I’m Sam - we don’t really have ‘titles’ in the organisation, except for maybe our Country Connectors.
My role is mostly helping people out with the open source aspect, with documentation, working on our methodology and the technical infrastructure. I’m one of 10(?) people on the Board of Stewardship.
I’ll give my perspective on question 2:
Necessity
We don’t have funding or institutional backing, so even if we wanted to, we just don’t have the resources to organise one single large-scale conference or to manage multiple events.
We can’t afford to spend our time making publicity material and subpages for local events, organising sponsorship etc. It is much more effective to provide local organizers with the resources and guidelines to do it themselves, and it’s also really fun to see what people do!
@OTTILIE created a modular system for this year’s design, and provided people with the files, some guidelines, and the permission (CC-BY license) to remix it.
Just look at the results!
It’s also more resilient this way.
If something happens to the initial organizers, or they decide to leave and work on something else, the network can adapt and continue.
Our working processes are pretty well documented, and responsibility, knowledge and power is gradually being distributed through the network, though we can always do better.
We may have less control of the brand and the people involved than, for example, the C2C Institute has over Cradle to Cradle™, but it’s not the name that matters, it’s the goal and the methodology.
Maybe one day, when we have an open source circular economy, we won’t call it an ‘open source circular economy’.
And that’s fine by us. Actually, if you have any better suggestions, please let us know!
a Global movement
Our goal with the OSCEdays event is not just to promote an idea, but to connect people who are doing similar things around the world, give them a framework, an effective methodology, make their work visible and build collaboration.
The initial group that kicked this off was based in Germany, the UK and France, but we wanted to build a global network. We cannot hope to know how to build a community around the OSCE idea in Shenzhen, or Togo, or Bogotá, so we shouldn’t force them to do things our way.
As an example, we had a discussion about whether people could charge money for tickets to OSCE events: we quickly realised that different cultures would have different expectations of what a paid event signifies in terms of quality and commitment, and there would also be different abilities to pay for tickets.
So each local organiser can make that decision for themselves - the wider network can share their thoughts and experiences, but only the local organizer knows what’s best for their situation.
We just share what works for us, and invite others to come up with improvements.
The main thing that we ask is that they share their ideas and results openly for others to learn from - it doesn’t have to be on our website, a link elsewhere will do.
Ethos
One of the initiators of OSCEdays, @unteem, sometimes talks about trying to be ‘straight in my shoes’ which is when you’re practising what you preach, living according to your principles.
Our principles are that you can’t expect to know who may have a solution or idea for your particular problem - if we were to invite only people who we picked out as ‘relevant’ to OSCE, then we would miss people.
If we required that local events had some level of institutionality, or that they could pay a fee, that would exclude many people who could potentially unlock all sorts of interesting ideas and collaborations.
It also wouldn’t fit with our open source ideals if we tried to do everything ourselves, or didn’t give people permission to build on our work.
It also wouldn’t make much sense to organise an event on sustainability and then fly all the participants halfway around the world!