Petitions to run through OSCE

ACTIVITIES Educate & Connect
#1

The OSCE days are about bridging the gap between our current take-use-throw model to a circular and collaborative model.

To achieve this, we need to gather a community, other non-profits, show the path to other companies and get governments involved. Which is quite an ambitious agenda.

For the moment we have already gathered quite a few of these actors by organizing our OSCE Days event, and looking by looking for sponsors that will back us.

But we have still a long road to walk. So I’ve been reading about non-profit impact and fundraising, and one great way to gather a community around a cause would be to launch a petition on sites like Change.org or Avaaz.

Some ideas of petitions I had were:

  • “Let’s make repair manuals open source by law”
  • “Let’s ban offensive patents, and allow only defensive ones”
    -…

A petition like this has the beneficial effects of:

  • Build our mailing list of people aligned with our message faster, which could eventually also help us get donations outside of the sponsorships
  • Gather politicians and civil society around our actions
    -Show an impactful action to the world and advance our objectives
    -Be the first stepping stone that explains what we do, in a simple manner. Once we get people involved with a simple action, we have an excuse to develop our vision with more complex concepts through our newsletter (Open Source vs DIY, Upcycling vs Circular Economy…)
    -Show companies that we have an audience that looks up to what we are doing.

I am not sure that my petition ideas are easy to understand or solve a pain felt consciously enough by people.

So I wanted to ask you:
What do you think about it? Should we go ahead with a petition?

Do you have other petition ideas that could be easy to grasp and get behind, aligned with our goals, and timely enough that we could tie it to the current news?

@BoST

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[BoST Call, March 14, 2016] – General provisional BoST meeting No 9
#2

Have you seen the Apple robot: Liam

It’s quite interesting indeed, but also a lot like greenwash (the end shows a picture of forest?!?). How can the phone be disassembled on a robotics line when it’s not designed to be. What about the embedded battery? What about all the critical materials? Why are we focused on recycling…still…when we know it recoups the least value compared with remanufacturing.

Perhaps Apple need to start with the design of their products, make genuine commitments to clean up it’s value chain, pay people properly and commit to address the end-of-life issues of it’s products. Could be a topical one.

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#3

@sharmarval like the idea of asking Apple to clean up their value chain, but I feel it’s maybe not a pain perceived strongly enough in people’s minds. Could be the object of a second campaign though.

I just had an answer from Kyle at Ifixit, and he’d be on board with any kind of petition to demand open source manuals, so this would certainly be a great way to start building our message with a strong ally that has an audience already aware of the problems we are trying to solve.

I’ll start building the petition this week and next, and will share it with you guys as I go along.

@BoST

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#4

Hi @Jaime great. I saw this organisation who are a producer of repairable bulbs. They just launched in the UK and I think could be a really interesting partner. http://www.iwop.uk/

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