I am helping to write a proposal for €1-2m EU university research funds to build ...
Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS).
I dub this software4transition.
The EU call for proposals has 3 key elements:
- Decentralised Social Networking
- Co-operative creation and sharing of knowledge
- Low power, real-time info gathering (from people or sensors)
See leaflet:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/collectiveawareness/docs/caps-leaflet.pdf
and description:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/collectiveawareness/index_en.htm
This is a great opportunity to build some software (infrastructure), that could help Transition initiatives.
Our immediate challenge is to develop ideas which satisfy the EU funders (so we actually get funded) and are really useful to the Transition Network and community sustainability groups.
Software Ecosystem for Energy Descent (SEED)
Our current working proposal is SEED, see the diagram attached. We envisage that SEED would interoperate closely with current and future Transition Drupal sites.
Request for ideas
We are already talking to people in Transition Network (TN), TN web developers, Transition Town activists and community sustainability initiatives.
We would love to hear your creative ideas for how this project (SEED) could support the Transition to a sustainable society (particularly ideas which fit with the funding criteria).
Thanks
Julian Briggs
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Comments
co-munity.net, degrowth and transition
Hi Julian,
We have been already in indirect mail exchange approaching this issue, but as I just stepped now on this thread, I thought it would be interesting to bring the discussion into this forum and possibly get some more input and convergence of projects.
co-munity.net is an Open Atrium based setup, that aims at providing an exchange and organisational platform - eventually building up a social network - directed for organisations, groups and people active in agroecology, permaculture, community supported agriculture (CSA), degrowth, transition initiatives, among others. The platform was created with the EU Grundtvig funded "Beyond our Backyards" (BoB) project, with a focus on supporting collaborative development of learning initiatives and materials.
We view co-munity.net as a bootstrap style project. It went on production with a nearly plain Open Atrium installation profille and, using the few resources available, adapted the setting to make it a more desirable experience for the target community of users and improving the interaction between the different profiles of people involved in the topics (academic, activist, gardener, ...).
In a certain way, it follows a very permaculturalist principle: watching what people use, what they like, what they don't like. Developing as deemed necessary and according to the available resources.
Some organisations - Transition Initiatives, CSA, Degrowth projects, Research groups - are already successfully using the platform and have made several feature requests, most of them waiting for further development. We have submitted another Grundtvig project, involving degrowth and transition organisations, as well as research institutions. The project "Learning more, GROWing Less" (GROWL), a 2-year project of which we are waiting decision, proposes to rely on co-munity.net, supporting with some funding new features deemed necessary to support the project aim of creating a modular "degrowth" course and pool of trainers on degrowth. By relying on the features/apps system of Drupal and Open Atrium, we have the door open for cooperation with other initiatives on the development of new Drupal features or apps.
We have created a group to work on articulating the different platforms and developments on similar initiatives (http://co-munity.net/distributed/). I invite you to join that space and I am looking forward for the possibility of cooperation on this developments and potential integration of the co-munity.net platform developments with the SEED project.
Best,
Gualter