Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons
Moving initiatives, collectives and NGOs towards the Commons
- Contact: Samer Hassan [samer at ourproject dot org]
- Team: Comunes Association: Bastien Guerry, Vicente J. Ruiz, Samer Hassan
- Proposed 'space' or theme: unknown
- Status: unknown
Summary
Moving initiatives, collectives and NGOs towards the Commons Learn how to rethink about initiatives/collectives/NGOs, ask certain key questions, and categorise them using 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 wanting to promote the Commons and alternative ways of organisation/production among non-geek communities
- Anyone interested in overlapping initiative networks, open semantic web, Creative Commons principles and icons/labels
- Geeks and non-geeks alike: NGO runners and volunteers; hackers and developers; Creative Commoners; social movement participants; anyone interested in
- Hoping for constant flow of participants
- Time: 1 hours, 2 hours... 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: name of the initiative (to be filled-in) + MC logos/icons (to be chosen) + tags/keywords (to be filled-in). The sticker sticks in the acreditation/t-shirt, and each one can advertise how his/her collective/initiative is classified.
- 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 in small groups 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)
- Documented feedback and suggestions
- Lots of examples of initiatives/collectives classified with MC
- Complaints/critics about initiatives which did not fit properly in MC
- Festival participants showing proudly their MC stickers all over and during several days
- 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. A preview in http://movecommons.org/preview
MC is in alfa stage of development and aims to be launched by the end of this year 2010.