openp2pdesign.org started at the beginning of 2007 as a personal website as it was intended to serve as a tool to publish and develop further Massimo Menichinelli’s graduation thesis, developed during 2005 and publicly presented on 6th of April 2006 at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design. It was a theoretical thesis developed studying the possibility of a role for design in giving support to communities, enabling them to act and improve their conditions. The starting point was the success of Open Source and Peer-to-Peer software, and specially the success of their community-based organizational forms.

During the following years it has grown both as a website and as a research project, with more posts and more guest authors on one side, and more lectures, workshops, publications and other projects on the other side. The goal of this website is to further improve the discussion on using design tools and processes for developing collaborative projects with and for communities.

In the current version, the website has been reorganized to show mainly research and publications. You can access an archive of the old version of the website, including its blog posts, here.