Openki Wiki

• Basic information for Users should be in the FAQ, currently at https://openki.net/FAQ. stuff to update: https://github.com/Openki/Openki/issues/943
• Non public information should be in the internal part of this wiki. accessible for collaborators only.
• Technical information (coders, sysadmins, admins) is in the github Wiki: https://github.com/Openki/Openki/wiki
• Documentation for partners and users is currently at http://about.openki.net/?page_id=1203

• create a tool for self-organization, one that will be itself a model for other self-organizational tools and one that empowers people.
• bring together and connect groups and initiatives to foster an exchange of knowledge and experiences
• To loosen up the „roles“ and hierarchies in the learning process
• To lower the barriers in educational processes
• we want the courses to be affordable and accessible to everyone
• self-determination and an autonomous acting of Openki
• transparency, non-profit
• We want to have this nicely formulated and there is already a proposed workshop for this. (https://openki.net/course/4XeLcJqfGWhQ4mrug/vision-for-openki)

We want to create a tool for self-organization one that will be a model itself for other self-organizational tools and one that empowers people. Openki wants to bring together groups and initiatives in order to foster an exchange of knowledge and experiences. Openki loosens to roles and hierarchies in general learning processes as opposed to classical educational programms (language courses, schools, universities etc.) and lowers the barriers to learn from each other. We think that education should be accessible to everyone, we therefore want the courses to be affordable and open to everyone. Openki should always stay a self-determined and autonomous project, we want to be as transparent as possible and don't want to make a profit with this project.

Our goal was to create a platform that can be used for self-organised education and knowledge exchange. On the platform itself we offer a frame derived from that idea. Our ambition is to develop a platform that enables everybody to contribute respecting our core values LINK. We are in contact with other participatory projects and try to learn from them as well. The platform itself does not give much indication of the theories and philosophies of alternatives to the insititutionalised school system. Is your goal to simply create a platform to be used in any way possible, or also to promote ideas about deschooling and convivial knowledge exchange? In which case a more informative/inspirational shell needs to be created around the platform itself. Suggesion for concrete® questions for this above mentioned question: [] What are the theories, philosophical traditions you referenciate on? []Is openki political? What is your vision in terms of a political aspect?

On the platform itself we only give a framing derived from that background We have ambitions to create this context arround the platform, necessary to enable everybody to contribute. not only to part of the answer as well is that from observing other participatory projects: the academic discourse is blocking lot of people to use it.

Our goal is to stimulate knowledge exchange and self-organized education and leraning structures, which are accessible to everyone We want the skills to be shared and transferred between people.

Our main goal is to make education accessible to everyone and share experience. Is it to have someone responsible for putting up courses/events or to have the groups/people putting them online themselves? The main aim is the tool itself with the objective of allowing self-empowerment/self-organization of people. the other activities ar subsequent results of this aim.

Offer support for users There are two use cases:

1. someone (e.g., a venue owner, group-member) organizing courses: Openki makes it easier for people to know about their events and participate (Calender, Webframe, Infoscreens)
2. stimulate participation of non-experts and create a self-organization ecosystem (in this case everybody propose courses in a self organized way where openki collective would not [participate] / moderate → self-empowerment

No. (Sure it could but it is not.) We need a very clearly visible usecase for Openki in order to help people easily understand what Openki is about. We want the skills to be shared and transferred. Knowledge should spread and we dont want to simply help to get in contact with people who can do things „for us“. Of course you can search courses for mentors/specialits that you might want to contact and get their skills. Users can not yet add skills to their profile. However, in their profile you find courses they mentored/are mentoring.

It would worry us a bit if other people would use it for other objectives other than organizing courses. Because if you browse the Webpage it is already hard to understand „What does openki do for you“ In other words it could give wrong ideas if usecases mix up too much. We feel a need to focus on learning and education So, at the moment, we don't see that it would make sense to open&broaden the use-case in the next years (for example proposing „projects“ in stead of „courses“). Many Years ago, we had an other project called „OpenConcept“ (everybody could propose projects, ex cultural (theater) ,techincal, political etc.) The application Openki could be used for that as well. Although we still like that idea very much, we can't promote it. It seems that even our understanding of „learning“ might be already too broad and we need to narrow it down in order to avoid confusions. Because of course we do not want to promote education in its old understanding - but learning in a broader sense: mutual sharing of experience and knowledge. So discussing ideas is an important part of learning and we want to promote such „assembly“-stlye of courses.

