It’s good when communities map their assets. But what if this mapping could mutually strengthen separate networks? The Murmurations Protocol can help

Here’s a great, problem-solving project from the systems radical Oli Sylvester-Bradley (who’s been covered here many times). Him and his colleagues’ latest project is called Murmurations, a software protocol and platform that rests on the importance of mapping assets for community power. (And of course, it’s inspired by the spontaneous and beautiful flocking we see among birds in nature, as in the embed above.)

What if these are not just “nodes” on a digital geography (as you might see on Google Maps), but are also an opportunity to make “Offers” and express “Wants”, between nodes? This could be the basis for alternative currencies, a way of organising the overlap of networks of interest, and many other possibilities. Read below for more.

Oli Sylvester-Bradley: Mapping assets for community power

Big corporations don’t care much about community power. But, behind the scenes of the corporate internet, an alternative, more collaborative model is paving the way for communities to organise.

One of the first things community projects and citizen action networks like to do is map the assets in their area. Mapping assets is an obvious goal, which helps promote and connect local charities and projects with like-minded people and other networks.

But charities, nonprofits and other commons and community building projects rarely have the marketing or web-development budgets of big corporates, so they often struggle to gain traction.

What under-funded community projects lack is a way to leverage ‘the network effect’ to attract more interest, gain wider exposure and more uptake, so that their efforts become more valuable to more people.

The original promise of the internet, which was going to connect us all into ‘webs of trust’ and increase democratic power, has not materialised. The extractive model of the big corporations which treats customers as ‘users’ and exploits people’s data is not conducive for community power.

A myriad of community groups, Transition Towns, Eco Villages and other community-minded, regenerative economy projects still flourish in their own niches. But how could they leverage their collective power to gain the benefits of the network effect?

And what would it take to connect and coordinate all the like-minded projects around the world, revealing their synergies and helping them soar to new heights?

These were the questions which the founders of the Murmurations project asked themselves back in 2019 whilst attempting to define the DNA of collaboration. Taking inspiration from the graceful flocking movements of starlings they realised that decentralised coordination requires protocols - not platforms.

Fast forward four years and there are now a range of free, open source tools running on the Murmurations Protocol, which enable people, groups and community projects to share data in open, interoperable formats across platforms and networks.

Murmurations Logo

The open, flexible approach to ontology and data composability which Murmurations follows, provides a framework in which components can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. [In computing, ontology means the range of objects that an information system takes to be real (and useful) - like Name, Purpose, City, Country, Website, etc—Ed]

For example, Murmurations enables people to build highly specific maps of people, projects or organisations in a particular geographic area, or topic domain - and a way to do this collaboratively, so that everyone’s efforts contribute to an expanding commons of open data.

But mapping is just the start. Murmurations also provides a way for community groups to share ‘offers’ and ‘wants’ to facilitate exchange within networks - but also, importantly, between networks.

Murmurations profiles, which can be hosted anywhere on the internet - and are owned and managed by their creators - can specify relationships between entities in the network.

For example, people can list organisations of which they are a member, or other people that they trust which automatically generates ‘webs of trust’ thereby providing a way to deliver on the original promise of the internet.

Murmurations doesn’t claim to have solved all the challenges of collaboration, or to provide all the tools needed to liberate community power. But, by adopting the protocol, community groups and other organisations can map the people, projects and organisations in their local areas.

They can also share “offers” and “wants” to start to link their efforts with other like minded entities and to benefit from the network effect. No matter which platform, or type of website a group has they can use Murmurations.

In order to make it as simple as possible for anyone to adopt the protocol and create profiles, build maps and directories and aggregators and curate the data which is important to them, the Murmurations team have now launched two open source plugins for Wordpress (which powers over 40% of the websites on the internet!) in the hopes of encouraging further uptake.

Those hoping for community power to take off would be wise to investigate Murmurations.

Oli Sylvester-Bradley is a systems-change agent, and is a co-founder of Open,Coop, OpenCredit.network and Murmurations Protocol - click here to explore their FAQ.