Invitation mail 1
Hi,
you receive this mail, because the sender thinks, that you might be interested in a new project dealing with 'resource sharing'. It's about sharing of goods, skills, knowledge, ... based on a criticism of abstract value and alienation (keywords: collectivism, solidaric economy, gift economy, communism). Sharing takes place already today, but only on a very small scale, like between close friends. Broadening this practice (also qualitatively) fails, among other things, because of the communication effort and missing trust (due to the lack of an observable common practice). Therefore the idea is to use the "internet" (as a communication tool, not as an alienating medium) for building a decentralized network, in order to expand the possibilities of a common practice.
The message is: There is a new project with exactly this aim, and this is the first invitation to join in. And not only to programmers, but to all who really want to live beyond commodity economy.
What do I expect from you?
1. If you are interested in this topic, please consider joining the project. It is not a fulltime job, we also seek after consultants who can give us tips on specific questions (or help with occasional translations from mostly german into readable english :-) ).
2. Please consider if you know people who are interested in a practical criticism of exchange in combination with the internet, and please forward this mail to them.
3. If you know people with coding skills (or people who want to learn coding) who want to overcome commodity economy, then please forward this mail to them.
Here you can find more information (for now, the project is named 'wws'):
- (wws-project wiki)
- (project plan, albeit only in german)
- NutziGems: http://www.nutzigems.org/
- und http://www.nutzigems.org/wiki/index.php?title=Entw%C3%BCrfe
- (forerunner software project and basic texts, unfortunately only in german)
What are the next steps, if you want to join?
1) Mailing list ( wws-project@yahoogroups.de ) Of course, in the beginning many important questions have to be discussed. Please join the mailing list by simply sending an empty mail to: wws-project-subscribe@yahoogroups.de
2) Wiki ( http://wws.dynalias.org/ ) This MediaWiki (extended by some nice semantic functions) contains already some ideas concerning the data model; there is however still pretty much to do. Please don't hesitate to add your ideas, criticism or questions to the wiki, and if you like also something about you. The wiki is not just for the programmers, but also for the actual networking project: What shall the software do? Which communication features shall it have, and which not? How does trust/cooperation emerge?
If you are in Berlin at Nov, 24th..26th, then you should try to visit www.solidarische-oekonomie.de, which is the first gathering of alternative economical projects (for a german speaking audience).
Thanks for reading, or forwarding! Your feedback is very welcome!
love,