Everything! We achieve our vision by creating the tool. The tool needs a community. To build a community we need the movement. We are a vision. To achieve this we create a tool. The tool itself wont do, we need to spread the vision (a movement) and we need a social framing (the community). Values→ Goal → Tool → Organization → Community → Movement → Idea → Goal

[] Openki free software: that means everybody that makes changes to the code has again to publish the improvements for everybody to be used. It is opensource so everyone can change or work on the code and use it.

Behind Openki there is the association KOPF„ (Kurs/Course Organisation PlatForm). Openki is registered as a Swiss „Verein“ which is an Association. We are called „Verein KOPF“ (Course Organisation PlatForm). By law „Vereins“ are democratically managed and non profit but still allow great flexibility. We are tax-exempt by the Kanton of Zurich. The „Verein“ is now a means to an end: As a „Verein“ we can manage our bank account more easily. [] A Verein needs Statuten? Maybe it would be more transparent to have a link to see them and the structure of the Verein (for those who are interested).

The focus is on physical events but it is possible to organize courses that take place online.

We're having dicussions about that. It might be a model financing Openki, but we're unsure of what is a 'counter value' for the cooperative mebers. Todo Juanse: Pros and cons of becoming a coop associated to BotC

(e.g., the publicschool.org, classery, dodiz http://www.tradeschool.coop/ moodle, meetup, )

there's a complex comparison work in our dossier depends to which you compare. we dont know of a platform that does the same.

- different functionnalities - It's open source - The content uploaded is open sourced (CreativeCommons) - The community context openki offers - It allows people to volunteer for the roles including hosting of events - Allows people to propose courses based on interest / needs (and puts the same weight on things happening and on rough ideas) - It's free to use

Our core idea about the courses is that they are never really finished. Learning processes continue and so should the possibility to go on with a course. From our perspective a course is an idea or a topic that one could learn about, and participants could spin-off events at any time. In this sence a „passed“ course can become new again.

e.g. banning a course. How open is it for the community to participate?

Everybody can report a problem (highly generic) that people could use to report misbehaviour and inappropriate content. The administrators then have to make a decision. Until today there have not been such cases reported, and thus there is not a decision-making structure defined nor implemented. In the future we are open to ideas of having assemblies or other participatory forms of collective democratic decision-making.

We are working on parallel paths. Different topics depend on each other: there is no community whitout a good app. there is no good app without a community, there is no community without an elaborated vision. The core team's mood and cowork is relevant for the direcction and development of Openki. Important is to regulary focus on tasks that might get forgotten or that have been not taken enough into consideration.

(of the project itself or from commercial alternatives as in the case of couchsurfing and airbnb)?

The Project itself: We won't sell Openki (unless everybody would decide collaboratively) The Source Code anyway we can not be sold. It is opensourced under AGPL Lincense. The domains .ch .org .net .de .fr are reserved. The Idea itself can be adapted by everyone and we can stop commercial companies of appropriating the idea. We have three related courses to discuss further in our Openki-Group:

  https://openki.net/course/tTzrXfdZ58qk42vAu/openki-und-geld
  https://openki.net/course/BJXJ2GYHTfDWgJWvH/openkibusinessplan
  https://openki.net/course/XGRPm6YS8gCQQcLcT/openki-risiken

At the moment we are a central team of administrators in OpenkiHeadquaters in Zurich. The primary goal is a decentralized administration. We feel inspired by diffenent models that we'd like to combine

• the „stackoverflow.com“-model: Users are assigned certain administrative tasks, and the more they participate and more „reputation“ they build, the more their rights increase to edit more stuff.
• Regional/Local Networks of People (Maybe with defined user roles like: Moderator Ambassadors…)
• Sociocraty, Voting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

Option for Child Care (monitored) during the time of the workshop. A tag every course could either have or not, same with accessibility for wheelchairs.

