Details website

From Unsereuni

As it was mentioned many times on the #bolognaburns weekend that the movement needs a common exchange platform, so people gathered and shared their ideas. So far the needs of the website were information, communication and documentation.

Information about the decentral acting groups all over the world needs a tools, which is collecting information from different sources like facebook, twitter, video feeds and rss feeds from mass media sources, autonomous media platforms and blogs of activists or local groups ... We have the idea of a multifeed display.

Communication between all activists or passivists can be realized in a minimal social network, which gives you the possibility...

to do direct messaging,

start groups for transnational team working,

a chat,

offering couches for travelling learners or teachers

sharing transportation to events

...

Documentation in its most flexible and grass roots way is made possible in this wiki. Feel free to write anything you want to share. If you have questions feel free o ask as well =).

• International Student Movement (ISM) is a international platform for education protests. Please get in contact with them and organise perhaps a relaunche of this website. There is also a mailinglist with around 1100 members behind the website. It's easier for everybody to use these structures which allready exists. -wurzellicht

Research - Journal a platform for research and transnational peer learning.

Contents 1 Invitation to mailing list to discuss the website 2 Ideas from the chat meeting on Monday, 22nd March 3 Idea on resistant research groups 3.1 Research groups – Concept 3.2 Research groups - Example 3.3 An afterthought on freedom 4 Elaboration of the Idea in Osnabrück

[edit] Invitation to mailing list to discuss the website

Dear you out there,

there has been a meeting of people from different regions of Europe in Vienna on Sunday, 14th March 2010. There the idea for creating a new international web site was born. There was a follow-up online meeting by some of these people on Monday, 22nd of March.

We discussed a few of the aspects that we would like the web site to have. In order to develop and discuss this project further we started an international mailing list to which you are heartily invited. Feel free to join us on http://lists.fuos.de/mailman/listinfo/internationalwebsite There you can enter your e-mail address and discuss with us on how to construct this web site.

The e-mail address of this mailing list is "internationalwebsite (at] fuos,de" . The server „@fuos.de“ was contributed by one of the activists from Osnabrück, Germany and stands for „Freie Universität Osnabrück“ (Free University of Osnabrueck) which is a project that started with student protests there in autumn 2009. The choice for this server was because of a lack of alternatives and is not meant to be Eurocentrist.

Our aim is to not only discuss on the mailing list but also to write our concepts and ideas for the international web site into the wiki that was created also for this purpose after the summit in Vienna. You can find it here: http://wiki.bolognaburns.org/wiki/index.php/Bolognaburns_community

We hope that our aims for a better education and society can be furthered through this project.

With best wishes, René from Osnabrück

on behalf of the people who met online on Monday, 22nd March 2010

[edit] Ideas from the chat meeting on Monday, 22nd March

• Integrate something like the following pilot project in Spain. The people from that project thought about starting with erasmus or interchange students, so that international students coming to Barcelona find useful information about political participation at Barcelona's universities. The way assemblies work, when and where they meet, what the symbolism is. Then, Barcelona students willing to go abroad also find a list of possible placements (the ones the several universities have agreements with) and information about the struggle there, and a contact person or group. Of course people's adresses won't be put online unless they say that is okay. Ideally we would only have networking groups contacts.

• Something like couchsurfing.org for education activists could be integrated on the website. People are travelling so much nowadays... but they have no idea what groups to contact where. It could be a page where all groups and single activists who are generally interested in networking with others when they happen to travel to "their" city leave their contact details. So people can always very easily get in touch with the local education activists and meet up and network. The local activist groups could then optionally state, if they also have a place to sleep for fellow activists coming from elsewhere or if they are just interested in networking with them.

• Both of these ideas can be realised in a social network where you can do direct message and start groups for traveling-bed-sharing-meetings... and any other group working transnationally on whatever needs to be worked on.

[edit] Idea on resistant research groups

An idea from Osnabrück, Germany put into a presentation File:Resistant Research groups.pdf. This idea can help with the website project by focusing local team work efforts on the goal of creating such a website.

[edit] Research groups – Concept

• Free: student-organised, resistant, critical, collective learning processes
• Topic – find a theme, a broad research question that you and others want to investigate further.
• Involve others – Find fellow students who want to do research together on the theme.
• Use professors – Convince them to support the research group. You formulate the research question (for an essay, a presentation, a Hausarbeit, a thesis (Bachelor, Master, Diplom, Magister). They give you credit points for it.
• Shared platform – Share this knowledge with your local activist group but also with other activists. Feed the produced content (documents, videos of presentations, slides) into an open and freely accesible platform.

