Group assembly on communication and networking, process 2018

Circles
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During the group assembly process of the Malmö conference, an earlier proposal has been reactivated by @gandhiano and me to help sustain web-supported, accountable communication practice for degrowth networks. In doing so we wish to provide contemporary means of communication, based soley on libre tools. These have well evolved in the past years to aid the escape from communicative echochambers or implicit knowledge hierarchies, such as Facebook or mailing lists¹.

The proposal addresses explicit needs of communities within the degrowth network, which come up in everyday practice with information and communication technology. These are:

  • Presentation of all associated services in a single place online
  • Unified login for all services
  • Sharing of files and calendars
  • Communication channels of different qualities
    • public and private
    • structured and real-time
    • integration with e-mail
  • Visualisation of participating communities

From these needs, which were collected in unstructured survey with different peers during the conference, and by engaging with the group assembly process, we concluded the proposal as of:

With some special voluntary effort during the last week we have realised the following components:

Remaining and upcoming are:

  • chat.degrowth.net
    Messaging across all platforms (Web/Android/iOS)
  • learn.degrowth.net
    Simple documentation system for providing accessibility and guidance to the new conversation streams

Other existing platforms will continue to function:

We are almost finished with configuring the services, but need help in taking the group process online and initiate first exchanges through the new channels. This also means for us to be explicit in describing the conversation channels, mentioning the groups and coordinators that moderate them and to provide overall documentation early on.

I have compiled an overview of good settings and missing content for them at:

Please have a look there, if you feel like helping out with bootstrapping a concise online environment for degrowth communities. We have done the technical part, and now we need only a little support from your group.

What’s left to prepare from your point of view?

Thanks in advance, Jon

¹ https://2018.ar.al/notes/farewell-not-goodbye/

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The entrypoints to the tools and their usage are being prepared in:

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Dear @gap, after spending a day today on visuals and appearance, I have now published the all new degrowth.net.

Any comments or opinions are appreciated. The documentation for the individual services will be written next week. Until then we’re also cleaning up and stabilising group and category names here.

If not delivered elsewhere, we will ingest the group descriptions from https://etherpad.net/p/degrowth_working_group here.

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thanks jon, good job, looks great!

  • do you think it would be possible/easy to offer a multi-lingual option - at least in spanish (i am coming back from mexico and there are many non-english-speaking persons interested in joining the network) - i can provide the translation for the page you shared;
  • will the mailing lists be available on that website too, in their relative session?
    thanks again,
    best,
    silvio
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Hi @si7vio!

Yes, the community of developers around the website theme that we use provided examples about how to internationalise it. This was also a question of choice when deciding about the theme for the learn.degrowth.net knowledge base.

The email addresses of the working groups have been published at

They deliver the messages right into the private categories that are mentioned there, like #group-assembly-process:research. Remember we’re still setting things up here. Please refer to the last hack.allmende.io link above, if you want to see more details. As a group moderator, you have the choice to make the list behave like a general mailing list, if you prefer. Please tell us, if so.

Then every participant will receive a notification about every message being exchanged there. You also have the choice of having a public discourse, if you wish. More on that in a separate mail.