[]! * Would a political assembly fit? Is decision-making a learning process? It should be! (we make clear what it is about and to accommodate such processes, it is actually important to make people imagine such meetings as p2p learning processes)

In January 2010 we started to work on Openki. In 2009 we created an extremly rudimental Webpage 'schuel.dot.ch'. The idea was that people could add their courses online an find participants. In January 2010 we started to work on the concept of Openki. The big difference is that people can also propose courses now, where they will attend als participants and not as mentors. After a break of one year, we started coding in November 2012.

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Lot of courses mainly from ASZ and denk:mal have been put on Openki. They were included as events but not organized on the platform itself. Courses that have been primarly proposed on openki and went through the whole process are not many. [!

Openki is for everybody, who wants to freely share knowledge and is interested in learning and teaching. The interests of the people concerning the contents of the course can be very diverse, however should respect certain common values like antiracism aand antisexism, etc We want to have as little barriers as possible to make it easy for people to join.

All Topics: Subculture, youthtopics, fineart, DIY, elderly people, academics, political, sportentusiasts, philosophic… (see question „What are the possible subjects that courses can be organized about?“ in FAQ)

As Openki is still in a beginning phase, we cannot yet target „everybody“, as we lack the necessary resources. In this phase its primarily peers that we are trying to involve in this project: possible promoters and multipliers, people who want to collaborate and give feedback to improve Openki, education enthusiasts and groups that have similar visions. In a later phase we want to reach beyond that peergroup - generally people who are interested in learning and teaching, people who want to freely share knowledge: subculture, youthtopics, DIY, elderly people, academincs, political people, sports enthusiasts, philosophers etc. If you want to share you thoughts on Openki's target group, join the course below: https://openki.net/course/P6KRoKCkpPF26gM6k

There's a list of webpages which link to Openki [, how many, which ones?] Physical locations and projects in which Openki is in use (e.g., Autonomous School) Word-of-mouth recommendation and physical presentations.

We started making partnerships and collaborations but we haven't started an outreach process for the reasons mentioned in the questions above. We don't think Openki is ready for mass publicity, however we think it's important to spread the word so as to avoid people starting the same project parallelly.

We achieve our vision by creating the tool. We want to build a community that shares our vision and helps creating and using the tool. The ideas on how to reach the goal of building a communitiy are:

1. home page (vision and concept)
2. platform design, e.g., promoting openess and participation in a very fundamental way
3. facilitating, collaborating with, and „featuring“/promoting real projects that represent such values

There are different ideas how to ensure accessibility for people with different backgrounds by having a userfriendly interface on the website, Further we try to use simple language.

No, but it is a good idea. Feel free to create one and watch out it's not gonna be a stup or rejected (because aferwards it will become more difficult to create one)

The project was born inside an activist community (Autonomous schools). Connection is through networking. We would love to have more capacity for such collaborations We organized an unconference for autonomous education last year where we invited different international groups. We are participating in different events/conferences. (Chaos Congress, Border scapes conference in Lesbos, Aarhus, Other activist networks, Personal networks.) spread the idea in networks we are in. http://about.openki.net/?cat=10 something about unconference []

1000 CHF/month fix for expenses and infrastructure: 800 €/month for the room + 80€ server and domain names + 200 food 15.000 CHF/month would be a budget for self-employment for the current workteam, following Swiss standards. 70.000 CHF/month would be required for general purposes of the project [] for example…?

The present budget comes exclusively from donations (solidarity funds and private persons). The only regular income is 100/month from ASZ. See http://about.openki.net/?page_id=1036&lang=en Related courses on the long-term sustainability of the project: https://openki.net/course/BJXJ2GYHTfDWgJWvH/openkibusinessplan https://openki.net/course/tTzrXfdZ58qk42vAu/openki-und-geld The current balance is 1000 CHF. Three years ago, we started asking foundations for funding (made a very professional documentation dossier). We asked arround 20 foundations for 250K CHF in total but didn't get it. We stopped this effort because one of us found a job and couldn't work on this, and the rest were quite demotivated because of the rejections. Foundations have a special focus and Openki is very broad (not only one goal like youth, refugees, education) and it is difficult for foundations to judge on the totality of the project. The fact is that a web platform goes under infrastructure. Business plan (sustainability) was not very well structured (at least not as typically expected) and elaborated. additionnally a standard businessplan is kind of contradictiory to a inovative project. The argument of „self-organization“ seems not very convincing. For some the budget was too high, for other too low. Too sociocultural rather than social. We were affraid to appear as too political, and trying to appear different than we are in order to be liked was a difficult situation psychologically. Foundations did not give good reasons for rejection. And applying for funding is a LOT of work. So we decided to put all our efforts in the development of the project instead of twisting us around. Efforts to get funding around concrete projects (Kunsthalle, learning festival with Impact Hub) have been resumed recently. Later (as soon as we are enough to do it) we will attempt a well-organized crowd funding campaign. This seems a good chance to get users and money at the same time. There is a also a Faircoin wallet: fL6D9U18Kjia7yHCkjsSLGReGSD9TeBvA2 (need to check if it is properly updated to v2)

