Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons

Moving initiatives, collectives and NGOs towards the Commons

• Contact: Samer Hassan [samer at ourproject dot org]
  
• Team: Bastien Guerry (Paris), Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado (Madrid), Samer Hassan (Beirut)
• Host: Comunes collective
  
• Proposed 'space' or theme: unknown
  
• Status: unknown
  

Summary

Moving initiatives, collectives and NGOs towards the Commons Categorise your own initiatives/collectives/NGOs and others', rethink, ask certain key questions... through the Move Commons labels. Audience: everyone.

What do you want to achieve? (goal)

• We want to promote that people ask themselves several questions about the different collectives/initiatives/NGOs they see/contact/participate everyday.
• We would like to raise awareness about the usefulness of categorizing NGOs and initiatives using the "Move Commons" labels
• We also hope to gather feedback on how to improve and evolve MC, and invite interested people to join the initiative

Who should come? How many? For how long? (audience)

• Anyone interested in how initiatives/collectives actually work (governance, commitments, etc.)
• Anyone interested in merging Creative Commons principles, social networks, open semantic web, and icons/labels/badges
• NGO runners and volunteers; hackers and developers; Creative Commoners; social movement participants; those interested in showing a fancy sticker of their initiative
• Hoping for constant flow of participants who want their sticker when they see others around :)
• Time: 1 hours, 2 hours, more... flexible

What will they do when they get there? (activities)

• Each one can choose and fill-in a sticker of the initiative/collective they come from: 1) name of the initiative + 2) Choose your convenient MC logos/icons + 3) tags/keywords. The final badge can be sticked in your t-shirt, and each participant can advertise how his/her collective/initiative is classified (or in other words, to which principles it is committed).
• Test & Chat: Those who have their stickers, can discuss about the different MC logos with us or with others, double-check they are well-classified, challenge others' classification, and find others with similar keywords/tags: it could trigger collaboration in the spot :)
• After testing & chatting, brainstorming about possible changes/improvements of MC
• Volunteer to help out longer term (if you are interested)

What will you / they have at the end? (outputs)

• Festival participants showing proudly their fancy MC stickers all over and during several days
• Documented feedback and suggestions
• Lots of examples of initiatives/collectives classified with MC
• Complaints/critics about the initiatives which did not fit properly in MC
• List of new volunteers and contributors to the project

Additional background and context

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 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.

Related links

http://movecommons.org/
http://movecommons.org/preview/