Comunes is a non-profit collective dedicated to facilitating the use of free/libre web tools and resources to collectives and activists alike, with the hopes of encouraging the Commons.
A quick summary of our initiatives is as follows:
Web Tools & Services
Ourproject.org is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for offering web space and tools for projects of any topic, focusing on free knowledge. It aims to extend the ideas and methodology of free software to social areas and free culture in general. Thus, it provides multiple web services (hosting, mailing lists, wiki, ftp, forums…) to social/cultural/artistic projects as long as they share their contents with Creative Commons licenses (or other free/libre licenses). Active since 2002, nowadays it hosts 1,733 projects and its services receive around 1,000,000 monthly visits.
Kune is a platform for encouraging collaboration, content sharing & free culture. It aims to improve/modernize/replicate the labor of what ourproject.org does, but in an easier manner and expanding on its features for community-building. It allows for the creation of online spaces of collaborative work, where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings and join people/orgs with similar interests. It sums up the characteristics of online social networks with collaborative software, aimed at groups and boosting the sharing of contents among orgs/peers. It is still under development, with the support of the IEPALA Foundation. You can check it out here!.
Move Commons (MC) is a simple web tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare and visualize the core principles they are committed to. The idea behind MC follows the same mechanics of Creative Commons tagging cultural works, providing a user-friendly, bottom-up, labeling system for each initiative with 4 meaningful icons and some keywords. It aims to boost the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, building a network among related initiatives/collectives across the world and allowing mutual discovery. Thus, it can facilitate the climb up to critical mass. Added to which, newcomers could easily understand the collective approach in their website, and/or discover collectives matching their field/location/interests with a simple search. Although there are a few initiatives already with their MC, it is still a beta-version under development, with the support of the Medialab-Prado Commons Lab .
Other projects
- Alerta! is a community-driven alert system
- Plantaré is a community currency for seed exchange
- The World of Alternatives is a proof-of-concept initiative that aims to classify and document collectively alternatives of our “Another World is Possible” in Wikipedia
- Karma is a proof-of-concept gadget for a decentralized reputation rating system
- Massmob is a proof-of-concept gadget for calling and organizing meetings and smart mobs
- Troco is a proof-of-concept gadget of a peer-to-peer currency
- Brick (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for guiding student assignments towards the solution of real problems and the sharing of their results for reusing/replicating/adapting the solutions
- Ideas (temporal nickname) is a forthcoming initiative for brainstorming ideas of possible social projects related to the Commons
If you found interesting any of our projects, you should have a look at our Join page… who knows? Maybe you would like to join any of our activities! On the other hand, you might be a FLOSS geek: then this is your corner.