Open Source Recipes to Make Social Innovations More Shareable

"How can we share and transfer sustainable social practices across communities? Increasingly, we see individuals and communities experimenting with innovative sustainable practices, pioneering new ways to communicate, think, work, live, and share together. In that context the question arises as to how best practices can be shared across communities. To facilitate knowledge sharing of the best sustainable practices, the concept of 'source code of a project' was proposed by Thanh Nghiem here as a way to apply the open source model to social innovation. In computer science, a source code is a collection of written instructions that can be executed by a computer to run a piece of software. Likewise, the source code of a social practice or project is a set of instructions that can be executed by a user in order to implement a practice or project — similar to the principles for a culinary recipe, where a set of instructions are given in order to facilitate the replication of a cooked dish. From that initial idea, a network of organizations and individuals from France have been working on networking and scaling social innovations using the concept of open source innovation as an intellectual framework ..."