The Open Source Platform Federation Business Model

This chapter first introduces the potential for creating alternative business models in the digital collaborative economy, then presents how annotated portfolios can be used to enable a founder’s wishes and desires for their emerging business to be articulated as a business model design. The chapter then presents two case studies of emergent micro-businesses who wish to use the platform economy to create a networked business model for more than financial benefit. Using annotated portfolio techniques as a framework to analyse ethnographic data gathered from engagement with each founder then enables their wishes and desires to be articulated as business models designs, rooted in their knowledge and experience in a particular domain. The common factors and power-balances in the case study business model designs are then abstracted as the Open Source Platform Federation business model.