Dedicated session proposed on the topic: https://openki.net/course/x8zDHqA7GMmRyvdS3/openki-collaboration-partners-network At the „About“ page there's a list of partners (mainly „friends“ projects). http://about.openki.net/?page_id=554&lang=en On-going collaboration with Autonomous Schule Zurich, Kunsthalle, NetHood, and ImpactHub (co-located in the same building) The ASZ courses: https://openki.net/group/90aa41f3 For Kunsthalle: https://openki.net/course/BERAsieNHEghHZW84/openki-x-kunsthalle-zrich

We would like to keep the topics diverse but there are 3 important (open) criteria for the actual thresholds of acceptance for projects/concepts: - Tolerance - We are clear that we don't accept discriminatory content. - Commercial - We want our courses to be accessible for everyone, expensive and/or fixed price courses are not welcome (indicative price is allowed [as long as someone has the freedom to choose their participation level] ←?) - Professionalism - do we want companies to participate, professional teachers? OK for companies to use Openki internally? What is the benefit for (more or less professional) teachers? How do we ensure quality? (difficult answer → separate session) Quality scope and challenge that openness could bring for the users at the point of valuing the quality of the different options when having such diversity. ← ?

You can try! Our experience is that it takes a huge effort to create an active community in a new region. We are working now in Zurich for a good pilot. Experience shows that it needs some people with a lot of commitment to coordinate all the volunteers. We started to create new Regions in Athens, Thessaloniki, Wintertur, Berlin and Bern. In all of them we knew motivated people that asked us to create a new region. non of them is active. so in 2018 me might work on a paper that helps to create new regions, and that might as well contain preconditions or advises for new region (diversity of groups, amount of fully committed people, fundraising, …)

We want to find out during this week. There are three workshops announced on this topic (money, sustainability, future) https://openki.net/group/Ya3BgteukAtN5XkFr [] This is part of what we want to find out in this openki-week [ During the openki-week many different funding options have been discussed. Some fundings more planed to be a „Start-boost“ for the project, and some more sustainable and ongoing fundings. A decision on which way to proceed has not been taken yet. But we are working on it.

We can't pay (yet?). It has been difficult and depressing that good people have left the project because they needed money or left because they found a job that didn't give them enough time to work on Openki on the side. Many good ideas have not been implemented due to that and have been left undone. The up side of our project is that we are our own bosses and have the opportunity to work on a project that has in our view much nicer goals that most companies and we can decide how often, how fast and how much we want to work on Openki.

[TODO] Richtpreis-post on about FAQ-link?

Course: https://openki.net/course/Y293GH7oYRyYwgTh2

Powerful tagging and searching functionality are already implemented. It could be possible, but for the moment we do not have the capacity for project-interractions or linking possibilities with others. At the same time it is a question about capacity of Openki/development

suggestions: Recommendations, the notion of a „link“ between groups, how could projects empower each other (resources sharing/ improving, experiences sharing, interact) Proposed course for Openki week: https://openki.net/course/YMnYtbu6gbqtgQcXM

If other people copy or fork it and create their own variations, we would be very happy. However, we have not the capacity to support such initiatives.

analouge, telegram, facebookpage… []

Main principles are not to discriminate any group of people. At some point we'll be forced to add a AGB disclaimer, code of conduct (maybe containing a statment that users are responsible for theyr content. This decisions should be made e.g. by the admin group or the moderator (in the future: of each region) subject to a commonly agreed disclaimer ⇒ Check couchsurfing policy or meetup

Openki.net is by default SSL encoded. It's the same technologies onlinebanking use. When you register for a course, your username is public. Therefore: „Nothing is safe“ ;)

Unlike most web platforms we allow people using the platform without providing any personal information (not even their e-mail if they don't want to receive notifications). Personal security demands (e.g. not logging) is not supported at the time. We can not provide guarantee that Openki is secure from crackers. We log the IPs on the server (by default we think, we didn't ever change something) Our host is not forced to log users IPs as far as we know. neither with the new federal surveillance law.

