Collaboration Lab Camp Paris #2 2015
Project Overview (so far..)
Finding a collaborative language in words, code, graphics and being
Here we go! Another edition of CollabCamp from the 23rd to the26th of May 2015. Being 13,3% a nomadic community until now, we are amazed with the potential of our attendees flying in from all over Europe. The work we all do and the possibilities to connect and find a new collaborative language for our aspirations.
Whether you are a start-up, student, hacker, entrepreneur or activist, we all seem to contribute to a collaborative society by creating new procedures, ways of governance and using the internet to create global connections, projects and collaborations. Inventing ‘a new We!’, democracy or facilitating communities to work even better on their common goal to make the world a better place. Uniting unique talents and ideas, forging new tools, procedures and social impact.
Together we are truly building a House of Knowledge as one of the famous statues of Jaume Plensa is named.
“Our body is the home of the spirit. The place in which ideas live. Our body is a meeting place where our different experiences converge, mix and grow, creating a colossal archive. The University is an extension of our body. A gathering space in which people and ideas, tradition and future, meet to converse, weaving the mesh of human knowledge. Taking the shape of a human body made out of essential vehicle of communication, the fundamental tools.”
Jaume Plensa
Language doesn’t always come in words or letters anymore, but in code and graphics too. Being together, meeting in real life and collaborating on common goals is extremely inspiring. Touching us all with the inspiration and passionate goal of each, enriching our methods, skills and expertise by contributing to each others and collaborative projects.
Update attendees & projects
With 181 attendees and 82 maybe attending people of Collaboration Lab Camp 2015 #2 in Paris, we are heading to interesting crossovers and collaborations on several topics. Responses are coming in fast now. Here we give an overview of the first 19 people stating what they are heading for, have to offer and the subjects they are passionate about.
If you didn’t fill in the forms on projects or participants yet, this is an overview of topics and skills coming up! Please fill in the forms to get the total of all questions, people and contact info. And more importantly: to contribute your subjects to the collaboration proces.
Topic 1: Giving voice to collaboration
With working topics such as:
- Towards Platform Cooperativism, using Semantic Technologies. Am Boundary Spanning between Projects with Similar Intentions. Intention being to facilitate emergent forms of Governance.
- Gamification for collaboration.
- Governance platforms and their impact.
The united people: wikigame for a better world.
There is currently nothing on the website. The idea for the project is essentially a wikigame where the players have the goal of making the real world a better place. A decentralised social platform where the players are incentivized through gamification to do two main things.
One is to make the world a better place in whatever way the individual players desire but since collectively, the superorganism that we call humanity, is passionate about everything, having an open source platform allows the players to fill every niche. As such the environmentalists will do their quests, the childrens rights activists will focus on theirs and the collaborative economy people can put up anything they would wish to share in a common platform, and on and on while still working towards a common goal of a better world without wars and borders.
The other main task is for the players to add to the platform and make the game better and richer. Any user can add quests or missions for others to accomplish. So it can start as a simple text based app and slowly but surely the fraction of players who are developers and who wish to can add new features and code with the ultimate goal of having a sims version of the real world that can be played. Where the players can build cities and countries but with the really cool open source tech that exists. Like 3d printers that build houses, like contour crafting, advanced and superior agricultural techniques like vertical farming and aquaponics, roads that are paved with solar panels, etc etc with goal also being that these technologies come with blueprints that the players, should they wish to, can recreate in the literal world and bridge the gap between our world and the virtual.
I stumbled across this idea about three years ago and since then I’ve thought of a great number of applications that this marriage of gamification and wikinomics can produce. Honestly I have thus far not come across any limits. Like the much simpler yet similar concept of wikipedia this can grow indefinately and become immensly grand as anything the players add are added to the whole system. So while the idea seems too large or too ambitious the initial step is to a create something very simple, that through a common goal and collaboration can become something complex and grand.
