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Overview: A Proposal
Introduction: History
Global Crisis: problem-solving collaboratively as a response to late-capitalism crisis, expand social forum, and to reduce cost of travel
Vision & Strategy: International Convergence with a focus on women and the global south lead by ICTs
Approach: Ongoing project, building, open virtual space
Tools: Support social forum infrastructure, similar movement events
Movement Building, Sustainability, & Ongoing Vision: Next year, Next stage is to empower the growing techie network to lead and stage an international movement towards problem-solving global issues on various scales with simultaneous collaborative moments.
Conclusion: Currently, update on what is moving.
Needs
Sponsoring Organizations
- May First/People Link
- Alternatives
- Social Watch
- Agaric Design
First Convergence, Paris Meeting (April 1-3, 2010)
- Principles: Collaborative Democracy Workshop
- Vision: Strategies for use of technology in any social [forum] movement
- Action: Skill-share, project exchange, and building together
Second Convergence, Thematic Forum on Alternatives in Mexico (May 2-4, 2010)
Seminar
Third Convergence, USSF Techie Congress: Workshop Proposal
Politically progressive techies from all over the United States and from several countries of the world will gather together to develop a set of "principles" describing our responsibilities and rights to our movement and the responsibilities and rights it has towards us.
We will then distribute the principles to everyone at the Social Forum and propose them to the USSF's People's Assembly for ratification. On that basis, we will begin to build the kind of relationships inside the movement that will move us all forward.
Outreach Events Proposals
In this gathering, activists will join together to examine and discuss 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.
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 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 a web-based system. A dynamic, projected display of the current state of the Bill of Rights is visible to all.
All ideas belong to the group: 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, which requires solicitation of new endorsements for the new version. Rights with more endorsers float to the top, while the rights with fewer endorsers sink to the bottom of the projected list.
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.
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.
A Call for a Techie Congress at the US Social Forum
Never has our work been more important.
A system struggling for its own survival, at the expense of humanity, greedily seeks to turn every idea into a distorted profit-making caricature of what it originally was.
The Internet humanity has built, under our collaborative leadership, is now threatened by a morass of profit-making schemes, rabidly self-protective proprietary software, and repressive laws that obliterate the spirit and letter of the First Amendment from on-line activity.
With their avalanche of limited, glossy and ultimately entrapping social software, corporations are profiteering on human communication while fencing it into a superficial, choiceless chorus line of faces and self-descriptions.
All the while, the human race continues to make and change history by using the Internet for the reasons we created it: the massive communication of our ideas and knowledge and the collective, collaborative search for the truth of our world and its future.
And it continues to look to us for alternatives, information and leadership.
But, while our importance has never been greater, we are also often alienated by the progressive movement's dismissal of our politics, thinking, perspectives and experiences.
In addition, much of the movement doesn't respect our work choosing to under-pay us or to hire large, flashy companies whose work doesn't build the movement.
Finally, most of the movement has no respect for the principle of Free and Open Source Software.
As a result, too many of us shy away from movement work. "Burned out" is now a common condition among prgoressive techies. And our political work has now been divided from our tech work.
And the movement loses the political thinking and leadership of a group of people who are the leaders of the largest mass progressive movement in human history: the Internet.
Now is the time to change this.
We want to build a set of principles that we can all share and that the prgoressive movement will agree to live by. We want to write and ratify an "agreement with the progressive movement" that is a commitment the entire movement will live by.
And the entire movement will be together, in one place, in June, 2010, at the Untited States Social Forum in Detroit.
So we are making this call to all techies who support the principles of the Social Forum to gather in Detroit at the Forum for a four-hour
Progressive Techie Congress
that will wrap up a four month process of discussion and thinking on-line around these principles.
After that Congress, we will distribute the principles to everyone at the Social Forum and propose them to the USSF's People's Assembly for ratification. On that basis, we will begin to build the kind of relationships inside the movement that will move us all forward.