1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

An ecology and process methodology structured around issues as social objects, designed to generate emerging forms of advocacy and governance.@20 words

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

To our knowledge there aren’t any meta-systems based on followship and responsibility assignment aimed at generating engagement and accountability for governing the commons bottom up. There are only scattered pieces. @30wds

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

We will build an open source distributed network of issue-related learning and collaborative environments incorporating tools that will enable data collection, reporting, curated knowledge base, news streams, collective action, possibilities navigation, deliberation, visualization, social graph, evaluation and reputation/trust-net, as illustrated in this design map and described in this article.@50 words

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

People subscribe to individual issues then designate the actors and stakeholders who they think may have an influence -positive or negative-  on the status of an issue. This ‘appointment of stakeholders’ by ‘followers’ creates a pull dynamic. Bringing together the parties susceptible of impacting progression on an issue and those to whom they are accountable will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation. It will create a context favorable to collaboration, exchange of ideas and know-how. It will stimulate political action and on-the-ground response, and ultimately advance the governance of the commons. @99 words

5.    Who is working on it? [100 words]

The project’s concept development and advisory team is composed of: Michel Bauwens (Founder of the P2P Foundation), David Price (Co-founder of the Debategraph),  Helene Finidori  (Experience Design).

We are in discussion to bring edge thinkers and doers into the process for advancement of  platform design in the fields of learning and action research, social change, governance, institutions,  participatory politics, collective action, sustainability, business, collaboration, design and systems thinking, linguistics, semantic web.

The Citizens Media’s team in charge of tech development includes: Caroline Smalley (Founder and Creative Strategist), Scott Nelson (Director of Technology and Integration) and Eric Howe (Lead Programmer). @99 words

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The first step is to build a prototype of a minimal viable product to run as part of the initiatives taking place around Rio +20. This will encompass an engagement module connecting people, data and potential solutions provided by the UN, such as the Earth Dashboard and The Future We Want. The framework for this project will be developed by adapting existing technology made available through The Citizens Media (software for creating scalable, distributed networks of community sites). Following testing of the prototype, the full potential of the engagement dynamics will be realised through ongoing integration of open source software.@100 words

As the project scales, the political and participatory nature of the network will help attract further funding from global institutions, citizen organizations and crowd-funding campaigns. We will also look at adapting our platform for business applications, such as pull platforms for building stakeholder relationship or generating innovation.@47 words