The Internet Rights Workshop

The Internet Rights Workshop is an organizing tool developed by May First/People Link to develop our skills in participatory democracy and build a consensus on the rights we should be fighting for on the Internet. The workshop is politically grounded in the ​Organic Internet.

Introduction/Summary

The Internet is humanity's most explosive and effective form of collaboration, born as humanity seeks a new era of social organizing with justice and respect. To realize this era, we need to be able to make decisions collaboratively. This workshop uses Internet technology as a collaborative tool to write an Internet Declaration of Rights. Using the Internet itself, small groups work to write, edit and endorse rights in constant, dynamic collaboration with the other groups. The result is a document for organizing and a unique and exciting experience in the chaos, creativity and power of collaborative democracy.

Workshop description

During the Internet Rights workshop, activists join together to examine and discuss one of the largest, most important and powerful human movements in recent history.

With over a billion people engaging in a collective activity, today's Internet is one of humanity's largest social movements, 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.

Even more inspiring, the Internet has grown in this progressive way against considerable relentless opposition by 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 workshop, we seek to collaboratively write an Internet Justice Bill of Rights. We break the audience into small groups of 4 - 5 people. Each small group speaks with one voice via a "scribe" who enters the group's proposed rights into a web-based system. A dynamic, projected display of the current state of the aggregate Bill of Rights is visible to all.

All ideas belong to the entire workshop: any group can edit any Right, whether they wrote the original version or not All revisions of a given Right are stored, but only the most recent edit is projected to the group as a whole. The group which creates a new version of a right automatically endorses that right, but otherwise holds no special connection to it.

Each group also has the ability to endorse any Right that seems worthy. When a Right is edited, existing endorsements are cleared; each group needs to decide if they want to endorse the new version. Rights with more endorsers float to the top of the projected list, while the rights with fewer endorsers sink to the bottom.

To keep the Bill of Rights to a manageable, concise size, only 10 rights can exist at a given time. If 10 rights already exist, the only way to add a new idea to the Bill is to edit an existing right, which requires engaging other groups in a dialog to ensure an adequate number of re-endorsements.

Goals

The goal of the session is to examine, through interactive collaboration:

• democratic collaboration and decision-making;
• 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

The software the runs the workshop is ​free software, and is available on this site.

People and equipment

The workshop requires:

• one laptop per break out group
• a wireless router
• a computer and a projector

Internet access is not required.

Past workshops

• ​US Social Forum, June 2007, Atlanta, GA
• ​Grassroots Media Conference, March 2008, New York, NY
• ​Allied Media Conference, June 2008, Detroit, MI

Related projects

The ​2008 Making the future of the Internet economy work for citizens, consumers and workers conference in Seoul jointly wrote a ​Civil Society Declaration to the OECD 2008 Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy.

The ​Alliance for Progressive Communications has published a ​Internet Rights Charter.