Yes, but not automatically (like NextCloud for example). Question about capacity we will think about in the future. We don't encourage this by now, but rather host the .net installation. As one of the main goals of Openki is to interconnect Initiatives, we hesitate a swell if it makes sense before the instances can connect to each other (see previous question).

No theres no app in any store, but we'd like to have one. For now the webpage is responsive / mobile friendly. Especally for refugees a mobile app would be very useful. People from athens asked us and in ASZ as well it would be great. It's not a very long way to create an Android or OSX app, as Meteor is providing a option to compile it to an App (compared to rewrite it from scratch).

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• Sure. But it needs the peer to peer server communication
• Idea is that each group&region can have an own server/computer/device that communicates with the others
• since we started this was a long term goal, but as is too complex to imlement a needed protocoll and definitions we don't think we'll implement it very soon.

The primary goal is a decentralized administration on a single server

We are a group of people. Somewhere between 3 and 15 are active. 2 people are fulltime, 1 person one day a week, 1 person irregularly between one and 3 evenings, 1 person on and off, when in zurich some halfdays a week, when abroad sometimes. One just stopped because he found a job. Some more are helping out with some tasks once or twice a month, some participate once or twice a jear. There's not yet a communication workgroup active, people in the core group are shy/modest/humble we're doing it all voluntarily

since the beginning, stopped coding 1 Jear ago, Passed projects:

Curent Projects:/Interests

• Professionalization. At the moment really little perspective to continue the project without a serious step of professionalization

• Coder, Denk:mal activist/moderator, Openki since sommer 2013

Right now there is no public road map for Openki itself, yet. (For programmers see open issues on https://github.com/Openki/Openki )

One of the current projects we work on is in the Kunsthalle in Zürich. 500 Years of Reformation Exibition, Artist RobPrutt will build a church. Open mid Dec. until mid Mai Core question: What happens in a church when there is no religion and no priest? The artist transforms the space (huge) to a „church“ and chooses as the main activity a bottom-up knowledge exchange Room is open for workshops organized by everyone. Openki can organize workshops (about the platform, concept, methodology, learning) Walkin thing (two actors, observers and participants) Entrance in not sure if it's free (Museumscard would loose it's value) Entrance for the workshops will be free Friendly collaboration

• Tried to get more money for us
• No pressure

Pay arround 2000 for our work on They make advertisment for openki (Flyer, Stikers…) Collection goes to ASZ Technical aspects:

• arty-event: so not everything has to look perfect

Ideas:

  
* activist projects, reading groups, offspaces, makerlabs, hackerspaces, youthcenters, academic groups, squats, migrantprojects, 
* dedicated installations of the software for 
  * collectives/companies
  * alternative schools
  * barcamps, unconferences, ....
  

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For general engagement activities we don't have any public list. For translation-tasks go to https://openki.net/translate, for programming-tasks join: https://github.com/Openki/Openki. For code contribution go to our https://github.com/Openki/Openki page and see the open issues thy are labeled (Tech, Small, UI, …) Untill today everybody can contribute to the translation to any language: https://openki.net/translate (you only need an openki User-account)

The tools we are using inside the project are documented internally: its mostly Gitlab, Trello, Github, Etherpads, Wiki… Please ask us for access and introduction, we are happy to show you.

The description of the courses are thought to be at the same language as the corresponding course. For 1-2 additional languages that might of interest (Multilanguage courses), the owner of the course could add the translations directly on the description field. This is answerd in the FAQ aswell.

No but do it. We would collaborate. We have the huge office and the Openki-Foyer in order to facilitate workshops, cyrcles and courses. free to be used for you.

[] You can ask Adreas from RevampIT, Panos Nethood…