Commons Culture Communications - 2013
Side-Event to the Economics of the Commons Conference – From Seed Form to Core Paradigm” (ECC).
Concept
Workshop of 25 persons (max) from different continents focused on discussing and defining actions related with communication, education and culture around the Commons paradigm, practice and Cultures of Commoning.
The main objective of the meeting is to gather different persons with skills on communication and educational projects in order to define plans and future initiatives to improve the communication about commons towards the commons movement in order to enhance the movement's collective consciousness, intelligence, and capabilities and towards a broader public in order to inform people and hopefully convince them that another way of seing and doing things already exists here and now.
Some future projects that could be discussed during the workshop include:
- Collaborative and distributed documentary film:
- During the last Latin America Commons Deep Dive, some ideas about creating some audiovisual pieces emerged as a way to reach large audiences: the two fundamental projects that was referred to in that moment were Remix the Commons (a multimedia platform with contents about the commons) and The Forbidden Education (a viral copyleft documentary produced in a collaborative way that reached millions of spectators in very short time).
- Open Educational Resources about the commons:
- While several "schools of commoning" are emerging in different countries, the production of high quality OER about the commons and practices of commoning would benefit and strength those educative networks
- Communication strategies:
- what ideas about the commons are the fundamental ones? what is the best way to communicate them? what languages can/has to be used in order to give a clear message?
- Which communication strategies (even from marketing/ publicity or advertising) can be used to strenghten our message?
- How to connect to other communication networks from Social Movements (as AMARC, Global Voices and others)
- Forming a "commons curation commons"?
- One of the suggested agenda items is that we identify and develop the conditions for the coordinated curation of directly commons-related news, events, literature, initiatives, reflected in all media, as they emerge.
- Curation is more than compiling lists of URLs of interesting stuff we come across. It's also about indexing, tagging, and annotating them The best work done so far is by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation team. However their inclusion criteria is much broader than the commons, and with the rapid development of global ecosystem of commons-focused initiatives, no one group can keep up with the task. It requires the coordinated effort of all of us, who feel called to contribute to the collective intelligence and consciousness of the commons movement.
- Curation is also about making relevant knowledge more actionable, by organizing it so that it is extremely easy to call into live conversation, from anywhere, anytime, using any device. It requires well-coordinated collective action, by a curation team.... possibly, a commons curation commons. Please comment on this on the Discussion page, by clicking on its tab at the top of this page. (You have to be registered and logged in before you can do that.)
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Date and Venue
- Date: 21/05 and 22/05. See agenda below
- Venue: Berlin, Germany in Betahaus:
- Address: Prinzessinnenstraße 19-20 (10969)
- Phone: +49 30 60980927
- Rooms available: 2
- Meeting room
- General audience room
Agenda
Tuesday 21
Session 0: Welcome - (14,00)
- Round of personal presentations
- Explanation of the day agenda
Session 1: The current situation - (14,30 to 16,30 )
- What are the different narratives on the commons?
- Who is talking about the "commons"? (mapping activity)
- Who is related with the commons concept and surrounding ideas?
- What communication projects / examples / pieces already exist?
Session 2: Communication strategies - (17,00 to 20,00)
- what ideas about the commons are the fundamental ones?
- what is the best way to communicate them?
- what languages/methodologies can/has to be used in order to give a clear message?
- Which communication strategies (even from marketing/ publicity or advertising) can be used to strenghten our message?
Session 3: Communication and education projects (21,00 to 00.00)
Possible projects:
- Forming a "commons curation commons"
- Bank of Open Educational Resources about the commons
- Audiovisual documentary film
- Mapping global commons initiative"
- "(My city) Commons" on the "Paris en Communs" model: common platform for urban commons initiatives
Wednesday 22
Session 4: Showcase of open communication projects (9,00 to 11,30)
- brief presentation of already existing projects related with communication and commons
Participants
- Final list
- Alain Ambrosi
- Santiago Hoerth
- Frederic Sultan
- Birte Friebel
- George Por
- José Ramos
- Wolfgang Hoeschele
- Melanie Dulong
- Wouter Tebbens
- Prabir Purkayashta
- Samantha Slade
- Marion Sylla
- Yves Otis
- Hervé Le Crosnier
- Marcelo Solervicens
- Helene Finidori
- Nancy Roof
- Denis Postle
- Marvin Brown
- Eimhin David Shortt
- Bernardo Gutierrez
- Neal Gorenflo
- Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh
- Tina Bakolitsa
- Mayo Fuster Morell
Methodology
The workshop will also be an opportunity to explore and experiment ways of working together as commoners. It is important that the methods and processes we are using when we come together to exchange, reflect and collaborate about the commons are also part of this new/old paradigm bringing us back into our fuller humanity. This means being together in circle again, as people, rather than looking at the back of each others heads. This means allowing space for collective intelligence and wisdom to flow and generative conversations to take place. This is another break with the ways of functioning we are familiar with, stepping into more empowering, democratic ways of working, coherent with the spirit of the commons movement. Throughout this session, we will live a variety of such methodologies and practices.
( input from Samantha Shade and Yves Otis from (Perbolab)
Other ideas to define the "methods of animation" of the workshop:
- Circle
- Open Space Technology
- World Cafe
- The Proaction Cafe - World Cafe and Open Space Technology
- Collective story harvest process
Objectives
Some general objectives of the workshop:
- Share and communicate what already exist in the field of communication and education of the Commons
- Produce and enrich the community with new languages/processes,methods. Animate and engage the commoners identity
- Provide a creative environment to come out with new projects, ideas and alliances to work in the commons communication future improvement
Dissemination
Invitation to participants
Dear XXXX,
We are members of the organization and support teams of the ECC 2013, a gathering to which you were recently invited and that promises to be amazing to commoners like you and us. The ECC will start on 22nd May.
Before that some side events will take place in Berlin. We would like to invite you to a workshop called Commons Culture Communications that would bring together some 20 persons from around the world to discuss and sketch out future communication and education projects to do with the commons concept and practices. This invitation is to participate in a horizontal meeting of commoners, artists, filmmakers, advocates of alternative communication ideas and others. We think that it is crucial to start to collectively imagine better communication strategies to promote the commons ideas around the globe and to do this in the commons-way: avoiding external solutions and promoting initiatives built by the rich and diverse commons international community.
The Commons Culture Communications workshop will take place in BetaHouse from Tuesday 21st at noon and will end on Wednesday 22nd in the morning. The schedule is quite open, organised into 4 different thematic sessions, since we want to actively engage the participants. You can see the proposed agenda and methodology here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Culture_Communications_-_2013
We would very much like you to participate in this meeting. If you are willing to do so, please give us a reply as soon as possible and consider the changes that this may imply in your travel arrangements and schedule.
All the best and hoping to see you soon.
More Information
Coordinators: Alain Ambrosi & Franco Iacomella
- For more information, contact Franco Iacomella via franco at p2pfoundation.net