Details website
As it was mentioned many times on the #bolognaburns weekend that the movement needs a common exchange platform, so people gathered and shared their ideas. So far the needs of the website were information, communication and documentation.
Information about the decentral acting groups all over the world needs a tools, which is collecting information from different sources like facebook, twitter, video feeds and rss feeds from mass media sources, autonomous media platforms and blogs of activists or local groups ... We have the idea of a multifeed display.
Communication between all activists or passivists can be realized in a minimal social network, which gives you the possibility...
to do direct messaging,
start groups for transnational team working,
a chat,
offering couches for travelling learners or teachers
sharing transportation to events
...
Documentation in its most flexible and grass roots way is made possible in this wiki. Feel free to write anything you want to share. If you have questions feel free o ask as well =).
- International Student Movement (ISM) is a international platform for education protests. Please get in contact with them and organise perhaps a relaunche of this website. There is also a mailinglist with around 1100 members behind the website. It's easier for everybody to use these structures which allready exists. -wurzellicht
Research - Journal a platform for research and transnational peer learning.
Invitation to mailing list to discuss the website
Dear you out there,
there has been a meeting of people from different regions of Europe in Vienna on Sunday, 14th May 2010. There the idea for creating a new international web site was born. There was a follow-up online meeting by some of these people on Monday, 22nd of May.
We discussed a few of the aspects that we would like the web site to have. In order to develop and discuss this project further we started an international mailing list to which you are heartily invited. Feel free to join us on http://lists.fuos.de/mailman/listinfo/internationalwebsite There you can enter your e-mail address and discuss with us on how to construct this web site.
The e-mail address of this mailing list is "internationalwebsite (at] fuos,de" . The server „@fuos.de“ was contributed by one of the activists from Osnabrück, Germany and stands for „Freie Universität Osnabrück“ (Free University of Osnabrueck) which is a project that started with student protests there in autumn 2009. The choice for this server was because of a lack of alternatives and is not meant to be Eurocentrist.
Our aim is to not only discuss on the mailing list but also to write our concepts and ideas for the international web site into the wiki that was created also for this purpose after the summit in Vienna. You can find it here: http://wiki.bolognaburns.org/wiki/index.php/Bolognaburns_community
We hope that our aims for a better education and society can be furthered through this project.
With best wishes, René from Osnabrück
on behalf of the people who met online on Monday, 22nd May 2010
Ideas from the chat meeting on Monday, 22nd May
- Integrate something like the following pilot project in Spain. The people from that project thought about starting with erasmus or interchange students, so that international students coming to Barcelona find useful information about political participation at Barcelona's universities. The way assemblies work, when and where they meet, what the symbolism is. Then, Barcelona students willing to go abroad also find a list of possible placements (the ones the several universities have agreements with) and information about the struggle there, and a contact person or group. Of course people's adresses won't be put online unless they say that is okay. Ideally we would only have networking groups contacts.
- Something like couchsurfing.org for education activists could be integrated on the website. People are travelling so much nowadays... but they have no idea what groups to contact where. It could be a page where all groups and single activists who are generally interested in networking with others when they happen to travel to "their" city leave their contact details. So people can always very easily get in touch with the local education activists and meet up and network. The local activist groups could then optionally state, if they also have a place to sleep for fellow activists coming from elsewhere or if they are just interested in networking with them.
- Both of these ideas can be realised in a social network where you can do direct message and start groups for traveling-bed-sharing-meetings... and any other group working transnationally on whatever needs to be worked on.
Idea on resistant research groups
An idea from Osnabrück, Germany put into a presentation file. This idea can help with the website project by focusing local team work efforts on the goal of creating such a website.
Research groups – Concept
- Free: student-organised, resistant, critical, collective learning processes
- Topic – find a theme, a broad research question that you and others want to investigate further.
- Involve others – Find fellow students who want to do research together on the theme.
- Use professors – Convince them to support the research group. You formulate the research question (for an essay, a presentation, a Hausarbeit, a thesis (Bachelor, Master, Diplom, Magister). They give you credit points for it.
- Shared platform – Share this knowledge with your local activist group but also with other activists. Feed the produced content (documents, videos of presentations, slides) into an open and freely accesible platform.
Research groups - Example
- Theme and goal: Create a web service that supports educational activist movements in organising political and social processes on the web.
- Research topics: social/political processes, group decision making, the history of social activism and protest movements, web design
- Involved subjects: Information Technology, Sociology, Politology, History, Critical Science, Psychology
An afterthought on freedom
- This is not a free and totally emancipated research. These research groups would make use of (and therefore continue thinking in) the achievement mechanisms of the orthodox university, i. e. degrees and credit points. The students would still depend on the good will and power of a professor to „allow“ them to work on a topic and give them a degree/credit points for it.
- Balance between two ideals (finishing your studies with a degree – being critical and free): Do research from which a protest movement could benefit and get a degree for it.