Harmonized groupings

a resource for contributors

There's a need within the occupation movement to connect people doing similar work in different locations together so they can share best practices, coordinate activities and collaborate. One challenge is that different groups use different terms to describe their work so it's hard to equate one group with another. For example: the "Kitchen Working Group" at Occupy Wall Street performs the same tasks as the "Food Committee" of Occupy Philly.

To remedy this situation, we advocate creating a set of harmonized groupings that can be used to standardize the names people use to describe their work.

Harmonized Tags

We need to create some standards for classifying information on occupy.net solutions and beyond.

The first set of solutions who's language should begin to sync is the wiki categories, newswire channels and idea tags.

The general information management workflow I'm envisioning is that people will select topics that they find interesting and take some responsibility for the quality of that topic's newswire feeds, idea feeds and wiki categories. To do that we need to sync the categories/tags between these tools.

Venues to harmonize:

The newswire system collects rss feed items along with a certain amount of meta data that includes the tags' output with content items in popular open source cms's (wordpress, drupal, joomla) as well as services like tumblr and blogger. The newswire can automatically add tags when it sees certain tags have been used. For example, if an item is tagged with the word 'school', the system can automatically tag it with 'education' and publish it to the 'education' channel, which easily be syndicated on a wide variety of blogs. When people can easily create content channels, they'll be able to get a lot more of the information they want.

So, standardizing these channels is a big task... and there's a big hurdle: newswire.occupy.net, the wiki and ideas don't have any mechanism to sync categories/tags, so we need to do it manually for now.

Below is the 'Tags' template. The words on the left are the 'topics', which would be synced between the wiki, newswire and ideas, and the words on the right are 'tags', which automatically get filtered into the topics.

**Harmonized Groupings**: **Topics** & **Tags**
Topic	Tag
Accounting	Accounting, Budget, Finance, Treasury
Actions	Action, Civil Disobedience, DA, Direct Action
Aid	Mutual Aid, Library
Arts	Art, Arts & Culture, Culture, Design, Painting, Sculpture
Assembly	Facilitation, Moderation
Documentation	How-To, Minutes, Notes, Note-taking, Reference Guide, Script, Technical Documentation, User Guide, Wiki
Education	Classes, Learning, School, Skillshare, Teaching, University
Faith	Religion, Spirituality
Food	Agriculture, Farm, Kitchen, Meals, Vegetables, PermaCulture
Housing	Foreclosures, Homeless, Houseless, Shelter
Interpersonal	Communication, Community, Deescalation, Mediation, Nonviolent Communication, NVC, Security
Law	Legal, Lawyers, Police, Jail Support
Logistics	Inventory, Sanitation, Shipping, SIS, Storage, Warehouse, Waste
Media	Commercial, Headline, Image, News, Photo, Press, Production, Video
Medical	Clinic, Health, Medic, Medicine
Organizing	Coordination, InterOcc, Interoccupy, InterOccupation, CoC, Committee of Correspondence, Movement Building
Space	Cohousing, Coworking, Ecovillage, Intentional Community, Occupation, Office
Sustainability	Environment, Environmental, Nature, No Nuclear, Permaculture, Public Transit, Public transport, Public Transportation, Renewable Power
Technology	Hack, Hardware, Internet, Security, Software, Tech, TechOps, Web, Website
Translation	i18n, Multilingual, Languages

Content

Type

Type	Description	Tags
#Commentary	A content item created by an individual describing their opinion.
#Statement	A piece of content that was agreed upon by a group of individuals.
#Minutes	Notes from a meeting that multiple people attend
#Event	Information about an event taking place in time/space
#Resource	A document that provides supportive information
#Announcement	A statement that brings attention to something
#Video	Content item contains a video
#Audio	Content item contains audio
#Image	Content item contains an image

Attribution

Type	Description	Tags
Assembly	Agreed upon by an assembly through a consensus process.
Group	Published through a group operated communication channel.
Publication	Published as content on another website.
Individual	Published by an independent individual.

Occupy Austin Model

In Austin [[1]] we tried a kind of experimental grouping system based on affinity or activity types. Despite new groups constantly forming and old groups going in-active, the relative percentages of each grouping has pretty well maintained. The Occupy Austin Creative Technologies [[2]] group created a style blog for each harmony. We felt that the groupings provided an open and yet structured framework for groups to navigate. Some of the names we chose are a bit kitschy, but we thought it gave the overall a feel of gamefication.

Harmonized Tag: Austin Model	Popular Tags	Blog
Body & Wellness	Food, Sanitation, Medics, Health, Clinic, Environmental, Holistic	Healers [[3]]
Mind & Spirit	GA, Press, Finance, Treasury, Facilitation, Moderation, Translation	Lawyers/Seers [[4]]
Outreach	InterOccupation, Movement Building, Occupy the Hood	Travelers [[5]]
StoryTellers	Info, Minutes, Website, Video, Art, Culture, Social Media, Library	Info-Scribes [[6]]
On The Ground	Direct Action, Civil Disobedience, Security, Marches	Warriors [[7]]
Machines	Internet, Tech, Sustainability, Inventory, Transportation, Storage	Alchemists[[8]]

NYCGA.net Forums

Discussion about group categories is taking place here.

Jack Smith created a flow chart that visualizes the relationships between different working groups of the NYCGA. His categories can be used as to inform the harmonized groupings.

wiki.occupy.net

A collection of information for activists worldwide