Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons
Tag/Classify/Rethink your initiative... with Move Commons stickers
- 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: tentative
Summary
Tag/Classify/Rethink your initiative... with Move Commons stickers Ask certain key questions to your own initiative/collective/NGO and show the principles it is committed to through a sticker badge. Audience: everyone. Plus, activists. Hosted by Comunes collective.
What do you want to achieve? (goal)
- We want to promote that people ask themselves several key questions about the approach of the different collectives/initiatives/NGOs they see/contact/participate in everyday.
- We would like to raise awareness about the advantages of categorizing initiatives and collectives 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 collectives and non-profits
- Anyone passionate about Creative Commons principles and eager to see how they can be applied to create a self-labelling tool for initiatives & collectives
- Activists wanting to advertise the principles they are committed to in an easy and clear way
- Hackers wandering how to use the semantic web for connecting and organising the jungle of initiatives
- More in general, social movement activists; NGO runners and volunteers; hackers and developers; Creative Commoners
- Anyone interested in showing a fancy sticker of their initiative :)
- Hoping for a constant flow of participants who want their sticker when they see others around and ask "from where did you get that??" :)
- Time: 1 hour, 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.