Kick-off-Selfie (Foto: Maximilian Heimstädt, CC BY)

Today, we held our inaugural project meeting in Vienna. For both of us this is our first textbook project, so our day started with a more general discussion on alternative propaedeutical structures of a textbook. After having skimmed some textbooks we use in our own teaching (e.g., Exploring Strategy), we decided to follow a modular rather than a linear approach as you can see in our basic structure (see Textbook-in-Progress).

Our textbook project is inspired by the master-level course “4Open: Open Organizations and Organizing Openess” that Leonhard had developed at the University of Innsbruck. We discussed his experiences and learnings from teaching this course (two times so far) and eventually decided to write an introductory chapter on openness as a paradigm, followed by six chapters with theoretical concepts related to openness, and another six chapters on empirical phenomena.

The concepts are: Technology, Boundaries, Transparency, Participation, Inclusion, and Emergence

The phenomena are: Open Source Software, Open Science & Education, Open Collaboration, Open Innovation, Open Strategy, and Open Government

Our idea is that each chapter can be used as a standalone resource, but that the core value of our book lies in the combination of concept chapters with phenomenon chapters (e.g. using theoretical approaches to transparency to explore the phenomenon of open government). We also discussed the idea to develop training questions for each possible combination of concept and phenomenon.

Towards the end of our meeting we not only setup this blog, but also inaugurated our new Twitter account: @O2C2project