This has been proposed by these guys here already: http://movecommons.org I am not sure about the status of this project though, I think to recall they tried a crowd-funding campaign which was not successful. 2013/5/19 Poor Richard <[email protected]>
I can see applications of this concept for "Researching p2p practices in a fragmented state." Michel Bauwens posted this link on facebook: https://sites.google.com/site/multitude2008/Home/politics/ towards-leaderless-social-mass-movements/rethinking-social-movements#TOC -Here-s-one-solution
<https://sites.google.com/site/multitude2008/Home/politics/towards-leaderless-social-mass-movements/rethinking-social-movements#TOC-Here-s-one-solution>Excerpt from Multitude site (Creative Commons Attribution):
"First proposed by Tiberius Brastaviceanu<http://www.google.com/profiles/tiberius.brastaviceanu>
. ------------------------------ "Build a *smart widget* to play the role of *banner* for the social movement. Nowadays, every individual or small organization that associates with a movement has a presence on the Internet. In the past, members and organizations part of a movement wore a banner to identify themselves and to communicate to others that they belong to that particular movement. In our case this banner becomes a *smart banner*, a widget, which marks individuals and organizations in the virtual space, which is "wore"* *on people's blogs, webpages, Facebook accounts, etc.
*"An open data acquisition, analysis, and display system * All *widgets are connected to a central system*. Every time they are viewed online they send data to the central system. Every widget/banner has it's own serial number, is unique. The central system is in fact *an open system*. It gathers data from all banners/widgets in circulation, processes it, and publicly displays information about the entire social movement in real time. The way the information is analyzed and displayed is open, and can be modified/improved by an open community.
*"Spreading mechanism* Anyone can grab a banner/widget from any other widget out there, just by clicking on a link which brings you to a place where the code is provided. It is not necessary to associate information about the owner of a widget, but the location of the widget (the site or blog where it is installed) will be known. Thus, the spread of banner/widgets becomes viral (spreads from member to member), and adepts of the movement become ambassadors of the movement with full rights. BUT, if someone in the community finds out that some owner of a widget is acting against the movement his *widget/banner can be terminated* from the central system through an open and democratic decision making process. Reputation parameters can also be added.
[end of excerpt]
This is genius. The idea of smart, live banner-widgets (I would suggest adding live badges also) is totally awesome! I love this method for automatically creating a central database of resources (people, web sites, etc.). This is exactly the kind of thing we need to help overcome the fragmentation of effort and visibility across a broad spectrum of social movements.
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