[Imc-alternatives] how are we different?

Mon Jan 23 16:12:10 PST 2006

Hi alternatives,

I just went through the list of Social Forges Strypey recently updated on 
the Alternatives IMC wikipages.  I added a couple and put my ideas on how 
the alternatives IMC project will be different from each one, as well as 
how we might be able to collaborate.

If you want to look at it on the wiki, check out the page:
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PotentialAlternativesAllies

I'll post the text below.  It's long (as you would expect from me!).

Here's the general summary.
"The Alternatives IMC project appears to be unique in its goal to be a 
comprehensive, participatory information source with a sole focus on 
alternatives.  Other alternatives-oriented content creators, like 
[[http://www.worldchanging.com][WorldChanging.com]], 
[[http://www.zmag.org/pps.htm][Projects for a Participatory Society]] and 
magzines like [[http://www.yesmagazine.com][Yes Magazine]], are currently 
closed resources (i.e. with closed editorial collectives).  Plus, the IMC 
Alternatives project has the advantage of being able to work with more than 
150 IMCs around the world and all the activists arleady participating in 
them to generate a tremendous amount of local content, as well as a 
tremendous amount of energy.  In this respect, I think this project is 
clearly unique.

Some of (the sites on the SocialForges list) seem to have successful 
communities building through the collaborative elements of their sites.  I 
think in building our community/workspace elements we have to put some very 
specific thought into how our resource would be different.  If we decide to 
develop our own community, similar to the others, would it be different 
because, placed in the context of a huge project like indymedia, already 
composed of thousands of social-change activists, we could inspire more 
particpation?  Would we be more active in making sure the projects that 
work through the Alternatives site work together toward results rather than 
just providing space for them to work on their own?  Would we try to make 
the community-building features of the site comprehensive, like we're 
trying to do with the information-gathering part of the site, offering wiki 
space to every alternatives-oriented project we can find, therefore 
developing a more integrated consciousness among those working on these 
projects alone?  That would involve a lot of active outreach on our part, 
but may well be worth the effort."

I'm really curious to hear everyone's ideas and reactions,
Jay

***

Here's the whole text from: 
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PotentialAlternativesAllies

This is a list of potential allies for the Alternatives Indymedia 
project.  This is essentially a duplicate of the page called SocialForges 
Strypey has compiled with added information about how the Alternatives IMC 
could be different from the project in question, and some of my (rambling) 
personal ideas for how we may be able to work together.  I just commented 
on the "general" sites, not the issue-specific ones.  Please add your 
comments.

---+++ General:

[[http://www.socialforge.net][Social Forge]]<br>
Hosted by mutualaid.org<br>
"Socialforge.net is a collaborative laboratory of social research and 
action, a multilingual meeting place for all those who are interested to 
make the world a better place to live and to directely act, as individuals, 
for a positive social change."

DIFFERENCES: Socialforge is the closest of all the sites on this page to 
the spirit of the intended collaborative/participatory elements of the 
Indymedia Alternatives project.  The difference would be that the 
Alternatives IMC would also have a traditional IMC "front end" -- an 
information-oriented IMC site layout and feel with features about 
alternatives and an open publishing newswire.  This will enable the 
Alternatives IMC site to be familiar to anyone who has ever visited an IMC, 
inspiring them to post their information about alternatives to the newswire 
and get involved with the editorial collective.  It will also build the 
Alternatives IMC as an indispensable resource for information about all 
kinds of alternatives.  People who want to learn about alternatives in a 
straigtforward way will come to the Alternatives IMC site, as well as those 
who want to participate in building them through the participatory parts of 
the site.

COLLABORATION: Magius is one of the people involved in making both projects 
tick so I'm sure he's already light years ahead of me in thinking how we 
can weave them together.  I'd imagine the Alternatives IMC site basing our 
participatory components fairly closely on Socialforge.

[[http://ourproject.org][Our Project]]<br>
"The idea behind the ourproject.org initiative is for it to be a tool which 
encourages the cooperative work effort of all types of people from every 
part of the world, promoting the coming together of people and the exchange 
of ideas and solutions to problems, with the condition that the results of 
the projects will remain freely accessible to whoever may find them useful, 
within this tool."<br>
licensed under Creative Commons

DIFFERENCES: The same "difference" from above applies.  In addition to a 
participatory workspace, the Alternatives IMC site will be a place for news 
and other information about alternatives, provided in a familiar Indymedia 
format.

