introduction to crabgrass

PROJECT CRABGRASS

SOFTWARE FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZING

Social movements have grown more adept at using the web to communicate publicly. However, we could still use a lot of help in communicating amongst ourselves. In particular, we need the ability to communicate securely; the ability to make decisions between groups and networks that are geographically disbursed; and the ability to have a decision process that is easy to understand, transparent, and directly democratic.

GOALS

The social networking phenomenon holds much promise, but it is clear that the revolution will not be hosted by myspace. We are building a web application currently called Crabgrass with these main goals:

DEVELOPMENT

There are three core components to this project.

  1. Democracy in Action Resource Center (DARC): A reference library of democratic systems and structures.
  2. Crabgrass: free software written in rails.
  3. Fusenetwork (name likely to change): A secure instance of the software most likely to be hosted by riseup.net.

Our plan is to develop the project in these phases:

This is a not for profit project. It’s a labor of love being undertaken in an effort to create a tool that we believe can streamline democratic processes and increase transparency and unity in social justice groups.

The initial development crew consists of a programmer, Elijah Saxon, from the riseup collective; a designer and project manager, Daniel Scott, formerly of NYC indymedia; and a consultant on democratic process, Brooke Lehman, from the Institute for Social Ecology. We are looking for more people to collaborate with and to actively join the project. We have some initial resources to compensate additional programmers and plan to aggressively fund raise in the near future. It is our hope that we will be able to write grants using the name and reputation of organizations that choose to join the project.

STAMP: MeetingNotes/CrabGrass (dernière édition le 2008-12-19 19:00:04 par anonyme)