The goal of these Questions and Answers is to open up the project for interested People and make collaboration as easy as possible. As much Information as possible should be accessible for everyone. If information is missing, pls help us to add it.

• Basic information for normal Users should be in the FAQ, currently at https://openki.net/FAQ.
• 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

2 things:

• create a tool for self-organization, one that will be itself a model for other self-organization tools. in order to empower people.
• bring together and interconnect groups and initiatives, exchange of knowledge and experiences

- To loosen up the „roles“ in the learning process - A political assembly would fit? Is decision-making a learning process? It should be! (we make clear what is about and to accommodate such processes, it is actually important to make people imagine such meetings as p2p learning processes) - Lowering the barriers allow an easy access to education - we want the courses to be affordable and accesible to anyone - 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)

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. make education accessible to everyone? Share experience with anyone?

Offer support for users

There are two use cases:

  1) someone (e.g., a venue owner) organizing courses and openki makes it easier for people to know about them and participate (Calender)
  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

(e.g., the publicschool.org, classery, dodiz)

- It's open source - The content uploaded is open sourced (CC) - 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

YES - it is free software: that means everybody that makes changes to the code has again to publish the improovements for everybody to be used.

WE started making partnerships and collaborations, and haven't started an outreach process, but have had some presentations. Outreach to other organizations that would be interesting to connect mentors/participants to Openki or outreach to organization that could provide money/other resources (e.g. building/rooms)?

There's not yet a communication workgroup active, people in the core group are shy/modest/humble

The workload is too high and capacity still low to develop and maintain the project, and we're doing it all voluntary

Maybe not yet ready for mass publicity

It is important because other people might start the same project in parallel, and we need to be visible (to know at least that such a project takes place).

There's a list of webpages which link to Openki Physical locations and project in which openki is in use (e.g., Autonomous School) Word of mouth, and physical presentations.

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)

In contrast to the answer about the usecase (narrowing down to learning) here the answer is „everyone“.

people who are interested in learning and teaching, people who want to freely share knowledge…

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

Examples of projects that can use Openki:

• activist projects, …
• reading groups
• dedicated installations of the software for collectives/companies alternative schools

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, so 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. ← ?

 It cannot be 'everyone' - because if that is the case, your target audience is hubs that gather people into communities. <-?

first and most important peers are possible promoters, multipliers: alternative education enthusiasts, groups that have similar visions. https://openki.net/course/P6KRoKCkpPF26gM6k

As we want to bring our Idea of alternativeEducation and selforganisation to a brought audience we want to reach far beond that peergroup.

On Openki.net We don't see that it would make sense to open&broghten the use-case in the next year (for example proposing projects).

We feel a need to focus on learning and education - Many Years ago, we had an other project called „OpenConcept“ (everybody could propose projects, ex cultural (theater) ,techincal, political etc.) Openki could be used for that aswell. Alldogh we still like that idea very much we dont want to promote it - today: even learning might be already too broad and we need to narrow it down in order to avoid confussions.

But 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 and within this of course discussing ideas is an important part of learning

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.

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.

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

1000CHF p/month fix for expenses and infrastructure: 800 € p/month for the room + 80€ server and domain names + 200 food

15.000 CHF 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

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

current balance is 1000 CHF

Three years ago started asking foundations for funding (made a very professional documentation, dossier), 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 that is 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. To much sociocultural 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 orround.

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)

we can not. often it is depressing that people leave because they need money or just because they find a payed job with having money. And lot of nice ideas keep undone. What makes us still competable is that we can do what we want, that we can work as fast as we want and on what we want, that we are our own bosses and that we have much nicer goals than most companies

linking possibilities from/to/with Openki platform?

like Powerful tagging and searching functionality already implemented. It could be possible, but for the moment there's not the capacity for facing the challenge. In 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 not, how to do it?

Abstract technical aspects: A peer to peer server communication / each group&region can have an own server/computer/device that communicates with the others / since we started was a long term goal, but as is too complex we don't think we'll implement it very soon.

social/political aspect:

A decentralized administration (in a single server) is also a primary goal of the project

We are inspired by stack overflow for example in this subject (users are assigned certain administrative tasks, and the more they participate and more reputation they build, the more increase their potential role). „User reputation“ is a keyword here. https://github.com/Openki/Openki/issues/164

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.