COLLABORATION: I'm wondering if/how we'd be able to blend the collaborative 
groups involved with sites like socialforge and ourproject so people 
working on similar things could know that others are out there working on 
the same stuff.  Perhaps rather than just create an entirely new 
participatory space as part of Indymedia Alternatives, we could act as a 
meta-site, coordinating between all these other collaborative 
alternatives-oriented sites to make sure everyone knows about each other 
and the work they're all doing.  In a sense that's what we'd be doing in 
the other, informational aspects of the site, regarding news about 
alternatives.  Rather than creating all our own content, the site will be 
gathering information and news from those who already create content and 
allowing people to publish their own content to the newswires.  So, maybe 
rather than create a new alternatives-oriented collaborative site, we could 
start to think of ways to act as a coordinator of "information" that 
already exists on other collaborative sites.  Just an idea I'm having as 
I'm looking at some of these other already-existing projects.

[[http://www.crimethinc.net/][Crimethinc network]] 
Hosted By Crimethinc Ex-Worker's Collective
"Some of you might be wondering: Where are the forums? In short, they’re 
the entire site, minus some banter. Instead of free-for-all discussion, 
everything is topically and structurally arranged to stimulate activity and 
collaboration."

DIFFERENCES: Same as above.

COLLABORATION: Similar thoughts.

[[http://globalideasbank.org/][Global Ideas Bank]] 
"The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas 
to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate 
these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process. These ideas we 
term social inventions: non-technological, non-product, non-gadget ideas 
for social change. These are a mix of existing projects, fledgling 
initiatives and new bright ideas."

DIFFERENCES: I love the Ideas Bank site!  It has a great energy around it 
and is a lot of fun to visit.  Same differences as above.

COLLABORATION: I have a sense we'd like to gear the participatory aspects 
of the Alternatives IMC site more toward practical action around creating 
alternatives than just random ideas for alternatives (focusing more 
attention on people actually working together than those sitting alone 
thinking up neat stuff).  On the other hand, I love the idea of featuring 
ideas and trying to inspire action around them.  Perhaps we could work with 
the ideas bank to feature some alternatives-oriented ideas as they come 
up.  This could be pretty inspirational -- I, for one, get inspired by the 
idea that people today still have ideas! -- but could also work into some 
of our efforts to gather information about alternatives-oriented theory and 
proposals.  (i.e. our section about ideas for a viable alternative to the 
current economy).

[[http://www.omidyar.net/home][Omidyar.net]] 
A quite active collaborative space for people doing work in varying areas, 
most of them having to do with alternatives. It's apparently a project of 
a large social action funding network started by own of the founders of 
EBay and there seems to be controversy on the site about the fact that the 
source code for the project is proprietary, but there do appear to be a lot 
of people involved with some very active ideas.

DIFFERENCES: Same.

COLLABORATION: Same.  I especially like the way they call their 
project-wikis "workspaces." That makes a whole lot of intuitive sense.

[[http://www.WorldChanging.com][Worldchanging.com]] 
"Works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building 
a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on 
tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. 
That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are 
already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We 
only need to put the pieces together.

DIFFERENCES: WorldChanging.com appears to be a project that generates some 
really content about alternatives and ideas relating to 
alternatives.  People can comment on articles and can suggest stories but 
can't post directly.  They don't have a "community" element like some of 
the above sites.

COLLABORATION: I think we should definitely approach worldchanging.com to 
see if they'd like to work with us on content of the Alternatives IMC. At 
the very least we should pull their RSS feed onto our newswire and try to 
direct people to their site.

[[http://www.zmag.org/pps.htm][Projects for a Participatory Society]] 
Hosted by Zmag.org 
"Projects for a Participatory Society exists to propose, investigate, 
debate, explore, and advocate radical ideas for a desirable future. It 
focuses on social, economic, cultural, and political life. It's membership 
is responsible for this site and for related projects which include 
struggling, writing, speaking, and acting on behalf of attaining a better 
world. The PPS core values include solidarity, diversity, equity, self 
management, justice, and sustainability."

DIFFERENCES: Projects for a Participatory Society is a really exciting 
collaboration of some of the most interesting writers for Z Magazine.  It's 
a "closed collective," in the sense that the people who write the pieces on 
the PPS site are voted aboard by members of the current group. IMC 
alternatives would obviously be more open than that, and would feature news 
about alternatives in a comprehensive manner rather than the ideas of a 
very (albeit visionary) visionaries.  Plus, I don't see a place to comment 
on the ideas presented on the PPS site, hence no participation from the 
public.

