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Bright Future Commons

Bright Future Commons (BFCom) is being developed to serve as an intranet for intentional networks. Context Institute is developing it as a platform to provide web support for the Bright Future Network (BFNet).

It is a fork of CUNY’s Commons In A Box, which is built on BuddyPress and bbPress, which are in turn built on WordPress. Like Commons In A Box, Bright Future Commons is a theme and an associated set of plugins— some our own and some developed and maintained by others. Our value-add is in the integration and customization. This is a user-driven project focused on meeting the needs of the Bright Future Network, but we expect BFCom will be useful for others as well.

While the commercial social media, like Facebook and Twitter, focus on lots of quick, almost random, interactions, BFCom is focused on meaningful collaboration and conversation in a non-commercial setting – like meeting in someone’s home rather than meeting in a marketplace. We feel BFCom has the potential for meaningfully accelerating cultural change by enabling better self-organized collaboration.

The basic design is for a site that supports many subgroups drawn from a membership pool that shares broad common interests and perspectives. The platform supports effective collaboration in those subgroups and robust cross-communication between groups and among individual members. Access to the site requires registration. For the Bright Future Network, members of the site will primarily be graduates of the Bright Future Now course.

Building on Commons In A Box, each subgroup has its own forum (from bbPress), its own blog (from WordPress multisite) and its own wiki-like docs. Each member can message either publicly (twitter-like) or privately.