I was approached by Lozana Rossenova (TIB Hannover) about whether I would be willing to participate in a research project with Wikimedia Europe looking at peer production and democratic governance.

Lozana has an excellent track record of working productively with the Wikipedia and Wikidata communities. Her proposal involves a team at Rotterdam who support the post.lurk.org Mastodon instance. They are interested in having SocialCoop as a case study, to help develop recommendations for practices, tools and policies that foster citizen engagement in democratic governed, online communities.

Below is some summary information about the goals of the project and the type of commitment they are looking for from one or more SocialCoop members.

Before putting in a proposal for people to vote on, I thought it would be useful to start a conversation here to see what people thought about one or more SocialCoop members participating (minimally me).

Aspects we will explore

The idea of the case studies is to present a series of best practices:

1. We will look in particular at issues related to governance (in particular decision-making and your approach in community-governance), interoperability, attribution/sources (how you manage your content and how people and content is attributed), engagement (how you foster participation) and technology (which technology do you use, which media and tools, which methods).

2. We would like to know from you which difficulties, challenges, obstacles you encounter in your practice (e.g. which laws and regulatory frameworks affect you such as privacy, copyright, removal of illegal content) and how those challenges impacted your choices (i.e. if you had to design your platforms in a certain way for content moderation systems, if you had to adapt your terms of service, if you had to plan procedural mechanisms for removing content, other choices related to copyright, privacy settings and policies….).

3. We would like to discuss with you some new prototypes and tools we plan to develop within the project, related in particular to the fediverse, the Wikimedia ecosystem and decision-making tools like Loomio: if you think they can be useful and which other tools can support your work.  

Commitment requested 

We ask groups and institutions involved as case studies to:

1. Contribute to the research with an interview.

2. Review the research related to their practice to provide feedback.

3. Providing if possible some content under the CC BY-SA license which will be uploaded also on Wikimedia Commons (i.e. images of your institutions, screenshot of tools/websites, images of initiatives…) or allowing us to produce some images under the CC BY-SA license if possible.

4. If possible participating in a prototype workshop to discuss tools and methods which can be useful to support your work. 

5. If possible participating in a focus group to discuss policy recommendations for the EU and member states.

6. Receiving the project outputs and be updated about the project, to have the possibility to provide feedback.