COLLABORATION: Yes yes yes!  Some of us probably already know a few of the 
PPS collaborators, or at least are familiar with their work.  I think we 
should be in touch with them to weave some of their content into the 
Alterantives site.  I don't get the idea they're actively seeking new 
members, in the sense that they probably don't want a hundred random 
readers of the Alternatives IMC writing in asking to join the PPS group, 
but I'm sure they want to get their visions and ideas around, perhaps 
placing them in a more participatory context on the Alternatives IMC site.

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page][Wikipedia]] 
Hosted by Wikimedia foundation 
"Wikipedia... is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia wiki 
cluster. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most 
articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser."
licensed under GNU Free Documentation License

DIFFERENCES: Wikipedia is the best practical example of the theory that 
on-line collaboration can work, and work wonders.  Obviously Wikipedia 
deals with a zillion topics rather than just alternatives.

COLLABORATION: At the very least we could use Wikipedia entries about 
alternatives to serve as an informational backbone to some of the 
discussions.  We could do that by linking directly to the entries without 
necessarily contacting anyone who contributes, but I'd be more excited 
about actively contacting contributors to wikipedia who work on 
alternative-oriented entries to see if they'd like to be involved with the 
alternatives IMC project.

[[http://dmoz.org/][DMOZ-Netscape]] 
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited 
directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global 
community of volunteer editors." 
Various open-source powered search engines use DMoz as their database 
including [[http://www.mozdex.com/about/][MozDex]]

DIFFERENCES: DMOZ is a collaborative directory of the web.  It doesn't have 
much focus on alternatives.

COLLABORATION: I don't know if there's really a way we could collaborate 
with DMOZ, but perhaps we could communicate with the people who are 
gathering links about alternatives-oriented projects for the directory.

[[http://www.43things.com/][43 Things]] 
Hosted by Robot Co-Op (private company funded by Amazon.com) 
Allows users to list personal goals and look at each other's goals.

DIFFERENCES: 43 Things is a neat collection of things people post that 
they'd like to accomplish.  Not essentially an alteratives-oriented site.

COLLABORATION: This fits into the the ideas-bank genre of random ideas 
people have for stuff they'd like to do or see done.  I don't know if 
there's really a way for us to collaborate.

SUMMARY:
The Alternatives IMC project appears to be unique in its goal to be a 
comprehensive, participatory information source with a sole focus on 
alternatives.  Other alternatives-oriented content creators, like 
[[http://www.worldchanging.com][WorldChanging.com]], 
[[http://www.zmag.org/pps.htm][Projects for a Participatory Society]] and 
magzines like [[http://www.yesmagazine.com][Yes Magazine]], are currently 
closed resources.  Plus, the IMC Alternatives project has the advantage of 
being able to work with more than 150 IMCs around the world and all the 
activists arleady participating in them to generate a tremendous amount of 
local content, as well as a tremendous amount of energy.  In this respect, 
I think this project is clearly unique.

Some of the above sites seem to have successful communities building 
through the collaborative elements of their sites.  I think in building our 
community/workspace elements we have to put some very specific thought into 
how our resource would be different.  If we decide to develop our own 
community, similar to the others, would it be different because, placed in 
the context of a huge project like indymedia, already composed of thousands 
of social-change activists, we could inspire more particpation?  Would we 
be more active in making sure the projects that work through the 
Alternatives site work together toward results rather than just providing 
space for them to work on their own?  Would we try to make the 
community-building features of the site comprehensive, like we're trying to 
do with the information-gathering part of the site, offering wiki space to 
every alternatives-oriented project we can find, therefore developing a 
more integrated consciousness among those working on these projects 
alone?  That would involve a lot of active outreach on our part, but may 
well be worth the effort.

---+++ Topic Specific:

[[http://www.oneglobalcommunity.com/][One Global Community]]
specific: community centres, networking
Very messy site with limited interactivity.

[[http://rtmark.com/][RTMark]]<br>
specific: activism, culture jamming

[[http://www.opentheory.org/index.phtml?lang=en][OpenTheory]]<br>
specific: critical theory texts<br>
"Developing texts like Free Software according to the principle »rough 
consensus, tasty text!« -- This is the basic idea of open theory, in short: 
ot."<br>
cool idea but mostly in German

[[http://www.osdn.com/][Open Source Development Network]]<br>
Hosts Sourceforge.net, Freshmeat.net, newsforge.net, slashdot.org amongst 
others<br>
specific: software development<br>
fairly business-orientated

[[http://www.infoanarchy.org/][InfoAnarchy]]<br>
Specific: freedom of information<br>
group blog-style with wiki

[[http://www.strohalm.nl/english/][Strohalm]] 
Specifc: economics, esp. local currencies

-- Main.JaySand - 23 Jan 2006