Contact Followup

Dear Contacters,



Thanks for making October 20 a great success. Contact was most definitely established, and together we marked a moment in our collective history. As participants, sponsors, facilitators, occupiers, technologists, artists, activists, educators, librarians, students, and more, we came together to declare and release the greater potential of our networks to make a better world. Your collaboration and spirit humbled me greatly.

Of course, Contact was never about itself but about you and your initiatives. So it is with great pleasure that I share with you some of how we and our colleagues are moving forward with the ideas and projects we created together, as well as a little bit more about the Bazaar winners.

Remember, to stay in touch with people please consider joining the GoogleGroup we have set up, http://groups.google.com/group/contactsummit.

Also, as Contact participants you have the ability to create an IndieGogo campaign for free by using the code “socialweek.” Finally, if you’re particularly interested in “next net” initiatives, the http://groups.google.com/group/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet list has been going strong for a few months now.

Here are the four projects we committed to seeing happen, and how to take part:

Upgrading Democracy -Representation is a fundamental concept of our governance, but is encoded in the technology of the 18th century. The modern networked world enables a truer form of representation known variously under the names Dynamic Democracy, Liquid Democracy, and Delegable Proxy voting. This is an effort to use the net to enact these new forms of democracy. If you want to add your name to the email list to receive updates on the progress of this project go to http://upgradedemocracy.org/  For the Upgrading Democracy conference in San Francisco spring 2012, contact Micah Daigle at micahdaigle@gmail.com. For the Democracy Hackathon in Virginia, April 28 to May 5, 2012, contact Keenan Dakota at keenan@twinoaks.org. Session notes at http://forum.contactcon.com/discussion/23/upgrading-democracy.

Local Foodsharing platform -  Local food systems need tools that can help match needs (land, labor, tools, transportation, and more) to available resources without money acting as a barrier. Many resource-matching tools already exist. The Food MatchIt Project will identify and adapt them to specifically support the food space in a barter context. Join us and help: identify local food matching needs, inventory existing matching tools, and adapt existing tools (or maybe even build some new ones) in coordinated makeathons. To learn more and collaborate, sign up at http://FoodMatchIt.com

“Kick-Stopper” - Crowdsourced Unfunding - Working together in a coordinated debt strike/divestment campaign we can bring the banks back under democratic control and give teeth to the concrete demands that are being hammered out at GA’s and working groups around the country and the world. The goal of this project is to create a mechanism for organizing and coordinating large scale debt strike and divestment campaigns. The project is explained here: http://forum.contactcon.com/discussion/33/kick-stopper#Item_1

Join or learn more here: http://groups.google.com/group/debt-strike-kick-stopper

Collaboration Matchmaking Application - A collaboration matchmaking service bringing artists and geeks together with other sectors. This service aims to match one’s needs with the skills of the people who will openly collaborate to provide them. More information is here: http://technoevangelist.net/collaboration-matchmaking-service/  

Online General Assembly - This group, first convened by Dan Sieradski, folded itself into the Upgrade Democracy group. But it has its own mandate: to create an online version of the General Assembly technique for consensus building. Read about the genesis of this idea in this Contact Forum: http://forum.contactcon.com/discussion/24/online-general-assembly-building-a-platform-for-real-time-consensus-based-meetings  To join the effort, email participate@consenter.org or join the list http://groups.google.com/group/consenter

Meanwhile, MetaCurrency, Community Forge and other Contact participants re-thinking currency will be leading a Reimagining Money track at Occupy Wall Street today from 10am to 7pm. The Protest Currency Design competition is also completed, and results posted here:  http://moneyart.biz/ows/





At the end of the day, Reverend Billy officially blessed each of our three Bazaar Award winners as they were announced. The projects each received $10,000 from Pepsi, deposited as the seed money for free campaigns on IndieGogo. Winners were chosen by a team of judges selected from among the participants.

Runners up included: The Library Farm, New Hive, Meshkit, GiftFlow, Commotion, Tether, and Digital City Mechanics. The three winners were:

Fayetteville Free Library Fab Lab

The Fayetteville Free Library aims to be the first library in the United States to build a free, public access Fab Lab. At the foundation of the FFL's Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, central to the greater vision of encouraging local innovation, collaboration and education. Lauren Britton Smedley, who has spearheaded this effort, said “the FFL is excited to provide our community with free and open access to this technology.  We are building a replicable model with the hope that other libraries around the country will be able to follow and learn from our experience.  It was such a thrill to participate at the Contact Conference, it was truly an amazing and inspiring day."



Free Network Foundation

The Free Network Foundation is an organization whose purpose is to steward the creation of a censorship-proof, disruption-resistant, global peer-to-peer network which is fully owned and operated by its participants. They managed to get two prototype FreedomTowers up and running in time for Contact - one at Occupy Austin, the other here at Occupy Wall Street in Liberty Square. The towers are providing Internet access to the occupiers, and will be used to establish an occupation-to-occupation Virtual Private Network. Next steps for the FNF, according to its founder, Isaac Wilder, include continuing to build out their burgeoning Wide Area Network, applying to the American Registry for Internet Numbers for status as an Autonomous System, iterating and improving the design of FreedomTowers, and working with the FreedomBox project to build FreedomNode, a mesh-enabled FreedomBox capable of opportunistically engaging in communications that are materially peer-to-peer.

FreedomBox Foundation

FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. “Free communities require free communication.  Once we have that, no problem is beyond our ability to cooperate toward a solution,” says FreedomBox’s Executive Director, James Vasile.

Watch for links to these projects on IndieGoGo in the next few days.

Thanks from all of us to Pepsi for sponsoring Contact’s Bazaar Awards.



Stay in Contact



Video from some of the morning provocations is being posted to http://www.youtube.com/contactsummit  and photos of the day are going up here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1753586@N25/  Please feel free to add your own.

To upload your own media (video clips, audio, and imagery) to our collaborative video editing project (in order to mashup and export your own version of Contact), create a free account on WeVideo, then send an email with your account username to venessa@contactcon.com, and she'll add you to the project: http://www.wevideo.com/sign-up?marketplaceId=16409042&languageId=2&method=selfRegistrationForm&invitationId=zILZOIuZWXAZ1Mp/PHD8MnLwboUZCa2xlxgnEiGJ+kfqV7x3l66KnTQ8j1zVALlg



And again, thanks to everyone for choosing make Contact. To stay in touch with Contact - to keep the spirit of that day alive - please stay in touch with each other or one or more of the projects you conceived and developed. Contact was just an initiation. You are it.



All my best,

Douglas Rushkoff