Open Toolchain Foundation

Goal

Find new channels to create a business ecosystem to fund open-source projects.

Action items

Use the ‘open-source business ecosystem’ toolkit developed by the Danish Design Center

People and their roles

Documentation

Simply write in short bullet point style what you’re doing, what your problems, ideas, solutions, workarounds are, also please link issues created in other repos, etc so we can follow up on them. No need to order it by topic, it can be step by step / timeline style.

Using the Open-Source Ecosystem Toolkit developed by the DDC for the EU project OPENNEXT, we set out to explore different business/funding opportunities for the OTFN and explore how the toolkit can be modified for activities within the OTFN.

The exercises in the toolkit were printed and filled out:

Customer Exploration, brainstorming different personas who are/can be a part of the OTFN
Customer Mapping Timeline, categorise the different personas into Innovators, Adopters and Mainstream
Ecosystem Building, define what your personas contribute to the organisation, the infrastructure required and the value exchange.
Ecosystem Mapping, map out how the different elements from the ecosystem interact with each other and create assumptions.
Assumption Mapping, how certain/uncertain are the assumptions and how much will it effect the business?
Assumption Validation, how might we investigate our assumptions to create a compelling offering?

To test the assumption, book 10 interviews with professors/educators and pitch a course for 5000€ for one week. If 8/10 think its a good offer we proceed with designing the course material to create a proper offering.

Possible Funding Sources

oSHOP - Infrastruktur mit Open Toolchains - HTW Dresden
NLnet Förderung - critical Internet (of Making/Production)
hop on to Andrew’s IoP collective application
Community Hosting (Crowdsourcing Funding options) ggf. with Onsel
Sponsoring

Summary

Results

A first draft of rough opportunities for the OFTN to explore to gain more revenue.

Next steps

In two weeks the OTFN will gather to spend a proper session using the tool (approx 2-4h)

Open questions

There were also improvements made to the tool itself, and if it is deemed valuable, a fork of the ‘DDC Open-Source Ecosystem Toolkit’ could be made more specific for the OTFN and relevant organisations.