Hi everyone
Firstly, a big welcome to some more amazing humans who have joined over the last couple of weeks. As always I am blown away by the, well, amazingness! of everyone and the range of skills from designers and filmmakers to Commons experts (I feel like there should be a nice egalitarian term for that but don’t know what it is. Commoners?) software engineers, spiritual teachers… and those are just the ones I know about. There are a few people I haven’t had any contact with yet so please do send me a message or comment below if you would like to say hi and have a chat.
I am enjoying the synchronicity that Lloyd Davis posted a link today to an MA course on Design for Cultural Commons run by Torange Khonsari, who has also just joined this group. It really makes me feel that between us we can build this platform and that as a collective we have what we need and are growing organically in the right direction all the time.
We have enough people now that we can start to create smaller groups and start moving forward the different aspects of the platform side-by-side (e.g. groups on Tech, Commons, Privacy & Security, Alternative Economics, Design, Community, Peace-building, Independent Media etc…) I’ll be thinking about how best to do that this week, and how to include people.
This next couple of weeks will be a time of reflection and consolidation, and also of communicating where we have got to so far which has been hard to do with so much work involved in organising the Global Sprint (which for those of you who don’t know was on the 10th and 11th May, where at least 45 of us met for 2 days of workshops and community to work towards developing a prototype of the platform.) Please let me know if you would like to help with this consolidation process over the next couple of weeks.
I am aware that there is lots of exciting news that is not so visible at the moment, and that we also need a way of storing and organising information, research, people & skills that is accessible but that does not compromise anyone’s privacy.
A couple of updates:
- Mozilla sent information about the Commons Platform to the University of Glasgow AHRC Digital Transformations, who invited us to speak at Furtherfield Commons on the 8th May, which was nice, and will lead to more conversations in future.
- For those who are interested, we will be interviewing Carne Ross on 4th June about his thoughts on decentralised ways of organising society and how this fits with the Commons Platform. Let me know if you have anything you want me to ask! (Many of you may know of him from this BBC video)
- I am planning to record more conversations with people to share thoughts about the platform from many different angles over the next couple of months, as it is a great way to communicate about the platform and its aims through video/podcasts etc. (I have notebooks stuffed full of notes from amazing conversations I have had with all kinds of people over the last year or so – from academics to economists, policy-makers etc, and I would love to be able to share that with people more easily in future.) Let me know if you want to be in one!
- GDPR: the new laws on data are coming into force tomorrow, 25th May. As Kade Morton pointed out, it would be good to have a clear policy on how we use people’s data, especially moving forwards. Anyone want to help with drawing it up?
That’s all for now.