Overview: A Proposal

The converging crises in the major capitalist economies, the precarious state of the world environment, the political crisis in government in so many of the world's countries and the usurpation of government authority by international banks and committess have brought humanity to a point of urgency and the Internet, a community of more than 1.4 billion people world-wide, is one of its responses. When all else fails, human beings come together to communicate and figure out how to survive. That's what's happening today with the Internet.

Humanity's crisis demands greater communication and collaboration among the world's people. And humanity has been forging ahead in doing that with world-wide efforts like the World Social Forum and the Climate Control movement and, of course, the Internet.

The Internet is humanity's way of facilitating the communication necessary to make all this collaboration possible.

At the same time, the global crisis against which we're mobilibizing depletes the resources required to build gatherings of large numbers of people. They are too large to put on, too expensive to get to and not capable of broadening the number of poor people attending. If we are going to ensure the progressive movements' continued collaboration world-wide, we are going to have to use the Internet and that is one reason why humanity invented it.

In that context, the role of technologists becomes critically and centrally important. Techies are the leaders of the Internet because we run its technology and lead the work on its software. Progressive techies have a very special role to play: our political perspective prioritizes the use of the Internet and development of its software for organizing (rather than merely commerce); our commitment to Free and Open Source Software makes us central to a struggle that is fundamental to the Internet's future; the fierce opposition we have long had to controlling and interventionist government policies help assure the Internet's essential independence and freedom; and our politics gives the progressive movement a leadership position within the Internet.

The impact of our work, and the importance of the Internet, has never been clearer. It has drawn together all kinds of organizations (the Association for Progressive Communications, for example) and has driven the World Social Forum to its current situation. And, as the progressive movement has outgrown the Forum structure, an expanded format to the Forum process, first used at the Belem, Brazil WSF, is emerging. At Belem, organizers from all corners of the globe were encouraged to participate in the Belem Forum from their local communities via Internet media.

Simultaneously, a new concept in collaboration on-line became popular: used all over the United States and at various world and localized Social Forums. The "Collaborative Democracy Workshop" was first used at the first United States Social Forum in 2007 where technologists collaboratively developed a progressive approach to maintaining the Internet as a secure and open platform for movement building.

These two processes have merged into what is known as a Techie Congress, an open virtual space led by and involving progressive technologists. The ultimate goal of the Techie Congress is to discuss and establish some principles about progressive techies responsibilities toward our movement, our rights in relationship to that movement and the social and political rights of all Internet users.

Because of the traditional isolation techies have had within the movement (and from each other), this type of gathering has been very infrequent and an international movement of these gatherings is unprecedented.

Principles:

Create accountability: Respond directly to the causes of global crisis enabling fully collaborative and democratic problem-solving in response to late-capitalism crisis. The format and nature of social forum versus civil responsibility. Fortify the movement in the face of deepening crisis, severe rationing of resources, and reducing costs for communications and convergences.

Vision & Strategy: To develop an international progressive techie "organization" to serve as a resource for the entire progressive movement internationally. To dramatically increase the presence of women in the technie community. To stress the leadership of the global south.

Action Approach: An international convergence of technologists creates a network of access. The Techie Congress is an ongoing project, which builds sustainable open virtual space. The building process begins with core activists able to mobilize networks of techies all over the world. Dovetailing with open, simultaneous convergences of technologists, the growing network aims to empower politically-engaged technologists to embrace principles for implementing open virtual space. While growing the scope of the techie congress, focus is given to increasing access to technology in as many regions of the world as possible. Increased access carried out by empowered community leaders enables for an open online convergence with the highest degree of democracy ever seen in humanity's history.

The tools developed for the Techie Congress will be free, open, and available for application in all social forum, and forum-like events. While growing our own network and building our campaign, we will be enabling, technologically, for similar movements to use our tools to connect activists and communities across the globe.

Open weekly meetings are being held between Social Forum activists to plan Principles & Goals, Vision & Strategy, and building open Tools for expanded formats. A year's campaign will begin with the First Congress in Paris for early sponsorship and capacity building of the project. The first major, global Forum-endorsed event will then be held at the Social Forum of Alternatives in Mexico, City. The Techie Congress of the US Social Forum will be a major event centered in Detroit, Michigan. A few more events will be scheduled in 2010 with the current stage's final event at the 2011 WSF in Dakar, Senegal. Each event will grow stronger networks of progressive technologists globally with one another and locally between techies and the movement.

Movement Building, Sustainability, & Ongoing Vision: After this initial campaign, next year will bring the focus to empowering the Techie Congress network to lead and stage an international movement towards problem-solving global issues on various scales with simultaneous collaborative moments.

First Convergence, Paris Meeting (April 2-3, 2010)

Techie Congress

April 2, 2010 -- Paris, France

A We should be developing open source, decentralized and non-hierarchical systems to diffuse our messages simultaneously to many people, proposing them concrete ways to participate B We should promote access to the internet, including the ability to copy, modify and redistribute all software and all information, as a basic human right. Defend it as a common space and prevent its privatization.

C Server administration: we should use a centralized organization only as a starting point and then give rights to differents groups developing a horizontal web of trust and give a toolkit that people could deploy and use where and as they want

D Some advocacy groups developped crowd sourcing tools to collect and publish informations, should we take a look at that and mutualise some developpement

E Strategy for efficient technology use in social movements: Promote a good quality dialogue between people knowing the culture needs and practices of participants in movements and techies with social/political vision

F Activist should develop a set of political principles to guide the development of technology for every project. L'Activiste devrait développer un ensemble de principes politiques pour guider le développement de technologie pour chaque projet.

