Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/move commons

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Tag/Categorize/Rethink your initiative... with Move Commons stickers

Summary

Tag/Categorize/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 convince our audience to try using the Move Commons labels: it will help people find which initiative they want to support by helping initiatives to display the principles they are committed to.
  • We want to encourage everyone to ask him/herself key questions about the various collectives/initiatives/NGOs they follow/contact/participate to.
  • We also want to gather feedback on how to improve and make Move Commons evolve in the right direction.
  • We want to forster our team by welcoming new participants worldwide.
  • We believe in a bottom-up decentralized communication mechanism to build trust around initiatives: we want to build trust around the Move Commons initiative itself.

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

  • Anyone interested/involved in a collective and/or a non-profit
  • Anyone caring about Commons (knowledge commons, ecology commons, etc.)
  • Anyone passionate about Creative Commons principles and eager to see how they can be an inspiration for creating a labelling tool for initiatives & collectives
  • Activists who want 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
  • 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 build a sticker of the initiative/collective they come from:
    • 1) Fill-in the name of the initiative in the empty sticker badge
    • 2) Think, choose & stick your relevant MC icons in your badge
    • 3) Fill-in your initiative's tags/keywords
    • 4) Stick your final MC-badge in your drumbeat-registration-badge or in your t-shirt and each participant can advertise how his/her collective/initiative is labelled (i.e. what are its core principles). Example of final sticker
  • Test & Chat: those who have their stickers can discuss about the different MC icons with us and/or with others, double-check they are well-labelled, challenge others' to label their initiatives, find others with similar keywords/tags: it could trigger collaboration in the spot :)
  • After testing & chatting, brainstorming about possible changes/improvements of the MC labels
  • Volunteer to be part of our team

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

  • Festival participants proudly showing their fancy MC stickers all over during several days
  • Documented feedback and suggestions
  • Lots of examples of initiatives/collectives labelled with MC icons
  • Complaints/critics about initiatives not properly fitting into current MC categories
  • List of new volunteers and contributors to the project

Additional background and context

Here and there we see many initiatives promoting the Commons in different fields (open web, OER, free culture, or seeds). However, only a few have reached critical mass and are well-known by various communities, while the majority are still in their corner, ignored by the mainstream. Move Commons (MC) is a crazy idea which aims at boosting the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, and to build a network among related initiatives/collectives across the world, allowing mutual discovery. We think it can facilitate them reaching critical mass. Besides, newcomers 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 that Creative Commons (CC) uses for cultural works: we provide a user-friendly, bottom-up, labelling system for each collective/initiative, with four meaningful icons, together with a complementary set of additional tags to provide further classification (field, geographical location...). We provide a semantic layer on top of this labelling mechanism in order to allow searches such as: «which initiatives exist in Beirut that are a grassroots organisation, non-profit, delivering Creative Commons content, related to "alternative education" and "teen-agers"» (think of your favorite principles, keywords and places).

The four labels that each initiative can display 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") tells whether the initiative is volunteer-based and not profit-driven; "Reproducible" (otherwise: "Exclusive") refers to the openness 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 recommendation system of similar collectives, additional semantic web layers, geographical mapping, stats and graphs over the collected data (made available for free through APIs), network visualization, web widgets, etc.

MC is still a prototype: we are looking forward new ideas and contributions. It aims to be launched by the end of this year 2010.

Related links

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/move-commons
http://movecommons.org/
http://movecommons.org/preview/