create fruitful collaboration that makes everyone happy. And how to progress our agenda of openness for circularity and make more political and societal impact. CHALLENGES A lot. First of all: There are misconceptions about Open Source when you leave the realm of tech (which is what we try to do). People are afraid of it or have the wrong expectations or ideas. It is hard to explain then what it is about or spark inspiration so that they start working on interesting experiments. But we’ll get there. Also in the team people sometimes don’t understand that documentation also in our team is the key to make the project sustainable and including. But we’ll get there too. LOOK FOR IN A MENTOR I don’t have really a clue. But I have friends and colleagues that attended the Mozilla Open Leadership program and highly recommended it to me. I think a mentor can help me see things I don’t see right now - how to engage and support an open community better. I think I could be much better with that job! // OTHER I work on Open Source for several years now exploring it from different angles. The project above is just the biggest I am involved with so far. But please click on my website there you can find other projects that involve community and are about „Open Source Hardware Business Models“ „Hacking Cities“ and „Building Open Source Circular Objects“. Links to all of this projects can be found by clicking a bit through my personal website: http://larszimmermann.de | Thank you very much.