Community groups in Cyprus are calling for ideas from around the world to solve the economic problems crippling the island. They have launched the OpenCyprus website to collect short texts and videos with practical ideas from international thinkers.
Weeks after the banking sector of Cyprus collapsed, different community groups in Cyprus have come together to hold a series of conferences and workshops aimed at implementing grass-roots solutions to their daily problems. These include access to currency, loss of jobs, and looming problems of supply shortages.
Rather than wait for the European Union or the Cypriot government to solve these problems, the community members are pushing forward with their own fixes. However, they need practical ideas and input.
The OpenCyprus initiative has been created in response to this need. Through the website www.opencyprus.org, thinkers from around the world can submit 1000 word texts or 10 minute videos with their practical ideas. These contributions will be displayed in an online “congress”, and shown at various events across Cyprus. The best ideas will be put into practice through a series of workshops.
The OpenCyprus “call for papers” runs until April 30 2013. OpenCyprus hopes to collect ideas from some of the leading alternative economists, political scientists and community activists from across the globe. The same ideas may prove applicable for other countries in the future.
To contribute, write a 1000 word text or film a 10 minute video, then go to www.opencyprus.org to submit your ideas.
Thank you for sharing, I had no idea… It’s impressive how the speed of people self-organising is faster and faster, and also reaching out across Europe… Will definitely give it a thought and send something through, also a good idea is for us to get in touch with Edgeryders who already have written about this, last year on our former platform. On the top of my head I can think of Jay’s idea of an app with detailed instructions to help people grow their own food or Darren’s community supported agriculture to increase self-sufficiency in cities. And these only on the topic of food! Will get in touch with them… Oh, and welcome to Edgeryders!
As Noemi says, several of us are interested in problems similar to those you list here. And in less than a month, Petros is going on an Expedition to document the many ways smart communities in Greece are bouncing back – and some of us are supporting him! So I guess it does make sense for you to join Edgeryders.
After checking out your website (which is opencyprus.org, not .com as you wrote above!) I am missing one thing: a clear brief about Cyprus. The categories of solution you list are relevant everywhere in Europe (and probably outside): Cyprus remains out of focus to someone like me, who has never been there. I would find your call more compelling if it came with some specifics: what makes Cyprus different from, say, Portugal; who – in the island – is working on it; how local movements relate to the political/financial calendar etc.
Welcome here, Joel, and thanks for the post … there’s indeed a good amount of sharing possible between what you folks do with OpenCyprus and what we do here. I hope you get a good amount of submissions, but if there are some areas left out, here are some pointers to collections of content that might help:
Edgeryders Archive. Lots of discussions covering grasroots initiatives in crisis-struck Europe, from our original site and not yet migrated to here. There's also a hidden search function.
EarthOS. A personal project of mine, collecting open source and P2P solutions for all areas of life. Quite long but admittedly quite messy still, so if you look for something specific and can't find it, just contact me.
(P.S.: From webmaster to webmaster (forward if you’re not): The non-working opencypus.com link appears also in this OpenCyprus blog post.)
I went in to be able to see where I might contribute, but could not see any of the other submissions to comment…could you publish them on opencyprus.com and make them commentable?