G Techies should be able to fully participate in all levels of decision making for campaigns or movements in which they are providing their labor. Techies Il devrait être capable à pleinement participer à tous les niveaux de la décision que fait pour des campagnes ou des mouvements en lequel sont en train de fournir son travail.

H We should work toward ways to close the socio-economic barriers to technological access and understanding and reflexively examine places where we contribute to those barriers.

I Build on existing tools and practices that are developed from organisations who are building alternatives within the social movements Construire sur des outils et des pratiques existents qui sont développées d'organisations que sont en train de bâtir alternatives dans le mouvements sociaux

J stimulate movements to organize collective discussion about their use of internet and how to increase visibility and visioning of online possibilities for the movement agenda. This strategy is to change the way we relate to the internet as a space, rather than a collection of tools approached individually.

USSF Techie Congress

Detroit, Michigan

Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 1:00pm

At the United States Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan (USA) on June 24, 50 politically progressive technologists came together to make history: the first U.S. Progressive Techie Congress. The Congress was sponsored by four tech organizations: May First/People Link, Agaric Design, Openflows and the Progressive Technology Project.

The Congress is part of an International effort to build discussion, among progressive technologists, of our rights and reopnsibilities within the movement for social transformation.

After nearly five hours of collaboration and discussion, the Congress emerged with a consensus on the following principles:

• Technological decisions have political consequences. These decisions need to reflect the politics of our movements. Every technology we adopt has embedded power relations. Technology structures how we are able to communicate and who is able to communicate. Technology use is highly influenced by NGO and government procurement, spending, and regulation. Our movements should work to change policies and spending, create more transparency, as well as work to develop technologies that are attendant to our needs.

• Participatory Technology Design. We understand that technology should be driven by the needs of the movement as a whole. We all have the responsibility to voice our ideas about socially responsible use of technology; at the same time, specialized tech skills, like all specialized skills, create power dynamics that we must recognize. We must engage in ongoing dialogue as a movement to address the ways that power structures become embedded in technology, and include everyone as far as possible in all aspects of technology design.

• Digital Inclusion: Technology should be accessible to all, and the movement should actively move to break down those barriers to access including language, hardware and connectivity. We should work on technology to break down other barriers, and not construct new barriers. Technologies need to be designed with the end user in mind, this includes translation, accessibility, youth education, and access to computing resources.

• Social Sustainability: Technology we build or implement should retain its usefulness to people and organizations in the movement. It must be usable and accessible. It should support multiple platforms, open standards, and data portability. It must be economically feasible for the organization to maintain. We must include documentation and training sufficient to give groups control over the technology that serves them.

• Community Owned Infrastructure: Our communities have the right to design, own, use and control the network, hardware, and software we rely on. The movement has the responsibility to support and steward this community-owned infrastructure. Techies within the movement have the responsibility to explain and advocate for community-owned infrastructure.

• Data privacy: Our social movements have a right to be free from surveillance, both governmental and private. We should encourage our movements to make political choices to protect the privacy, security, and data of both individuals and organizations.

• As we do tech work with the movement, we must work against systems of power, privilege, oppression and exclusion. We must work collaboratively across identities, groups, languages, and borders. We must specifically commit to strengthen the voices of oppressed peoples including people of color, women, gender-oppressed people, LGBTQI people, Indigenous peoples, migrants, immigrants, low-income people, people with disabilities, and people of all ages, education levels and technological skill. We must actively engage, train and collaborate to nurture a movement that celebrates diversity.

Techie Congress Description

In this gathering, "techies" (the progressive movement's technologists) will join together to examine and discuss strategies for growing one of the largest, most important and powerful human movement 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. Techies have been fundamental to this movement and will continue to play an increasingly important role in the progress of humanity.

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. An international Techie Congress seeks to strategize against this growing opposition.

In this gathering, we seek to hold an open space for technologists to collaborate on a set of "principles" for organizing the Internet. Modeled after the Collaborative Democracy Workshop at the first US Social Forum, this event integrates virtual participation with organized in-person events in local venues. At each location, the audience breaks 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 proposals into a web-based system. A dynamic, projected display of the current state of the document is viewable by participants in the room and anyone in the world with access to our website.

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

Each group also has the ability to endorse any proposal that seems worthy. When a proposal is edited, existing endorsements are cleared, which requires solicitation of new endorsements for the new version. Proposals with more endorsers float to the top, while the proposals with fewer endorsers sink to the bottom of the projected list.

To keep the document direct and concise, only 10 distinct proposals can exist at a given time. If 10 proposals already exist, the only way to add a new idea to the document is to edit an existing idea, which requires engaging other groups in a dialog to ensure an adequate number of re-endorsements.

call_to_techie_congress

Needs

• Contracted software development: includes website, collaborative democracy software, server maintenance $10,000
• Coordination staff: Two -- One full-time, one part-time -- organizing positions for 1 year $100,000
• Travel: includes fees and travel/accommodation to outreach events as well as travel/accommodation for 6 major Techie Congress events in Paris (April), Mexico (May), Detroit (June), Palestine (October), India (December), and Dakar (January 2011) $18,000
• Equipment: ongoing costs for rentals and purchases at events $12,000
• Advertising and networking $15,000

• (email mallory at mayfirst.org for Sponsorship Inquiries)