Over the last few years I have been studying many examples of open collaboration and how they work. These examples eventually ended up being compiled into the book “Open Collaboration“.

As I tried to create a meta-view of all the open collaboration examples and methodologies, I came up with some basic principles for how you can build your own open collaboration project

1 Create a structure for participation

2 Help individual passions flower

3 Rapidly prototype, get immediate yields

4 Iterate

5 Create feedback loops

6 Anticipate each other

7 Connect people with each other

8 Listen empathically to each other

9 Facilitate diversity and synthesis

10 Allow autonomy & autonomous circles of people

3/29/10 note: I’m thinking there can another principle thats related to help individual passions flower, ‘allow autonomy’, ‘create a structure for participation’ and ‘create autonomous circles/guilds of people’. And that is to ‘open up ecological niches’. So there are many types of projects that can be done around a project, little cottage industries that people can sprout up their project in.