Civil Society Spore

Civil SocietySpore is a mapping experiment (seed) project within WikiSpore.

Aims

• To compensate for the lack of understanding and visibility of many Civil Society entities (organizations, projects, people, events...)
• To introduce Wiki-Making as practice to those who are in the situated and communal knowledge practices (ideally lived and embodied experiences) rather then Wikipedia's aspirations (global and encyclopedic)

Reasoning

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs for short), unlike corporate sector, usually can not afford (and should not) much of their resources to be focused on PR and marketing, which in current media landscape means simply no or very little visibility and indirectly understanding. The fact that formal education in most countries does not include learning about civil society means that many people also do not understand the importance and relevance of this so called third sector, especially compared to the first/Governmental and second/Corporate sector. Smaller organizations and individual activist often have no or little references to their work that could fit the hard criteria of Wikipedia *(visibility and relevance, for smaller wikipedias the language size and publishing capacities).

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. itself is an American non-profit and charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California.

More information on Wikipedia about Civil society.

Entry infos and types

• Timeline (date/year of founding, renaming... and folding)
• Location (country, region, city... Geo-location of registration address)
• Topical (human/animal rights, environmental, ... )
• ...?

Examples

• Countries: Croatia, Civil Society Spore/Poland, Germany, Austria ...
• Fields: Culture, Gender-justice, Anti-militarism...
• Entities: Mi2-MaMa, Civil Society Spore:LGBT_Center_Split CMS Zagreb, Mali Korak ...
• Events: Civil Society Spore/Green_Academy, Otokultivator...
• People: Urša Raukar, Karmen Ratković, Maja Kuzmanović, Civil Society Spore/Ewa Majewska ...
• Webs (tools and services): Civil Society Spore/RiseUp, Civil Society Spore/RiseUp/Crabgrass

Work

Collaboration tools

WikiSpore for wiki work

https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=Civil_Society_Spore

Chat channel for (almost) real-time coordination

https://chat.wmcloud.org/wikimedia/channels/wiki-loves-civil-society

Opportunities and ideas

CEE spring

• We work on setting up things here...starting from notes https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/2020SPRING

Outreach plans

• potential support
  • oerters@mitost.org

Sourcing info

• Public records or registries per country:
  • Croatia https://registri.uprava.hr/#!udruge
  • Austria ? ** Germany ? ** USA ? ** Ukrain ?
• Check existing in Wikidata?