Developing the text – Types of Challenges to get Inspired

[Lars2i]

(edit)
Hi, we should have a text to inspire people for their challenges. Check out this draft:

---

How can different challenges be structured?

###DOCUMENTATION JAM
You’ve already created a good technical solution or ‘best practice’ but it is not well-documented (open sourced) yet?
Sit down and start the documentation. Invite people to test your documentation, give feedback, suggest good tools or structure, or provide other help with design, language or anything else.
Tag: doc-jam

###BRAINSTORMING/KICK-OFF DISCUSSION
Do you have an interesting, unexplored question or problem, that hasn’t even been discussed? Are you looking for new ideas or perspectives?
Sit down with others and start a discussion. “What can we do to …” “How could open source help …” “How might we…” could be good beginnings for a title. The outcome of the challenge could simply be further questions for investigation, or it might be an idea or even fully-fledged action plans or models to start working on.
Tag: discussion

###PROTOTYPING
Do you already have a great idea for a hardware or software solution? Start (or continue) prototyping! Show people what you are doing, and invite others to join you.
Tag: prototyping

###BUILDING & IMPLEMENTATION
If there is already a good practice, technical solution or action plan developed, the challenge might be to implement it in a local neighbourhood, factory, community or project. Great, lets do it! This could also be something like a Jam, Sprint or Action-Day designed to push an existing project further, to create more content for it, build more copies of it or something similar. Beta-testing is another example.
Tag: implementation

###PLAYING & RESEARCHING
Creativity is jumping outside the box! Many challenges will be very unusual or different from the ones above. Well, the ‘play’ tag is for you. It might be research or experimentation, for art or protest, for laziness or a clever hack. It might just be to create a surprising outcome.
Tag: play, research & art
_

These are some general ideas for challenge structures. Do you have more? Post it in the thread.

Update: Link to the discussion about challenge-meta-tags in platform development.

[sophia]

Another source of inspiration on how challenges may look: https://openideo.com/challenge

[Alice_audrey]

This seems an interesting suggestion toward the methodology. I would just like to raise one issue and see how the rest of the community feels about it.

So to me personally it feels that through the language OSCEdays have a really strong focus on “technical” solutions and “technology”.

And I would like to raise the question if this is really intentional?

Because I personally do feel that it is important to be open to solutions and innovations which may not in the first place be centered around technology but may be a “service” innovation, a “supply chain” innovation, “logistics” innovation or “design” innovation. In a second step technology or specifically software platforms may play a pretty crucial role but maybe first in the implementation.

Do you also feel it is relevant to reflect that stronger in the text and how could we do that?

[cameralibre]

Yes, I think you have a point - it’s not the intention to emphasise technology in an ‘electronics and software’ sense, but the language could be interpreted that way. At this stage, for example in the text above, the term ‘best practice’ is used to describe service, supply-chain, logistics or design innovation, but perhaps it isn’t explicit enough.

@Lars2i, I edited your text for spelling and grammar, but I wasn’t sure what you meant by ‘for laziness’? Also, I think it’s more natural to say ‘post it in the thread’ or ‘post it in this thread’ rather than ‘post it down in the thread’.

[sophia]

Thanks for this nice overview of inspirations, Lars! I agree to Alice that we could include non-technical challenges a bit more (e.g. prototyping of ideas such as a standard prototype). And maybe we could also change the order: brainstorming, playing and researching first… then prototyping and implementation… and last documentation…?

[Lars2i]

Hi,

Yes, I think you are right right.

But remebmer: the Methodology above is about meta-structure of challenges.

And then there are tags for the content like “3dprinting” “LCA” or the suggested “service” “logistics” “supply chain” “design”

How to make this stronger in the text? We could add something like this: saying that there is also a variety of content-tags available.

I will recreate the text later today and post the new version here in the thread so we can have a look at it together

& yes, I will change the order in the new version

[sharmarval]

@sophia this is really nice! And the formatting/layout is clear and accessible. Think the visuals make a big difference.

