The Federated General Assembly

Occupy Wall Street has captured the attention of the world. Since its inception on September 17th, it has spread from the founding occupation at Liberty Plaza in New York City to thousands of cities and countless minds across the globe.

The Federated General Assembly (FGA) project is trying to scale participation. We are building a new web platform that combines community organizing techniques and ideas, lessons and patterns from social networks, web standards and best practices, all together with the very real ecosystem of Occupy itself: occupations & their working groups, the values and principles, and all the coordination & communication challenges. We believe that by reflecting the "brick and mortar" reality of occupations, their working groups, their processes and the ideas, goals and actions they produce within this online platform, we can support both meaningful participation by millions of individuals right alongside the development of movement-wide trends.

We're tackling some very big technical problems and communications paradigms that are also very applicable to institutional contexts and models. This talk will explain how Drupal is forming the backbone for a social semantic platform, what protocols and standards we will be connecting, and what all this means for academia, and the free dissemination knowledge.