These are non-constraining, open-ended, and adaptable principles for an architecture of participation that can be used by any group of people, NGOs or urban planners interested in activating the collective intelligence of a community. Airoots
We “hacked” these 12 principles from Eric S. Raymond’s groundbreaking essay of the organizational principles behind the development of Linux by a global community of programmers (The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2001). We simplified them and tentatively adapted them to the field of urban planning. Eric S. Raymond himself formalized the principles that Linus Torvald followed with the success that is now legendary. Eric S. Raymond also successfully tested these principles for the development of “fetchmail”, an email application.

These principles are still at a nascent stage and we hope that with time and practice they will get defined better. After all, we are still pretty much walking in the dark as far as participatory planning is concerned, so it might be wiser to abstain from organizing these principles too tightly. People should adapt them according to their own objectives, context and experience. We encourage everyone to propose new versions of these principles on this blog or elsewhere.