the BLABLA project SOCIAL CONTRACT

Historically, capitalism has been developed by western societies, but as we
witnessed in recent decades, it has spread worldwide and it continues to do so.

Even though it exists worldwide, capitalism is still directed and revolves around
the West, and it further concentrates the wealth and power, effectively forming
an Empire.

The crucial difference from the old empires is that today, because of the speed
of electronic communication and of travel, there will be no space left
where an alternative or an opposition to the Empire could develop. This Empire
is in a position to conquer and dominate the entire planet.  This is precisely
why it is urgent for people who live and work in the heart of the Empire,
the West, to work on undermining it and on building alternatives.
 
One of the Empire's main strategies for conquest is to offer neo-liberal values as
the means for achieving equality, individual well-being and a just society.

Private, for-profit ownership of all resource and infrastructure  (food,
water, energy, education, roads, etc.) is the essential goal of the Empire. At
its very core is the drive for the same kind of ownership of media, knowledge,
information, and electronic means of communication.

The purpose of BlaBla project is to oppose the Empire, by working on tools and
organizational principles that can serve as the basis for constructing a
society whose goal will not be domination and exploitation, but collaboration
and equality.

This BlaBla Social Contract with society at large is a set of commitments
that we agree to abide by:

(a) to demonstrate and work on promoting and enabling transparency,
inclusiveness (participation), self-management and accoutability, and
diversity, by developing, providing, and assisting organizations and
groups in implementing, The Framework of Open Organizations[1]

(b) to host, provide and develop software tools - based on Open 
Publishing[3] to reach goals specified in [a]

(c) to use only software that can be used for free[2] and whose 
source code can be obtained and modified

(d) to work on a theoretical political framework that will give the 
BlaBla project a firm and clear base on which to develop

(e) to work towards collective and not-for-profit ownership of knowledge,
information and means of communication

(f) to support, whenever possible, other projects that, in our view, are working
on undermining the Empire, and on building alternatives based on the values
specified in this Social Contract.

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[1] The Framework of Open Organizations (OpenOrg) is set of organizational
practices whose goals is to promote and enable goals set in (a)

[2] The licences we consider to be Free are those specified in the Debian Social
Contract by the Debian Free Software Guidelines

[3] Open publishing (OP) is a concept developed by the Indymedia Network, based on
the idea that, on the Internet, everyone can publish.  Posts can be hidden
accordingly to a publicly available editorial policy, but never  deleted;
this policy functions as part of an agreement between the producers of OP
projects and their users and readers.  Censorship, and therefore political
alignments, are clearer through direct access to the content that
gets hidden.