Comunes is a nonprofit organization aiming to encourage the commons and facilitating grassroots work through free software web tools. Previously known as Ourproject.org, this collective established itself as a legal entity in 2009, forming Comunes. Nowadays it serves as an umbrella organization for several projects related to the Commons.[1]
Philosophy and Values
The objectives of the Communes include providing legal protection[2] to member projects, together with technical infrastructure. The organization claims[3] to be inspired by Software in the Public Interest organization, which provides similar protection to free software projects. Comunes member projects must focus on encouraging the protection or expansion of the Commons.[4] Comunes Manifesto[5] shows a view on the social movements as nodes in a social network, analysing which problems this ecosystem has[6] and proposing Comunes web tools for diminishing them.
Projects
Ourproject.org
Ourproject.org[7] is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for offering web space and tools for projects of any topic, focusing on free culture and free knowledge. It aims to extend the ideas and methodology of free software to social areas and free culture in general. Thus, it provides multiple web services (hosting, mailing lists, wiki, ftp, forums, etc.) to an online community of social,[8] cultural,[9] artistic,[10] and educational[11] projects as long as they share their contents with Creative Commons licenses (or other free/libre licenses). Active since 2002, Ourproject.org hosts 1,200 projects and its services receive more than 1 million monthly visits.[12]
Kune
Kune[13] is a software platform for federated social networking and collaborative work, focusing on workgroups rather than in individuals.[14][15] Kune aims to allow the creation of online spaces of collaborative work, where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings and join organizations with similar interests. It is programmed using GWT, on top of the XMPP protocol and integrating Wave-In-A-Box. Licensed under AGPL, it has been under development since 2007[16][17] and it launched a beta and production site in April 2012.
Move Commons
Move Commons (MC)[18] is a web tool for initiatives, collectives, and NGOs to declare and make visible their core principles.[19][20] The idea behind MC follows the same mechanics of Creative Commons tagging cultural works,[21] providing a user-friendly, bottom-up, labelling system for each initiative, with four meaningful icons and some keywords. It aims to boost the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, and build a network among related initiatives/collectives, allowing mutual discovery. Additionally, newcomers could easily understand the collective approach in their website, or discover collectives matching their field/location/interests with a semantic search. It has been presented in several forums.[22][23][24][25][26] Nowadays it is in beta version, but there are already a few organizations using their MC badges.[27][28][29][30][31][32]
Other projects
Comunes includes other newer projects such as Alerta,[33] the community-driven alert system, Plantaré,[34] the community currency for seed exchange, and others.[35]
Partners
Comunes has developed partnership with several organizations:
GRASIA (Group of Software Agents, Engineering & Applications):[36] Research group of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, it is collaborating with Comunes to offer joint grants to students and provide hardware resources.[37]
The Master of Free Software of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid): offering students the chance to complete their compulsory Master internships in the free software community of Comunes projects.
Medialab-Prado:[38] Serves as a forum to present Comunes initiatives.[22][39] One of them, Move Commons, is part of their Commons Lab.[40]
IEPALA Foundation:[41] It has hired a programmer for the development of Kune and provides technical resources for an alpha-testing environment.[42]
^De Pedro, Xavier; et al. (2006). "Writing documents collaboratively in Higher education using Traditional vs. Wiki methodology (I)". The Fourth Congress of the International University Teaching and Innovation (IV CIDUI). 10.
