The goal of these Questions and Answers is to open up the project for interested People and make collaboration as easy as possible.

Most Information should be accessible for everyone. If information is missing, pls help us to add it. by adding your Question

Please add [] tags if things are unclear

• Basic information for normal 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

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)

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

Openki is officially 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 for a great flexibility. We are tax-excempt by the Kanton of Zurich. Right now the 'verein' only uses for the bank account and adress of Openki.

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 increase their rights 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

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.

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

[fixme] Openki free software: that means everybody that makes changes to the code has again to publish the improovements for everybody to be used.

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, 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 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

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

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

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 We think it's not yet ready for mass publicity It is important to spread the word 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.

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

[] 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… 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)

Examples of projects that can use Openki:

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

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. ← ?

[] because if „everyone“ is the case, your target audience is hubs that gather people into communities. ←? first and most important peers are: possible promoters, multipliers, and people collaborating and giving feedback alternative education enthusiasts, groups that have similar visions. As we want to bring our Idea of alternativeEducation and selforganisation to a brought audience we want to reach far beyond that peergroup. =⇒ Question 1: Who is the target audience? Question 2: How to reach this audience (for example the audience far away from the peergroup) Also: What caracteristics should physical communities have (or should they not have) to connect with/ be part of Openki (e.g. to inform on Openki about already existing courses)? [] https://openki.net/course/P6KRoKCkpPF26gM6k

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.

Untill today everybody can contribute to the translation to any language: https://openki.net/translate (you only need 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. This is answerd in the FAQ aswell.

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

[]

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)

Lot of courses mainly from ASZ and denk:mal have been puted on Openki. They were putted 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. at least one. actually we don't know it.

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

The focus is on physical events but it is possible to organize courses 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.

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 aswell can make 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 pression

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: []

1000CHF p/month fix for expenses and infrastructure: 800 € p/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 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 want to find out during this week. There are three workshops announced on this topic (money, sustainability, future) https://openki.net/group/Ya3BgteukAtN5XkFr

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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. Although 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.

No there 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).

[]

• 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

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).

For programming-tasks it's the https://github.com/Openki/Openki issues and milestones

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.

(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

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 couchserfing policy or meetup

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.