[Lars2i]

Hi, I changed the topic title to not confuse newcomers as the final topic should be simple and instructional. I will post the final version we agreed on in the new topic.

New draft will follow soon.

[Lars2i]

New Draft:

---

How can different challenges be structured?

###BRAINSTORMING/KICK-OFF DISCUSSION
Do you have an interesting, unexplored question or problem for example around a “service” innovation, a “supply chain” innovation, “logistics” innovation, a „communication“ innovation or a „hardware“, „software“ or „design“ innovation, that hasn’t even been discussed? Any good action starts with an idea or discussion. Sit down and start. The goal could be to find further questions for investiagion, or an idea, or even fully-fledged action plan or model to start working on.
Tag: discussion

###PROTOTYPING
Do you already have a great idea for a service, system, software or hardware solution? Start (or continue) prototyping! Use the platform to show people what you are doing, ask for help and invite them to join you.
Tag: prototyping

###BUILDING & IMPLEMENTATION
If there is already a good practice, solution or plan developed, the challenge might be to implement it, for example in a local neighbourhood, factory, project or community. It could be a Jam, Sprint or Action-Day pushing an existing project further, build more content for it, beta-test it, or if it is hardware, build more copies of it, repair it or something similar.
Tag: implementation

###PLAYING & RESEARCHING
Creativity is jumping outside the box! Many challenges will be very unusual or different from the ones above. Well, the ‘play’ tag is for you. It might be research or experimentation, for art or protest, for laziness or a clever hack. It might just be to create a surprising outcome.
Tag: play, research & art

###DOCUMENTATION JAM
You’ve already created a good technical solution or ‘best practice’ but it is not well-documented (open sourced) yet? Sit down and start the documentation. Invite people to test your documentation, give feedback, suggest good tools or structure, or provide other help with design, language or anything else. Communication is key.
Tag: doc-jam

_
These are some general ideas for challenge meta-structures and their tags. Note that there is a variety of tags available for the content of challenges like „textiles“, „3dprinting“, „packaging“, „materials“ and many more.

Do you have more ideas for challenges meta-structures? Post it in the thread.
_

[unteem]

I aslo agree on the non-technical challenges. With Future of Waste, we also worked on categories for challenges, this is the draft of what we thought => FoW challenges. Maybe we can take some ideas.

I would add a category like: Close the loop. For projects that are not necessarly about circular economy but want to be.

[Lars2i]

To be honest, I don’t find the FOW categories very clear. I can easily think of a project that fits into all of the categories, and none. Pretty fuzzy.

The goal of the text above is to create an idea in peoples heads, what to do in a challenge – discussing, or building, or implementing. It does not say anything about what do build, discuss or implement. It is not about content.

Setting categories is always difficult. Especially in a creative environment that is about expanding boarders. More often the categories end up to confuse more then to inspire. Something I would like to avoid. Discuss, build, implement, document & the “rest” category play – they are all instructive and most importantly ! don’t require any knowledge about OS or CE.

“Closing Loops” or “Experience Customzing” for example – (1) people need to know what that is “customizing” – here you lose already the first pile of people, send them out to be confused – and (2) the concepts are extremely vague “closing loops” or “customizing” – those are fuzzy and pretty unprecise concepts in itself for almost all people – and there you loose almost all of the rest. People are busy in their head figuring out, what this means and if they fit and what this category will say about/do to their work instead of thinking about what to do now and how to frame their particular individual idea.

Most people that have invented a creative project experience this: The more you think about the project, the more you see in it and the more it looks like a solution “for everyting”, you see a meaning and implications for a growing number of things. That is part of the fun, and a core of creativity. But that is also, what makes categories and creative processes a problematic couple.

[Lars2i]

Hi, relocated this thread to the “Platform Development” category to not confuse newcomers to the platform - we will invite local organizers soon. I think this dicussion should have been in that category to begin with.

I hope it is ok. It is still a linked topic from the final text. So the connection is not broke.