Yes, but not automatically (like NextCloud for example). Question about capacity. so put to 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 others (see previous question).

Mostly for physical events but it is possible to organize courses and events that take place online.

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.

Not many. Maybe non. actually we don't know it.

Openki does not offer any functionality for e-learning processes (e.g., slide sharing, online assignments, etc), except from the proposal and organization of the events.

There are such open source e-learning platforms like p2pu…, that could aswell be integrated or linked with Openki.

We could acctually add a „on-line“ region for organizing on-line learning sessions with third party solutions.

 (text, media, streaming service)

There is no Place for documentation of the courses yet. We had the functionality of „course documentation“ (Upload of Files) and took it away because it was too much work to maintain it. We'd be up for putting it on-line again in meanwhile we consider using third-party solutions and add a link in the description of the course. we could add dedicated field for the file-links

It doesn't exist. The FAQ is partly 7 Years old

The core idea behind: The course never really finishes. From our perspective a course is an idea or a topic that one could learn, and participants could spin-off events at any time, and so a „passed“ course can become new again.

The user interface needs to make clearer the distinction between groups, courses and events.

→ todo: CREATE COURSE FOR: Groups, Courses, Events

No. (Sure it could, but it is not) We need a very clearly visible usecase for people to understand what Openki is. But of course you can search courses for mentors/specialits that you might want to contact and get their skills. But we want the skills to be shared not not sure whehter I understand this. Users can add skills to their profile?

A more dedicated mapping, documenting and history work could be done in order to have records of what was done through the platform.

Course for this: https://openki.net/course/A3s967qWm8xFGpfuB

(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 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

7.5 years ago (Jan 2010) we started to work on the concept of Openki for arround 9 Month. Before there was allready a extremly rudimental Webpage schuel.dot.ch 4.5 Years ago (Nov 2012) after a break we started to code.

when did we decide for the name?

case not, how do you consider this option?

Openki is officially registered as a Swiss „Verein“ which is an Association. We are called KOPF (Course Organisation PlatForm). By law Vereins are democratically managed and non profit but still allow for a great flexibility. We are tax-excempt by the Kanton of Zurich.

Todo Juanse: Pros and cons of becoming a coop associated to BotC

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

from our FAQ: Wie sicher ist Openki? Openki.net ist standardmässig SSL verschlüsselt. Dies ist die gleiche Technologie, wie dein Onlinebanking nutzt. Deine Anmeldungen an Kursen sind zum Beispiel aber für andere Nutzende sichtbar. Wie immer gilt: „Nichts ist sicher“ ;)

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.

No there no app in any store, but we'd like to have one. Especally for refugees it would be very useful. People from athens asked us and in ASZ as well it would be great. For now the online app is responsive / mobile friendly. 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)

Untill today everybody can contribute to the translation to any language: https://openki.net/translate (you need only an openki User-account)

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.

For programming-tasks it's the https://github.com/Openki/Openki issues and milestones For other activities we don't have any public list it yet.

The same answer as above

we want to find out during this week. There are three workshops announced on this topic (money, sustainability, future) https://openki.net/group/Ya3BgteukAtN5XkFr

The project was born inside such 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

Everything! Driven by our goals/vision: 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 one we create a tool. the tool itself wont do we need to spread the vision (a moovement) and we need a social framing (the community).

Values→ Goal → Tool → Organization → Community → Movement → Idea → Goal

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 (verblenden) everybody to use it.

Three ways to promote such ideas:

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

katalin: see wikimedia foundation for inspiration about bringing specific groups on to the site

analouge telegram facebookpage

For this our answer untill now has been to implement a feedback/reputation system. Trusted venues, public spaces should be preferred and avoiding private places of strangers is recommended.

Every region has (will have) a moderator (or a local admin group?) that should make such decisions (democratically?) subject to a commonly agreed disclaimer?

⇒ Check couchserfing policy or meetup