[edit] Research groups - Example

• Theme and goal: Create a web service that supports educational activist movements in organising political and social processes on the web.
• Research topics: social/political processes, group decision making, the history of social activism and protest movements, web design
• Involved subjects: Information Technology, Sociology, Politology, History, Critical Science, Psychology

[edit] An afterthought on freedom

• This is not a free and totally emancipated research. These research groups would make use of (and therefore continue thinking in) the achievement mechanisms of the orthodox university, i. e. degrees and credit points. The students would still depend on the good will and power of a professor to „allow“ them to work on a topic and give them a degree/credit points for it.
• Balance between two ideals (finishing your studies with a degree – being critical and free): Do research from which a protest movement could benefit and get a degree for it.

[edit] Elaboration of the Idea in Osnabrück

File:Concept Osnabrueck English.pdf

Researchproject: "Web communications platform for decentralized political groups"

a) Current problems

Many decentralized political groups and NGO's are facing the same problems for organizing and communicating their protests. In the case of the student protest movement within Germany, that had its climax during November/December of last year, there have been many different groups trying to set up similar infrastructure for similar problems all over Germany. Our research project tries to solve this problem by introducing a new way of organizing decentralized protest groups, while adhering to their inherent structure and debating culture.

Concrete examples for the problems discussed are:

 - Several Wiki's setup for a german-wide protest movement

 - A multitude of mailinglists, all trying to cover similar and/or
   the same problems

b) Focus of the communication platform

The main focus of the research project and thus the communication platform that is to be worked on include:

 - Easy communication

 - Being able to reach both non-technical and highly-technical people
   in the movement (currently a problem since many non-technical
   protesters show up on real-life meetings, whereas the more
   technical members use mailing lists, webforums, wikis or other
   kind of technical communication services)

 - Building a platform which can be seen as a representative "place"
   for all participants within the movement (as well as for
   outsiders) by providing a place where all the information,
   discussions and opinions can be followed and noticed. This can
   cause a positive effect on the reader ("Wow, we are a lot of
   people!")

c) Technical implementation ideas

Here's a list of some ideas on the actual implementation. It's quite Buzzword compliant - sorry but this is more for the technical people and those who want to help with programming etc.

 - Decentralized cluster of Servers running the platform software
   where each autonomous server within the cluster is told on
   'parent' server to which it should sent it's updates. The parent
   server then acts as a broadcaster, sending the updates to all
   other child servers. 
   By 'updates' we mean all kinds of relevant information. This could
   include Twitter-like shortmessages, Links to videos, blog posts,
   wiki articles as well as comments on all of the mentioned data.

 - A Jabber-based backend for the network-communications layer. An
   inspiration could be StatusNet ( www.status.net ).

 - Use agile softwared evelopment principles for the development
   process

 - Use a free software license (GPL / LGPL - see www.gnu.org/licenses
   for more information)

 - Use a creative commons license for all information/content
   generated within the platform (see www.creativecommons.org for
   more information)

 - OpenID login system

 - Define interfaces for the front- and backend to
   communicate. Ideally work on the backend can be begin before
   working on the frontend. 
   To the backend we count the following:
   Server infrastructure (cluster system), network communication,
   sending and receiving updates (broadcast system) and generally all
   data management and storing software (database etc.).
   To the frontend we count: 
   The overall appearance to the user, e.g. web page layout, design
   and 'feel'. Basically everything the user 'sees'.

 - Optional: Use some kind of "AI" system to archive, categorize/tag
   all content based on different techniques. For example, new
   articles that contain certain words similar to other articles
   tagged with a certain category, would also be tagged (or suggested
   to be tagged with that category). This implies, that the system
   also relies on participants categorizing the content as well.
   Note: This idea hasn't been discussed enough yet and may be not
   implemented after all.

d) Next steps

In order to get this project going we need to do the following steps as soon as possible:

  - Find people that want to help (this text is one way of doing so)
    and find out how to do so in a most effective way

  - Document as much of the project and the ideas as possible
    (ideally in both english and german - other languages are of
    course welcome to join)

  - Find professors within the university that are willing to support
    this research project.

e) Possible research fields within this project

  Here's a (incomplete) list of possible research fields /
  departments that could benefit from participating in this project:
  
  - Human interface design

  - Computer Science
    -> Software development of a large-scale, distributed content
       management system with an emphasize on political participation
       processes and an open development model from the ground-up

  - System sciences (german: "Systemwissenschaft"), Sociology
    -> Behaviour of complex, decentralized systems / political groups

  - Psychology
    -> Software ergonomy, working processes, organizational processes
       etc.