Comunes Collective


Comunes is a nonprofit organization with the stated aims of encouraging the Commons and facilitating the grassroots work through free/libre web tools. Previously known as Ourproject.org, this collective established itself as legal entity in 2009, forming Comunes. Nowadays it serves as an umbrella organization for several projects related to the Commons.

Philosophy and aims

Among the Comunes' objectives are to provide legal protection to member projects, together with technical infrastructure. It claims 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. Comunes Manifesto shows a view on the social movements as nodes in a social network, analysing which problems this ecosystem has and proposing Comunes web tools for diminishing them.

Projects

Ourproject.org

Ourproject.org 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 in 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 to an online community of social/cultural/artistic/educational projects as long as they share their contents with Creative Commons licenses. Active since 2002, nowadays it hosts 1200 projects and its services receive more than 1,000,000 monthly visits.

Kune

is a software platform for federated social networking and collaborative work, focusing on workgroups rather than in individuals. It 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 Affero GPL, it is under development since 2007 and it launched a beta and production site in April 2012.

Move Commons

Move Commons is a web tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare and visibilize the core principles they are committed to. The idea behind MC follows the same mechanics of Creative Commons tagging cultural works, providing a user-friendly, bottom-up, labelling system for each initiative, with four meaningful icons, and some keywords. It aims at boosting the visibility and diffusion of such initiatives, and building a network among related initiatives/collectives, allowing mutual discovery. Besides, 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. Nowadays it is in beta version, but there are already a few organizations using their MC badges.

Other projects

Comunes includes other young projects such as Alerta , Plantaré and others.

Partners

Comunes has developed partnership with several organizations: