Open Coalition
Welcome to the homepage of the Open Coalition project. This page will act as a portal for the project, offer useful updates and highlight ways that volunteers from “open” communities can participate in the project. More content will be added here, and to sub-pages, as the project progresses.
History
The idea for the project emerged towards the end of 2013. It became apparent that many of the organisations working in the field of open shared areas of overlap. Work was sometimes duplicated, lines of communication between organisations and communities were sometimes weak and there was lots of potential for closer ties between open groups. Following some tentative discussions, a session about this was delivered at MozFest in October 2013 based around the idea of developing an open coalition.
The objectives of the coalition are varied and include supporting various open organisations and communities in the development of collaboration, a shared web presence where useful information can be aggregated and the creation of other resources that support these aims.
The project has been initially funded by Wikimedia UK and Bekka Kahn has been appointed as the project co-ordinator for six months. During this time Bekka will be working to develop the concept as well as co-ordinating efforts to achieve the coalition's aims. While the post has been funded by Wikimedia UK, Bekka's role is to support all interested parties and support the coalition more broadly.
Resources
Bekka's role description can be seen here. This provides an overview of her role and what she will be working to achieve.
This page gives a little more context to the project's inception
Digital Democracy - add your voice to our submission to the Parliamentary Commission
In theory there are many lessons that any attempt to increase engagement with digital democracy can learn from open projects. These include the participatory nature of content development and the nature of content (and policy) being arrived at by consensus. Open organisations and the people involved in them are from a wide array of backgrounds and represent a broad spectrum of views. This could lend itself to effective drafting of the kind of evidence that the Speaker is looking for. The Open Coalition, Wikimedia UK and Demos would like to establish whether this is indeed the case. In particular, we are seeking answers to the following questions:
- How can technology help Parliament and other agencies to scrutinise the work of government?
- How can technology help citizens scrutinise the Government and the work of Parliament?
- What kinds of data should Parliament and Government release to the public to make itself more open to outside scrutiny?
Everyone is encouraged to try to answer these questions collaboratively, in much the same way Wikipedia articles are approached - using the space below for content and talk page for discussion, as well as our collaborative etherpad. Staff from Wikimedia UK, The Coalition and Demos will happily answer any questions on the talk page but are equally happy to let the process take its course.
At this point there is no fixed deadline for evidence on the theme of digital scrutiny. However, the Speaker’s Commission will be publishing publishing a single call for evidence covering our last three themes (yet to be announced). The conversation and crowdsourced evidence will be reviewed at the end of June with a view to either continuing the process or submitting as is. If there is appetite among the community, and if the first attempt is successful, there may be further attempts to develop submissions to the later three themes.
At the end of the process Demos, Wikimedia UK and the Open Coalition will prepare a report on the process and the effectiveness of this kind of approach to crowdsourcing policy and evidence. This paper will be released under an open licence. It is a real opportunity for everyone working in the open space to influence the debate about digital democracy and both Wikimedia UK, Demos and the Open Coalition thank you for engaging with this idea.
Background to the Call
The Speaker of the House of Commons of the UK, John Bercow, has established a Commission on Digital Democracy. It will report to Parliament in early 2015 with recommendations on how Parliament can use technology to better represent and engage with the electorate, make laws and hold the powerful to account. As part of their work, the Commission have issued a series of calls for evidence. These are open invitations for members of the public, either as individuals or groups, to submit responses to a series of questions. They have attracted responses from unions, academics, non-governmental institutions and private individuals. The first theme was ‘making laws in a digital age’, and the second on ‘digital scrutiny’. The Commission plans to shortly publish the final three themes.
There is a growing sense that the growth of the Internet has not paid the democratic dividends that it could. Turnout in formal political elections is steadily decreasing, and trust and support in the institutions and offices of mainstream political life are low and falling. Despite many innovative attempts from both within and outside of Government, the daily reality of democratic engagement for most people in the UK would be familiar to generations of British citizens who predate Facebook or email. The rise of the Internet has, broadly, done little to challenge concentrations of power or structures of unequal representation
Demos is one of Britain’s leading cross-party think tank and it has an overarching mission to bring politics closer to people. They contacted Wikimedia UK to propose an experiment: can an online community be used to source a response to this call? Can the ethos, community and technology like that of Wikipedia be used to engage Wikipedians to come together and collaborate to create a reply? In particular, Carl Miller, Research Director of the Demos Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, wrote this piece in for Wired in which he describes Wikipedia as a masterclass in digital democracy.
