Move Commons

Filed on 13 / 12 / 2011
Closed
Received
£ 911
Minimum
£ 5,962
Optimum
£ 8,281
58 Co-financiers
Channel
  • Contributing £ 4

    Thanks environmentalist!

    You have our gratitude, the appearance in the annual donors list, and the acknowledgement of your environmentalism, as we won't send you the stickers you deserve for not harming the environment.

    > 37 Co-financiers
  • Contributing £ 17

    Thanks for not being consumerist!

    All of the above + gratitude for not being consumerist, as we won't send you neither the stickers nor the CDs for not filling your house with marketing merchandise that you would forget in a few days.

    > 04 Co-financiers
  • Contributing £ 83

    Customized assistance in order to satisfy the Move Commons categories

    All of the above + Acknowledging your social involvement, we'll provide you with remote personalized assistance, so your social/cultural/political/creative/software project/collective/organization fully satisfies the four categories of Move Commons.

    > 00 Co-financiers
  • Contributing £ 414

    Assistance to improve the running of your collective

    All of the above + As we know that building alternatives is not easy, we'll help you with face-to-face personal assistance to improve how does your collective/project/organization works (or will work). We'll advise you in topics such as: internal organization, social media, fundraising, community management, use of free software and horizontality.

    > 00 Co-financiers
  • Contributing £ 828

    First supporters & special consultancy

    All of the above + Because of your great support, your organization will become one of the first ones to use, defend and appear in the Move Commons platform. Besides, through meetings we'll advice you on the best ways to include Move Commons in each of your initiatives/projects, making sure they are easily found. Finally, we'll support you in a personalized strategy of diffusion.

    > 00 Co-financiers

About this project

Needs Task Minimum Optimum
Development of the platform
Continue with the development of the platform Move Commons (with subcategories and optional icons), maximizing usability and a modular semantic code.
£ 2,981
Construction of the search engine
Construction of the semantic search engine for the web platform of the project.
£ 1,987
Graphic design and visual materials
Design of icons, graphical explanations and other descriptive visual materials.
£ 994
Texts & Manuals
Preparing (in Spanish & English, at least) descriptive texts and manuals with advices and resouces to aid collectives in each category (icon).
£ 994
Testing
Testing of the developed platform, tracking of possible problems, testing of scalability and capacity for massive use.
£ 331
Needs Infrastructure Minimum Optimum
Band-width
Band-width of the internet connection needed in a year to provide an appropriate service
£ 994
Total £ 5,962 £ 8,281
Necessary
Supplemental

General information

How many people do you know who would love to help somewhere but do not find where? How many small collectives but with amazing ideas are ignored by society? Move Commons is a simple webtool that allows social initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare the principles they are based on.

Through these icons, the visitors of a web will be able to understand if the initiative is nonprofit, if it shares its work, or if the decision-making is horizontal.

Besides, by showing the icons of Move Commons, the initiatives allow special search-engines to find them easily, grouping them with similar ones and letting potential volunteers to find them easily.

Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign

Move Commons is a tool for initiatives, collectives, NGOs and social movements to declare the basic principles they are committed to. It follows the same mechanics that Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) uses when "labelling" the cultural works, but Move Commons "labels" social initiatives. Thus, it provides a user-friendly, bottom-up, self-labelling system for each collective/initiative, with four icons, together with some descriptive keywords.

Everything is supported by semantic code (that computers can read) to allow searches such as: «which initiatives exist in Beirut that are a grassroots organisation, non-profit, delivering Creative Commons contents, related to "alternative education" and "teen-agers"» (think of your favorite principles, keywords and places).

The four principles/icons that each initiative can show are: "Non-Profit" (otherwise: "For-Profit"); "Reproducible" (otherwise: "Exclusive"); "Grassroots" (otherwise: "Representative"); "Reinforcing the Commons" (otherwise "Other Aims"). You can see them in the demo http://movecommons.org/preview/

Why this is important

Here and there we see many social initiatives promoting the Commons in different fields. However, only a few have reached critical mass and are well-known by a large community, while the majority are still marginalized and ignored by the mainstream.

On the other hand, frequently we know about people that would love to help in a social initiative but don't know where. This is mainly because from outside it's very difficult to have a global view of the existing initiatives in a field. Usually, those volunteers just turn to the large NGOs that have budget for advertisements. It's much more difficult to find the small local initiatives without resources.

Move Commons aims at boosting the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, "drawing" the network among related initiatives/collectives across the world, allowing mutual discovery and facilitating to reach critical mass. Besides, any volunteer could easily understand the collective approach, and discover other collectives in their location matching their interests.

More implications of this project in http://movecommons.org/implications

Move Commons is oriented towards the following communities: collectives, social movements, NGOs, cooperatives, organizations, activists, volunteers, alternatives to the mainstream models, social/cultural/political/creative/software projects.

Goals of the crowdfunding campaign

Nowadays there is a small prototype in http://movecommons.org/preview/ but the idea goes beyond that. Move Commons aims to:

Provide a simple tools that allows to organize the jungle of collectives, NGOs and social movements, while maximizing their visibility.

Facilitate a system of self-labelling, standardized, usable, bottom-up, for each initiative, using icons and descriptive keywords.

Promote that social collectives re-think themselves, asking questions about how to fulfill this or that category (icon), and helping them evolve with guidelines and resources for each of the categories.

Provide a semantic search-engine that allows to perform complex searches.

Build a series of widgets so the insertion of icons+code is really easy.

Provide a free/libre platform where multiple extensions can be implemented, such a geographical mapping of initiatives, a recommender of similar initiatives, stats and graphs on the open data, visualization of the collective networks, etc.

Team and experience

Since 2002, the Comunes collective has been working on different initiatives and digital projects related to the Commons, focusing on facilitating the work of the social collectives and activists through the construction of free/libre webtools and resources.

Some of our projects are: 1) http://ourproject.org: free/libre web services for social projects, nowadays with around 1,000 projects from multiple fields and 1,500,000 monthly visits; 2) Kune, collaborative social network for the creation of free projects, under development: http://kune.ourproject.org; 3) Move Commons, webtool described here; and others listed in the web of the collective http://comunes.org

For more information about Move Commons:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/movecommons
Identica: https://identi.ca/movecommons
Web: http://movecommons.org

Social commitment