<nettime> SaysUs Project Seeks FLOSS Collaborators

[Ãrsan Åenalp <orsan1234@gmail.com>]

http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/saysus-project-seek-floss-collaborators/

Dear friends,

SaysUs just has become affiliated to May First / People Link
(https://mayfirst.org/), which has been providing useful IT services
to the activists and movements around the world. We did just send the
below text to the comrades involved in and collaborate each other at
May First / People Link network-coop. Yet our call is open to all
floss developers, commoners, activists and anyone who shares the
vision that we tried to formulate in the text as simple as possible.
We invite all comrades around the world who share similar values and
virtues to join us and engage with our comrades at May First / People
Link network.

Here is our call:

âSays-Us (see http://www.saysus.net) is a new member of May First /
People Link. We propose the creation of a web facility, a portal, to
facilitate the ability of millions of people to tell their own
stories, to write anonymous complaints, about work, housing, health
care, schools, unemployment, prison, government, almost anything, as
it affects them.

Many job related web sites have already shown that, given the chance
to safely complain, people will do so. Unfortunately, existing
corporate sites are oriented towards helping employers find cheap
labor, and to sell advertising, not to helping change workplace
practices. Non-corporate sites are particular to one union or reform
organization and are not sufficiently generalized or allowing of
self-organization.

Jobvent.com collected as many as 100K complaints about 10K companies.
The complaints were then destroyed when jobvent was acquired by
Glassdoor.com. Sites like glassdoor are spaces where hard-to-organize
flex-jobs seekers may read about and learn from each otherâs
experiences. But site users are not offered any course of action
except the obvious â to avoid employment at the worst offender
companies.

Says-Us will be different from job-recruitment sites and complaint
forums because it will offer users opportunities for
self-organization, the ability to find and address each other, as well
as assistance, and organizational help to those who want it. Site
users will be able to find others with similar complaints, by
organization and location. If they work for the same company
(anywhere in the world), have the same landlord, are dealing with the
same predatory bank, government, etc they will be able to find each
other by anonymous site id. They can pick thresholds of action, and
choose from many forms of action, should they decide to do so.

Best practices, âprosâ, will also be collected, allowing users to
identify organizations that both have good employment practices as
well as socially useful product. Labor unions, labour activists and
trans-local social justice and community organizing / collective
action / activists will be able to be âfoundâ on the site by those in
need of their services and open to their messages.

We would like to develop the ideas and build the site in line with
open-source and libre philosophy: p2p, distributed, highly secure,
scalable, not-for-profit, user extendable (by data fields), enabling
self-organizing and empowerment, multi-lingual, web and especially
mobile applicable. A simple user interface will allow people to move
readily from complaints and issues to self-empowerment,
self-organizing, and self determined communication and action through
existing organizations.

Gateways to whistleblowing projects (like Wikileaks, Associated
Whistleblowers Press, LabourLeaks, or WildLeaks) or progressive and
independent unions, or relevant how-to, self-learn or Do-It-Yourself
projects, hacker spaces, mediaLabs and other alternative
economy-solidarity networks can be offered in the Take Action section.

As May First / People Link members can see, this potentially important
facility would need help from people of many interests, skills, and
dedication. We would need help with requirements, understanding of
technological possibilities and needs, simple and attractive user
interface design, security and scalability, coding, open-source
knowledge, coordination, legal help, multi-language translation, and
financial help.

At the monent we use a doku wiki build in on our online workgroup
(https://on.usilive.org/dokuwiki/972/) on the Organizing Network
-which is project being developed by another may first / people link
member, Union Solidarity International. Since you need to register
Organizing Network to log in and join the group, we might use another
location [like a SaysUs media-wiki] to develop the ideas for the site,
the user interface, and other requirements.

We would love for any form of assistance possible from MayFirst
members. We, Frank and Ãrsan, (http://saysus.net/who-are-we/) care
most that the project be implemented well, by many people of skill,
vision and of passion for justice, democracy, freedom, and equality.
Please get in touch with us, for a discussion or to help. There is a
contact form at the bottom of the who-are-we page.â

The concept is still draft, as you see, and we seek any kind of
solidarity to build it further. We would appreciate if you join us and
/ or pass our word to your comrades you know or think who might be
interested in joining their labour and creativity with us, and make
SaysUs a working global platform.

In solidarity


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