Ways to get involved
Open Coalition Meet & Greet - 19 May 2014
When: Mon, May 19, 4pm
Where: Wikimedia UK Office and online
Why? To help us start building the Open Coalition (and see old friends, make new ones and have a drink)
Join us in London to meet Bekka Kahn, the new co-ordinator at the Open Coalition, and get involved in building the coalition. We'll talk about improving communication, sharing experiences and start mapping out plans for the 6 months. We'll also have a dial-in set up for those who are outside the UK, so everyone can take part.
Can't make it to the Meet & Greet? There are some simple things you can do to get involved and help us build the coalition:
- Follow @opencoalition on Twitter for all the latest news
- Tweet this: Help spread open collaboration across the web. Join the #opencoalition
- Join our mailing list: open-coalition(at)googlegroups(dot)com either by dropping a note on the talk page or by emailing above
- Join the coalition - get involved on this wiki (later to be followed by a shared presence) and help to shape the project as it grows
As the project progresses more opportunities to participate will be listed here.
Next steps
Bekka and other people involved in the development of the coalition will maintain this page with latest news. The talk page can be used for questions, comments and general discussion.
Report, 16 June 2014
Progress
Since the Coalition started work at the start of May, progress has been made in two main areas - internal organisational development and projects involving external partners. Both have been given invaluable support by Wikimedia UK.
Internally, communications have been set up, specifically via a Google groups mailing list, and this is the main space where community building is taking place. One of the key objectives for this list is to recruit community members beyond the partner organisations, and involve organisations and individuals who are involved in different areas of open work and the open movement. Hosting has been purchased (although moving to another hosting service might be necessary) and the domain open-coalition.org has been secured.
In terms of engagement with external partners, the Coalition has secured programme space at the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OKFest (Berlin, mid-July) Wikimania (London, early-August) and Mozilla’s MozFest (London, late-October). Considering the current 6-month timeframe of the Coalition project, these events are useful progress markers for evaluating the project’s activities and achievements.
The Coalition has put out a call for submissions to the crowd sourcing democracy project which is being run in conjunction with Wikimedia UK and DEMOS - some submissions have been made and this process is ongoing. The Coalition also presented a short outline and general plan of action at the Wikimania Fringe Free Culture event on the weekend of June 7-8, and reception was good, with Wikimania Netherlands showing interest in the possibility of replicating or duplicating a similar project in Europe.
Priorities
Priorities for the moment are also both internal and external. Internally, we are working on developing the Coalition’s web presence via a website with an integrated blog and designing a logo. This is high priority.
Externally, the Coalition is working on the workshop session at OKFest, which will feed into an ongoing project to map the Open Space. This project has some overlap with a mapping project that the Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Data Institute are working on, and which we have discussed as a possible collaboration.
The Coalition is also working with the Wikimedia UK team on an Open Drinks networking event to take place in the lead-up to Wikimania, which will be important for networking, building the community and profile of the Coalition and for making first contact with potential funders.
Overall, this will be vital to extending the existence of the Coalition beyond the initial 6 months for which we currently have funding.
Process
So far, the process of establishing the Open Coalition has been refreshingly straightforward and simple. This is due to the support from Wikimedia UK which has been exceptional. However, if the project is to survive beyond October, support from other partner organisations is essential and this fundraising process has begun. Key to this is developing a communications strategy for the project, which will help to communicate projects and progress to the wider community online. This strategy is currently in development. The necessity of bringing in external help to build a website and design a logo (both of which are essential for developing the profile of the Coalition and differentiating it from Wikimedia UK) has been a bottleneck - hopefully this will be resolved soon, as quotes for the work have been received from several contractors and a decision will be made soon. In retrospect, the fact that the Coalition found itself involved in collaborations and projects such as the DEMOS project has meant that the project hit the ground running and some of the initial infrastructure set-up tasks were pushed back. However, most of these have been addressed, and the growing support for the Coalition and interest in projects from external groups is heartening.
One way to support this momentum is to establish a regular “Coalition Office Hour” - a live hangout online, at a convenient time, which is open to all who might want to log in and discuss Coalition projects.