I linked to the press release earlier. This is a project for social change activists to find and work together more effectively on common interests. It can be roughly described as follows:
- Pursuance is an encrypted toolbox for activists, by activists.
- Pursuance is a new way to organize online: more secure, more structured, and more fun.
- A pursuance is a sort of organization or group with a name and a mission that guides all the activity within that pursuance.
- So what’s it like to use Pursuance? You log in, click on one of the pursuances you’re a member of, and then you see a hierarchy of tasks as well as a simple list of what’s assigned to you. You can then create new tasks, assign them to others, assign tasks to other pursuances(!) to leverage their unique expertise, plan and prioritize with others via text chat or video chat, and more.
- The ultimate goal of Pursuance? Accountability. How? By building software and a network of people around it, thus unleashing a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice.
- Feature set: each pursuance includes task management, chat rooms, and integrates with other tools for providing video conference functionality and crowdsourced journalism and research tools. You can invite other people to your pursuance by skill set.
- Pursuance is an encrypted toolbox for activists, by activists. Populated by invitation and running on an integrated suite of digital tools, all designed to allow activists, researchers, journalists, artists, coders anyone with talent and a little time to collaborate on projects large and small, working within customizeable project groups called pursuances, aimed at achieving results with impact.
- We are building a global federation of activism projects.
If you think it is worthwhile, then any contribution is welcomed. You can donate here. That link also contains short videos that explain more how the system works.
So it’s like Act.il except not purely aimed at pro-Israel propaganda? Good idea!
Your link gives a 404. Here is the right one,
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/85883596/barrett-browns-pursuance-project
Not immediately clear how “Populated by invitation” squares with “vast and formidable” organization (from the kickstarter promo). And If they imagine for a second that “populated by invitation” will keep out trolls and employees of the fbi and nsa, they are dreaming.
Just an Organic Regular Expression @#2,
Thanks for the correction.
The project is designed to be collaborative and involve a lot of people but the problem is that if it is completely open, then pretty soon the quality of the information becomes low. We see that happen with all manner of social media that start out as useful networks but can degenerate into messes as others who do not share the goals of the group join in.
So the basic idea is that this is ‘open but by invitation’ (if you get the idea) in that people in the network can invite others to join in but then they become responsible for them and their actions in the network and can get rid of them if they become troublesome or disruptive. The people who are doing the hard work on this system (which does not include me because I am not a techie) think that they can avoid the problems you mention.
I am curious as to whom this “encrypted toolbox” is available to and inclusive of? I ask because this reeks of hierarchy.
Barret explained, “From there, explaining Pursuance gets kind of complicated. In short, it is structured so that people have to earn their way deeper into a particular project by building trust and proving their commitment.”
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What type of activism and change is one’s commitment required to embrace before access to the toolbox is allowed?
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Is this strictly a Progressive endeavor or are Conservatives and even possibly Anarchists tolerated in the use of the toolbox?
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There was mention of “open source” in the article. How open and tolerant to all cultural and political possibilities is this project?
Or is this just another religiously hierarchical platform that will enable the capture of the energies of many to be utilized for the interests of either the few or a particular flavor of politics?