Move Commons, the end of the campaign … Now what?

Posted on Tuesday January 24th, 2012 by jpzafra

After the Goteo crowdfunding campaign of 40 days, Move Commons has not obtained the necessary amount that would boosted the project. Still, from our approach we don’t see it as a negative bottom line. In fact, thanks to spreading so much the word, the project will go on with new partners, new contacts and renewed energy due to the feedback received. However, for obvious reasons, the schedule will be severely affected.

In this adventure we have learnt lots of things which will be very valuable in the future. However, what did it go wrong? We believe that mainly our inexperience in this type of campaign… Perhaps we should have began spreading the word earlier, or perhaps we should have digged deeper in search of possible stakeholders. Also, we couldn’t manage to involve an important entity that would understand the benefits of Move Commons and bet for it, which in turn would have served as motivation for other partners and co-donors.

Yet we are very pleased with the work done! Despite not getting any actual funding (all donations are returned as we didn’t reach the minimum), we have been obtained other assets that are also very important. Thus, nowadays we have brought new blood into the project, which should revive the project with their new ideas and views. Besides, we have now the experience for possible future campaigns with other projects of Comunes. And above all, Move Commons is now much more known in the community, by word of mouth, social media and traditional media diffusion.

Still, Move Commons continues needing basic economic help to keep up the project, as unfortunately volunteers are not enough… we still need to pay bills and hardware, so we ask your collaboration through our donation website.

Last but not least, we would like to take advantage to thank all co-financiers, acquaintances and colleagues for all the support, work and feedback received. This vote of confidence will not fall on deaf ears and will help us to move forward with our project.

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Presentations in the “Free Culture Forum” & “Building Digital Commons”

Posted on Sunday November 20th, 2011 by shevek

During the last weeks, we have been moving around presenting Move Commons in several contexts. We already mentioned the presentation of Goteo in Medialab-Prado (Madrid), where we launched our crowdfunding campaign (during the 4 weeks campaign we’ll insist on this in every post, so apologies in advance).

In the Free Culture Forum (Barcelona), an “international space in which to build and coordinate a global framework for action and a common agenda for issues related to free culture and access to knowledge”. In this nice environment we presented several Comunes projects, and of course we began with Move Commons. We have the slides we used (in English), which provide a pretty good overview of Comunes projects. For those Spanish-speakers, you can also watch the video of the presentation here, which provides a global approach around the reasons for Move Commons.

In the Global Forum on Building Digital Commons (Barcelona), an event that “aims to provide visibility to collaborative communities to create digital commons, promoting learning and mutual support among them.” In this Forum we made use again of the Move Commons stickers, that were included in the registration of every participant in the forum. Thus, we were pleased to see how people was hanging around their conference badges with their name and their MC badge! We had a whole session to discuss Move Commons named “Giving visibility & international alliances: the project Move Commons”, and it was very fruitful, as we received very good feedback and ideas. For instance, Mayo Fuster proposed to use Move Commons to form local networks to share resources and professional needs, which is something we want to explore in the major release of MC. If you also want to see it happening, please help us spreading the word about the crowdfunding campaign or even better, make a small contribution to the project or offer to collaborate in some task!

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Move Commons begins a crowdfunding campaign

Posted on Friday November 18th, 2011 by shevek

Move Commons, the Comunes project for labelling social initiatives, has just began a 40 days campaign for crowdfunding and search for collaborators. It is using the new crowdfunding platform “Goteo“, which just helps projects which provide a return to the Commons. The campaign aims to attract funding to boost the project and collaborators in different areas to fulfill its needs.

There is a list of collective returns to the Commons (such as an open infrastructure, search engine, HOWTOs) and individual returns (“if you donate X we help you with Y”). There is a minimum of 7,000€ that, if it’s not reached, no money will be gained and all donations would be returned (to guarantee donors that they’ll fund a sucessful project). Even if we don’t reach such minimum, we hope to attract enough contributors to push this ambitious project forward in the next months. Please, spread the word!

The campaign:
http://www.goteo.org/project/move-commons
The needs and calendar:
http://www.goteo.org/project/move-commons/needs

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Goteo crowdfunding release on November

Posted on Monday October 17th, 2011 by jpzafra

As we’ve mentioned in other occasions, the crowdfunding platform Goteo has included Move Commons as one of its main projects to be launched. Its launching presentation is scheduled for November 3 accompanied by a presentation at Medialab-Prado (Madrid), where Move Commons will be giving its support to this platform.

Goteo is a free digital platform to build a network of production, microfinance and distribution of resources collectively and distributed, for projects of any kind that contribute to the strengthening of the commons, open source and / or free knowledge, and benefit to the greater number of people using free or open source licenses.

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Visual Explanation: Move Commons for humans

Posted on Saturday September 10th, 2011 by shevek

Following our last post, we have finally built a proper presentation of Move Commons. As we didn’t have hands and time for a video, we build a visually attractive presentation using Prezi. Here you can enjoy the presentation (in English):

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Call for video makers

Posted on Tuesday August 2nd, 2011 by jpzafra

Do you know Move Commons? Are you looking to collaborate on a project to help strengthen relations between collectives and volunteers?

Move Commons requires some initial funding to allow a strong beta release. In order to achieve this, Move Commons will participate in the launch of the crowdfunding platform Goteo, with an information campaign with which we hope to get enough microdonations. Concerning this campaign, Goteo has requested us to create a short video or animation to present the project in an attractive manner. In the worst case, it would be enough a combination of screencasts or a Prezi.

