Open Inclusivity’s “build your own organization” was a resounding success! We modeled this un-workhop on HUB Heidelberg’s innovative style of un-seminars after being inspired by them at the Science in the City Festival at ESOF in June. Many people showed up to participate in helping build the structure of this new organization. We mainly focused on clarifying what the nuts and bolts of what should be of such an organization — we talked about what should be in our own code of conduct, what we should encourage other open knowledge organizations to put in their, how to approach open knowledge and traditional organizations to ask if we can use their codes of conduct as examples and how to best spread the word about Open Inclusivity to interested parties.

One of the main things discussed was whether or not we should employ the naming and shaming strategy. There were several opinions on the topic within the group that worked on that question. In an unexpected turn of events, two participants named and shamed another when we reconvended to discuss the outcome of the working groups.

This incident highlighted exactly why the strategy is controversial; some of the people present had previously been in conflict about improper conduct and had been unable to resolve it – and as outsiders to the conflict, a lot of the other people present were unsure how to approach the issue because of the great difficulty in getting all the information about a complicated situation quickly from the involved parties.

This situation was a wake-up call for how hard naming and shaming is to handle for an organization that at the present time does not have the resources to thoroughly investigate a situation from a thorough and just standpoint. This helped us realize that we do not believe that naming and shaming should, for now, be a part of Open Inclusivity beyond the one open case we are already handling.

Going forward Open Inclusivity will be in contact with various hackerspaces to investigate what they think of naming an shaming and other points of its construction. We also have plans to poll the online community and engage them in dialog for feedback on this.

We would like to thank everyone who showed up for displaying interest and support for open knowledge and inclusivity!

Below are some photos of the notes that were taken by the different groups that took part in the workshop:

openinclusivity.org is hosting a “build your own organization” workshop at Kapelvej 44 on Saturday, July 19 at 3pm. Everyone is welcome to stop down and get involved as long as you come with an understanding values of inclusivity. Paradoxically, working towards a future inclusive society means not letting everyone shape inclusivity. Confusing? We’ll explain more at the workshop! See you there!

For more details about the event please check out the Facebook page. You can also sign up there but that’s not necessary and the event is free.

We’ll be facilitating more actions to help form the organization soon. Most will be online as this is a global movement! Keep checking back for updates.