Hi Nina, thanks for posting these questions here. Since we have met personally and I know it is urgent I am going to start – with my personal views. But please anyone else, share your views as well.
###(1) The biggest challenges
There are so many challenges in the world today. Do you know the famous Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”. Well, we are living in really interesting times! No one can foresee the changes digital media will make in the world. The only thing we know, they are and will be huge. And changing the world is always … ‘interesting’ (= full of challenges).
But one of the big challenges is of course the shift to a sustainable world. Here is a copy of an answer I have given to this question before (here: http://bloglz.de/shuttleworth/ ) :
'The industrial revolution and the way it happened did harm to our planet and continues to do so. Climate change and resource depletion are two problematic trends. If we continue with business as usual – our future will be less bright.
But there is a positive idea for an alternative: Circular Economy. A Circular Economy is an economy that doesn’t know waste because everything is designed for constant reuse and recycling. And the Circular Economy works in mutual elevating symbiosis with our biosphere.
A great vision! On paper. Truth is, we don’t know how to get there. Our economy is optimized to be linear – take, make, waste. And even if we would like to change. We lack the collaboration methods for a Circular Economy.’
###(2) Motivation for OS?
I am interested in what the internet can do to rebuild our economy. The web is a “transparency machine”. And Open Source is a way to do business and collaboration using this transparency possibilities. The Open Source discourse is an open door to interesting new experiments.
###(3) Circularity?
We worked in the OSCEdays a while back on our own definition of Circular Economy. We never had a final result. But this here one of the versions from this discussion. Feel free to shorten it.
Circular Economy is an (holistic) approach to the design of artefacts, systems and collaboration with the goal to build a truly socially, ecologically and economically sustainable economy.
It replaces the linear “take-make-consume-dispose” paradigm for production and consumption with a paradigm of regenerativity (or circularity) where every output of every process can always feed in as an input for a new process (and materials return after the life-cycle of a product back to another production cycle as raw materials or nutrients), making the concept of waste obsolete.
The Circular Economy aims to work in a productive, preserving and mutually elevating synergy with the biosphere and future generations, not seeing (treating) them (?) as a source for resources or subject for depletion.
It is aware of problems like externalities, over consumption and rebound effects and tries to tackle them by taking a (holistic) systems thinking approach.
Therefore the Circular Economy favours and explores – where it makes sense to reach its goals – short feedback loops, local before global patterns, durability, compatibility, upgradability and adaptability, ease of maintenance and repair, readiness for dis- and reassembly of artefacts, general standardization and the use of standards and the choice of materials that are either technically recyclable – can always be brought back without loosing quality to a fresh technical manufacturing process – or biodegradable – can be released into the biosphere without harming it, but feeding it.
The Circular Economy prefers fair and free environments for people to live and work where they are not subject to conditions that undermine their capacity to meet their needs and rather enable them to participate freely, self-determined and creatively in the invention, building and continuance a Circular Economy.’
###(4) Young Peole & OS?
My personal goal at the moment is to get into the heads of the people and students that design products and systems. Because I think most products have to be designed and set up differently to work as Open Source (and also Circular) Products. Think about these products as platforms! Think about Open Ecosystems around them. You don’t have to invent a product. You have to invent a new ecosystem for it. This is what it makes so difficult (because you can’t learn this from most products you are surrounded by everyday).
This is the reason I created the Open Platform Design Flowchart – a simple tool to map out an Open Source Circular Product and Business Model