Facilitator: Yanick
Notetaker: Analia
Summary
The main topics suggested to talk about where related to three main topics. Firstly, how ethics in small business in open source and its relation with openss, free cost and transparency. Secondly, how can we build sustainable bussiness and which are the codes of conduct to take into consideration as well as the barriers that arise when starting a business and thridly, we realised that it would be interesting to take action into a mapping of existing models and for that we suggest the creation of a questionnaire to better understand the state of the art.
Notes
There is a lack of collaboration between econoimcs actors in Africa. Need of strong argument to collaborate because sometimes they decide not to collaborate because they could be a commercial gain. Despite this specific situation, amog GOSH we need to clarify first, as a community: what is the mean of open when we try to build business on openess. How we explain that perhaps my technology is open but not my busienss?
We should think that there could be different kind of openess or different levels of it. Which are those types or leveles?
Another questions that arises whas there do exist open source business models or any kind of templates related to OH and business?
List of concret propostions and quetions to be addressed by the communiy.
- Resources of people that have open business models
- Reflect on the issue related to feel confotable making close business with open technologies
- Problem when not feeding back to the community when doing business with OH
- Reflect on how ethics plays in this game?
- Should be ask the community to have clear standards about businessa and OH?
- Licences
Another important issues that were discussed where related to consider the global south context as a whole network, because of the shared problems and social challengues.
Additionally, the creation of a code of conduct within the community AND related to doing business with OH would enhance the ethical aspects of the business activity. It should be a difference between the openness of operation an openess of technology. Recognition should not be enforced but celebration, since it arised for tue use of public domain source. Again, enforcement is not mandatory but celebrated when people is sharing
It would be great to know more about case studies to identify business models and sucessful models (Anna volunteer to collaborate),also to see if they are willing to contact them and to see the different taxonomies (we can include non profit cases) We wil make a questionnaire to better understand the current state of the art of open source technology business.
What are the barriers to start a OH business:
- Not knowing what is there
- Not knowing what design exits that could be relevant in the context
- Documentation standars. You find sth that is really good but you do not understand.
- Replication
- They arrived only to be prototype but not to product development
- Access to funding
- Access to materials
- Access to expertise, skills levels.
- how to know the rules, best choices
- Misinformation about the sucessfull open source histories.
- Record about failures and challenges from those that did business before
- Regulations, licensing. Importance But depending on the context, should we look at regulation first?