Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons: Difference between revisions

Here and there we see small initiatives promoting the Commons in different fields (open web, OER, free culture, or seeds). However, only a few have reached critical mass and thus can be well-known by different communities, while the majority are still in their corner, ignored by the mainstream. Move Commons (MC) is a weird idea which aims to boost the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, and to "draw" the network among related initiatives/collectives across the world, allowing mutual discovery and facilitating the reach of critical mass for each field. Besides, any newcomer could easily understand the collective approach in their website, and/or discover collectives matching their field/location/interests in [http://movecommons.org movecommons.org].

MC follows the same mechanics as Creative Commons (CC) tags cultural works, providing a standard, user-friendly, bottom-up, self-labelling system for each collective/initiative, with four meaningful labels/icons, together with a complementary set of tags (keywords) and additional information to provide further classification (web address, geographical location...). Everything supported by a semantic web layer to allow searches such as, for instance: «which initiatives exist in Beirut that are a Grassroots organisation, Non-Profit, using Creative Commons, related to "alternative education" and "teen-agers"» (or other principles, keywords and places). The four principles/icons that each initiative can show and advertise that they are committed to are: Non-Profit/For-Profit; Reproducible/Exclusive; Grassroots/Representative; Reinforcing the Commons/Other Aims.

What we mean by the four principles: "Non-Profit" (otherwise: "For-Profit") recognizes if the initiative is volunteer-based and not profit-driven; "Reproducible" (otherwise: "Exclusive") refers to openness (using CC) and transparency (sharing their procedures to facilitate replication); "Grassroots" (otherwise: "Representative") indicates if the collective has a horizontal structure; "Reinforcing the Commons" (otherwise "Other Aims") highlights those that protects/expands/empower The Commons.

MC expects to provide a free platform where multiple extensions can be implemented, such as a recommender system of similar collectives, additional semantic web layers, geographical mapping, stats and graphs over the open data, network visualisation, web widgets, etc.

MC is still a prototype, and thus we are very open to others' ideas and contributions. It aims to be launched by the end of this year 2010.