Discussion lists on Move Commons in Kune

For those not aware, we are using Kune.cc for discussion on several issues related to Move Commons. Both projects are under the umbrella of our Comunes collective. We believe that Kune offers us everything we need in order to work collaboratively.

Now we have Move Commons lists in Kune (similar to mailing lists or Google Groups, but improved) concerning Documentation, Translation, Development, Testing, Communication and a general Discuss list for any issue. Feel free to join any of those lists and participate. Nowadays many of the messages are in Spanish, although feel free to open English discussions.

Kune is an innovate project so if you have difficulties using it, please contact us.

You need to be registered in Kune.cc to be able to “subscribe” to the lists. Although the contents are public, we advise you to also click on “join” in the Move Commons group.

While we are in the transition to use Kune as a work space for Move Commons, we will still use the MC mailing lists you already know.

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First 2012 Meeting of Move Commons Workgroup

Medialab Prado As we mentioned some time ago, Move Commons is a workgroup inside the Commons Lab of the Medialab Prado (Madrid) @medialabprado.

This year we decided to activate it much more, and we’re going to hold monthly face-to-face meetings in the Medialab. The first one happened two days ago and it was such a success! More than 15 people joined us, and we saw plenty of energies and backgrounds, together with amazing discussions. The meeting was followed by a presentation of our sister project Kune. Later on, we all went for some drinks and dinner, and we have to say it was indeed such an intense night! Hours of deep conversations, fabulous world-views, and warm people. Thanks to everbody who joined and hope we can meet again soon!

Note that even though we are having monthly face-to-face meetings, the most activity and work load happens online. We still have multiple collaborators outside Madrid (and Spain), so Move Commons is still very open to any kind of collaborators. Join our mailing list to be up to date or proposing how to contribute. We are waiting for you ;)

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

Goteo 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”

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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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