Wezer: boost cooperation in a Solidarity Economy
Wezer is an open source platform aims to bring best collaborative and business tools normally found separately into one environment, where they will be more integrated, more effective, and easier to use.
Wezer is a set of integrable Odoo modules. Each community can determine its appropriate packages and features.
Wezer is a systemic solution to boost cooperation to dynamize the We!
Virtual Assembly
Fragmentation or duplication of ideas is a big problem. It creates a lack of collaborative practice between actors and leads towards little or no mutualization of resources. Like on the web a silo-effect creates this fragmentation, this also happens in real life.
Virtual Assembly wishes to make the web and real life a social and collaborative place. By practicing p2p principles, co design and designing the best web facilities possible. Allowing actors and resources to crystalize around ideas or projects.
Also Virtual Assembly is very aware of the problem of free platforms using our data, so we are becoming the product. Finding ways to make a change.
Topic 2: Reinventing democracy
With working topics such as:
- Working on building an implementation of Liquid Democracy on the decentralised F2F platform — RetroShare! Also working on a centralised website to try out ideas. Project is currently partially in hibernation.
Represent.cc: loading the future
“Take part, take control. We’re not changing the world, we’re changing the rules.”
Most people want things to be better. A fairer, smarter, healthier, happier world — for everyone, as fast as possible. But if most people want it, why does it feel so hard to achieve?
Represent reinvents how we, the people, get to better.
For the first time EVER we live in a world where proper representation could actually work. Just picture it: a world where the values, desires and opinions of everyone are taken into account and acted upon*. It gives us butterflies just thinking about it.
Because today — so often — it feels like we’re not represented. Like there’s a chasm between what happens in our world and what we, the people, want to happen.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
Together, we can do more than cross that chasm between the world we have in the world we want — we can make it disappear. We just need a tool that’s up to the job.
Psst. Don’t worry, we’re not saying we want everyone to have to vote on everything all the time. That’d leave no time for actually living! Instead, you can choose what to be involved in — like the things you care most about, or are an expert in. We have a plan for this — it looks a bit like liquid democracy
Politheor
Politheor.net is a network of political scholars and public policy analysts, created as a platform for regional (SEE) and European policy exchange. The platform has been launched with the aim of strengthening critical reflexion on theoretical concepts and socio-political realities. We hold that an independent critical discourse is inconceivable without a relevant, objective and impartial approach to certain societal and political phenomena, be it from a theoretical or a practical angle.
With a team of renowned experts in our advisory and editorial board.
Given the goal of exchanging conflicting policy ideas, the platform does not confine itself to authors with a political science background, but welcomes authors from akin social and human sciences: sociology, philosophy, culturology, psychology, history and other disciplines that deliberate on social and political conditions of the region and beyond. Another aspiration of the Editorial Board is to induce meaningful and argument-based academic writing mainly among the youth in the region (students, BA, MA and PhD holders) without falling into the trap of ”redundant criticism” of opinion journalism. Still, politheor.net is endeavoring to act as a forum for opposing opinions and arguments through exchange of policy briefs, op-eds, essays, (book) reviews, comments and interviews, thereby opening up the space for discussion.
With contributors from entire Europe.
The purpose of exchanging ideas is, on the one hand, to promote new generations of authors in political science areas and social and human sciences, and on the other to keep track of developments in political thinking in the SEE region, and their level of inclusion into European discourse. It welcomes students, teaching assistants, professors and researchers from Europe and beyond, as well as anyone interested in contributing to the bolstering of critical thinking and impartial academic writing.
Mesh democracy
Progress on this implementation of “Distributed Liquid Democracy” is going well, Steadily progressing into something amazing — “Mesh Democracy”.
The underlying system is up and running. It works, kind of like a car without bodywork “runs”, but still should not be driven on the road.
