| | 1 | = GMC 2008 Workshop Proposal = |
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| | 3 | Title: Organizing the Organic Internet |
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| | 5 | In this gathering, activists will join together to examine and discuss the largest, most important and powerful human collaboration in recent history. |
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| | 7 | With over a billion people engaging in a collective activity, today's Internet is humanity's largest social movement, reflecting the kind of social |
| | 8 | interaction and collective achievement activists like us struggle for world-wide: fundamentally collaborative, democratic and based almost entirely |
| | 9 | on tools and software that has been produced collaboratively, developed by large, democratic communities and distributed freely. It is truly |
| | 10 | International and resilient against constant attempts to control its direction and curtail its positive growth. |
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| | 12 | What's more this Internet has grown in this progressive way against considerable relentless opposition by the powerful forces that don't want a |
| | 13 | "better world" for most of us. As such, it represents one of the progressive movement's most significant and important victories. |
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| | 15 | In this gathering, we seek to collaboratively write an Internet Justice Bill of Rights. Modeled after our successful workshop at the US Social Forum, we |
| | 16 | will break the audience into groups of 4 - 5 people. Each group will speak with one voice via a "scribe" who will be tasked with entering the group's |
| | 17 | proposed rights of the group into the web-based system. The system will project onto a screen for all groups to see. |
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| | 19 | Like the philosophy of free software on the Internet, there is no ownership of ideas. Once a group submits a right, any other group can edit that right. All |
| | 20 | revisions are kept, however, only the most recent edit is presented. |
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| | 22 | Each group also has the option of endorsing a right. Once a right is edited, each group has to re-endorse the new version. The rights with the most |
| | 23 | endorsers float to the top, while the rights with the least endorses sink to the bottom of the list. |
| | 24 | |
| | 25 | And finally, the catch: the system only allows 10 rights to be created. Once we reach 10, each group had to modify an existing right, thereby engaging the |
| | 26 | other groups in a dialogue. |
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| | 28 | The goal of the session is to examine, through interactive collaboration, what the Internet really means for us and our movements; how it models the society |
| | 29 | we are struggling for; how the way we've developed it serves as a model for how to develop that just society; and finally how we as progressive activists |
| | 30 | can work inside the Internet to broaden its positive impact and protect the gains we and it have made. |
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