Federated General Assembly

Hi everyone,

This week we’ll be hosting a public Skype chat about The Federated General Assembly (FGA), an open source, distributed social platform built around groups activating on the ground for social change – where information is broadcast between people, groups, and organizations in contexts that bring new meaning, value, and trust to relationships.

FGA is being developed as a redistributable Drupal package with functionality including and exceeding that of nycga.net, made available for all occupations, and linking each of the sites together into a federated communication network.

A recent Wired article describes the FGA (along with Global Square) as “Occupy Geeks… Building a Facebook for the 99%”. The FGA project wiki offers a shorter introduction:

Occupy Wall Street has captured the attention of the world. Since its inception on September 17th, it has spread from the founding occupation at Liberty Plaza in New York City to thousands of cities and countless minds across the globe. This expansion has carried with it principles of participation, inclusivity, and consensus. Application of these principles have helped result in a “leaderless” movement - one where we rely primarily on process, rather than charismatic individuals, to drive us forward.

Achieving good process is hard, even under the best of circumstances. And Occupy is hardly the best of circumstances: many millions of voices representing various forms of involvement, experience, identity, and (of course) desperation, all spread across a huge geographic area. The movement is absolutely committed to creating substantial, far-reaching change, but is equally committed to maintaining the grassroots process. Satisfying both goals at once is a daunting challenge. Scaling participatory process to thousands in an individual occupation is already a herculean task; scaling it to the millions who would participate in the movement as a whole requires a major leap in organizing and communication techniques.

The Federated General Assembly (FGA) project is trying to make that leap. We are building a new web platform that combines community organizing techniques and ideas, lessons and patterns from social networks, web standards and best practices, all together with the very real ecosystem of Occupy itself: occupations & their working groups, the values and principles, and all the coordination & communication challenges. We believe that by reflecting the “brick and mortar” reality of occupations, their working groups, their processes and the ideas, goals and actions they produce within this online platform, we can support both meaningful participation by millions of individuals right alongside the development of movement-wide trends.

FGA is very much an ongoing project, and we are very interested in bringing more people into our process.

There’s also an effort toward visually Mapping the movement, developing in connection with the FGA process.

We’re looking forward to this week’s public chat about FGA, with the group of people responsible for developing it, with anyone working on similar projects, and everyone else interested!

Join us this Tuesday

• On Skype (skypename: ‘basekamp’).
• If you have any trouble with Skype, ping us on IRC.

See you all then!

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