The name “Mesh Democracy” is due to this being an implementation of “Liquid Democracy” designed to run on RS’s F2F network, and hopefully at a lower level Mesh networks in general. Also because “Mesh Democracy” currently has no meaningful results on google it is descriptive and “unique”.
There will probably not be an actual release of Mesh Democracy until RetroShare 0.6 is out in the wild — the source code can be found here https://github.com/chozabu/trunktesting/tree/meshdemoc
Topic 3: value transition
Valeureux: money transition for the common good
Valeureux has started as a collective of 10 French money transitioners in 2009. Since 2013 it’s a non profit association based in Paris.
Its purpose is “revealing, attuning and sharing all forms of wealth in the service of Life”.
Its pilars are :
- Wealth actualisation
- organic Governance
- integral Vision
- and serving Life
Valeureux designs, engineers and spreads human and technological cooperation processes, particularly through games, awareness and subtile combinaison of fun & profound. It proposes events, workshops, trainings, coaching, consulting and publications in France, and abroad thanks to Community Forge partnership.
Focus is on wealth actualisation, as making them real, updated and empowering their potential. It covers governance, complementary currencies, alternative indicators, collective intelligence and human development.
“The Fabrics of Common goods Wealth actualisation tools” is emerging, gathering best tools and best people from everywhere. Wezer is its product and its community will use it, as Valeureux actors apply first on them what they recommend.
Topic 4: sustainable food supply chains
Question Mark: creating sustainable food supply chains together
Questionmark believes that transparency is needed about how and where products are produced, because this type of transparency is crucial to developing sustainable supply chains.
To bring this change, we are setting up a movement for radical transparency among consumers. We do this by providing consumers with a website and app so they can easily find information on the sustainability of products — starting with food in supermarkets. Next to sending our information we will later also give the possibility to ask your own questions directed at food producers, leave comments, personal stories etc, via Questionmark.
Simultaneously Questionmark publishes a ranking of products you buy in supermarkets, which makes it easy for everyone to compare products and which stimulates competition on sustainable products between brand owners. We also offer brand owners the opportunity to submit their specific supply chain data, enabling them to differentiate their products in our rankings and have their story told and confirmed to the public by an independent party.
We got a grant from the national lottery to jumpstart the dream. Now, to make it into the future, we are adding the aspect of a social venture. At CollabCamp I’d like to share our journey until now, and talk about the challenge of combining “doing good” with a sustainable business. Help us to be as open as possible. And for the hackers & tinkerers, we can also have fun with the data.
Foodsoft: software for food cooperatives
A food cooperative is a group of people that buy food from suppliers of their own choosing. A collective do-it-yourself supermarket. Members order their products online and collect them on a specified day. And all put in a bit of work to make that possible.
Foodsoft is online software that facilitates the process. I have not one specific thing (yet) that I’d like to work on at CollabCamp, but something that would be interesting to see if any related projects would like to connect and perhaps work together or interoperate. If you’re interested, drop me a line already!
Topic 5: intellectual property rights & new technology
With working topics such as:
- Find out why Media Makers/Owners need a Distributed Open Value Network and why it is in our interest to build it for them. Kendra Initiative is a non-profit organisation fostering an Open Distributed Marketplace for Digital Media, and developing Kendra Hub, an Open Source Dashboard Application for Media Makers and Copyright Owners to manage and track their digital media assets and associated credit/rights metadata.
- Trying to make legal amendments for better awareness about intellectual property rights, choices for copyleft etc.
Kendra Initiative
Kendra Hub is an open source dashboard application for rights owners, music makers, managers and record labels, enabling users to manage and track their digital media assets, collaborations and associated rights. The project is funded by the UK government and by industry. The application will integrate with social networks, copyright management organisations and online distribution points. Kendra Hub will also enable users to analyse sales reports. The application will be able to run locally on your laptop or hosted in the cloud.
Chroniques PI/NTIC
Blog and legal consultancy about ‘propriété intellectuelle et nouvelle technologies’.
More news to come after your registration!