The Move Commons team, a small group of volunteers, lacks the experience and creative skills necessary to make a video with sufficient quality. Thus, we would like to ask for help from the community: if there is any among you who has proficiency in the creation/edition of videos or animations, it would be incredibly helpful if you could help design a one-minute video for Move Commons. Communicating this project would greatly facilitate its dissemination and uptake of micro-donations to make it sustainable.

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Video of MC presentation in Medialab (in Spanish)

Posted on Thursday December 16th, 2010 by shevek

We now have a video of the fantastic presentation of Move Commons in the Medialab Prado of Madrid. The result was pretty good and provided a very clear and organized explanation of why Move Commons, and what its implications are. We received very good feedback and questions from the attendants, which are also included in the video (in Spanish btw). Since then, MC has joined the Lab of the Commons of Medialab Prado as one of its projects :)

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Presentation in Medialab Prado (Madrid)

Posted on Wednesday November 24th, 2010 by shevek

In this frenetic period where Move Commons is opening up, we will be holding another presentation in the Medialab Prado (Madrid). Medialab is an interdisciplinary space for the “production, research, and dissemination of digital culture and of the area where art, science, technology, and society intersect”. One of the initiatives of Medialab Prado is the “Commons Lab”, which groups several ongoing projects for the encouragement of the Commons. Starting tomorrow, Move Commons will be part of the Commons Lab and thus, it will be enriched by the constant flow of ideas of its members. So for those readers in Madrid, tomorrow 25th Nov, at 7pm, we will be presenting MC in the Medialab-Prado.

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MC stickers all over Drumbeat!

Posted on Wednesday November 24th, 2010 by shevek

As announced in the previous post, we were in the amazing Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago. We were planning to present Move Commons as one of the activities of the festival, specifically in the “Angels Hacking” space. However, in the end it was far better, as we invaded Drumbeat with Move Commons stickers :)

The idea, as briefed previously, was to push people to fill-in empty sticker badges of Move Commons with their icons (=more stickers) and tags. You can see the stickers that we used in our visuals gallery.

We prepared a flyer (and a poster) explaining the MC stickers mechanism (and thus, MC webtool as well)…

We left a few flyers here and there, each few with a pile of empty MC badges and a mountain of MC icon stickers :D This was the result (here in video):

Seems people found it interesting to play with the “interactive sticker”, and reply to the four MC questions about their collectives in the process. After a couple of days, we saw plenty of people (more? see this flickr) wearing their MC stickers on top of the Drumbeat registration nametag:

Thus, MC was a cross-activity during the Festival… but we also had two interesting opportunities to discuss our initiative. The scheduled one, in the Angels Hacking space, as it was placed in a tent outside, attracted a diverse range people: a couple of Portuguese hackers, several locals, a Jordanian FLOSS developer, Mozilla volunteers (local and foreign), commoners… they all ended up with their badges after nice talks and exchanges of ideas (which triggered some other reactions in some tweets and blogs, here and there). It was pretty quiet until the Laptop Orchestra began their final rehearsal… and made us run away :D

The second chance was more interesting, as it was placed inside the awesome Badge Lab. This space was meant for people to “Test, critique and improve badges and tools that recognize informal online learning”, and we found out that Move Commons had a lot in common with them and their discussions. MC badges initiatives and collectives, expressing their principles and connecting them semantically, while the Badge Lab aimed to badge individuals, expressing their skills and capacities. In the end, MC was one of the tracks of one session of the lab, where we brainstormed about how to improve the icons and its mechanics. Very nice people and amazing feedback, such as: we should allow extensions; what about digging more in the visual representations of concepts?; no one wants to advertise to be “close” (or Exclusive); think of the community of initiatives we want to gather…

To sum up, the Festival was really incredible, the attendees were very interesting and it helped us evolve in the right direction. Other findings during the Festival indicated that people favoured wearing stickers with positive connotations(Nonprofit, Reproducible, Reinforcing the Commons, Grassroots) and preferred leaving a space to answering negatively about something (advertising that “I am Exclusive” or “Representative” with an awkward pyramid symbol). Finally, after several discussions with the developers of the future “Mozilla badge software”, it is clear that we’ll be using their platform as soon as it is ready.

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Move Commons in Mozilla Drumbeat

Posted on Monday November 1st, 2010 by shevek

Move Commons is now part of the Mozilla Drumbeat community of projects. Drumbeat is an initiative of the Mozilla Foundation to support projects promoting the Open Web. Nowadays, they are providing a platform for such projects to attract support, and are organizing massive events to promote them.

Thus, Move Commons now has a profile in Drumbeat , which attempts to give a quick glance of what MC means and also includes a more in-depth explanation.

Moreover, MC will organize an “activity” in the next Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, which will be held in Barcelona between 3-5 Nov. In that crazy event, where slides are forbidden and interactive games instead of presentations are the rule, we will introduce Move Commons through… stickers :)

In fact, it is a very good way of explaining what MC means. You have an empty sticker with your Name / Tags / 4 empty slots. You fill-in your name and tags, that’s easy. Afterwards, you answer the four MC questions in order to choose your icons. Then you have a filled MC sticker which you can show around… and if you find others carrying their own stickers, you can understand their initiatives/collectives at first glance.

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