GMC 2008 Workshop Proposal

Proposal

Title: Organizing the Organic Internet

In this gathering, activists will join together to examine and discuss the largest, most important and powerful human collaboration in recent history.

With over a billion people engaging in a collective activity, today's Internet is humanity's largest social movement, reflecting the kind of social interaction and collective achievement activists like us struggle for world-wide: fundamentally collaborative, democratic and based almost entirely on tools and software that has been produced collaboratively, developed by large, democratic communities and distributed freely. It is truly International and resilient against constant attempts to control its direction and curtail its positive growth.

What's more this Internet has grown in this progressive way against considerable relentless opposition by the powerful forces that don't want a "better world" for most of us. As such, it represents one of the progressive movement's most significant and important victories.

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 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 proposed rights of the group into the web-based system. The system will project onto a screen for all groups to see.

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 revisions are kept, however, only the most recent edit is presented.

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 endorsers float to the top, while the rights with the least endorses sink to the bottom of the list.

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 other groups in a dialogue.

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 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 can work inside the Internet to broaden its positive impact and protect the gains we and it have made.

Software

Currently, what we have written is published on ​my blog. It should probably be added to our svn repository.