[drn-discuss] Musings on an open knowledge movement

Sat Jun 4 13:32:06 PDT 2005

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 04:57:21PM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> Tom Chance wrote:
> >Ahoy,
> >
> >After various discussions, culminating in a really good chat with Rufus 
> >last night, I've put together a collection of thoughts on an "open 
> >knowledge movement".
> >
> >Have a read, distribute and comment away:
> >http://tom.acrewoods.net/node/92
> 
> First off a big thank you for producing such a coherent and 
> comprehensive analysis. There had been some discussion of similar issues 
> back in February after the first Copyfighters event (I've just posted a 
> long email i wrote during that discussion here: 
> http://www.okfn.org/drn/node/57) but that thread never resolved on a 
> plan of action. There's also the OKFN governance document that lays out 
> a formal structure quite similar to what you suggest:
> 
>   http://www.okfn.org/governance.html
[...]
> I think it is really interesting to see that this kind of setup has 
> already been successfully done in the environmental movement in groups 
> such as People and Planet. Thus there's no reason it can't be done here.

thank you for sharing your ideas; I too think that a good balance
between local groups with specific expertise/campaigning power/local
links and uk-wide coordination on strategic decisions is fundamental to
overcome the weaknesses Tom outlined.

And yes, finding out which-group-is-doing-what is overly complicated at
the moment: activist-groups mapping projects like Jo Walsh's one are
needed - and I too am working on ideas for a more distributed resource
mapping system.

But aside from the technical bits, that we could surely work out quite
easily, I think we should really start out by defining core aims and an
overall strategy.

If, on one hand, a structure like the one outlined by Tom is flexible
enough to allow each local group to choose how to contribute to any
specific campaign (or to step out of some of those at all, if they don't
have enough resources and specific expertise), we should anyway probably
start by focusing on a few areas (e.g. creative commons and free
software) only and then build from here, campaign through campaign,
recruiting more activists, getting more resources and media coverage and
so on.

Do we want to start by aggregating in the freeculture-uk project? This
has the benefit of being part of a broader movement, that has already
good visibility and is well linked with CC, that in turn has excellent
visibility.

Regards,
Andrea