It has become apparent that the development and promotion of the OVN model of production requires a focused effort by the network of people that are working on it. This is required so as to acquire data and experiences from each group on the practices that work and those that do not so as to converge into a set of good methodologies. At the same time, the more the network shows that it has a strong mass, the easier it is to acquire funding from governments, determine favourable policy changes or inspire people around the world to join us.

Thus, it has been proposed to build a site that will allow everyone to work on the aforementioned goals as well as specify the current common methodologies around the network.

The site needs to be easy to use by all the participants of the network. Since the development of the OVN methodologies is a multidisciplinary effort, people from non-technical background will need to use our collaborative tools. Google docs is a good collaborative tool because it requires minimum technical skills while at the same time it has many collaborative features:

• The ability to comment.
• The ability of real time collaboration on writing the document.
• The ability to see all the previous changes and the person that made them.
• The ability to create personal backups of each document, by copying the document, and thus allowing the common ownership of the document.

At the moment, each group of practitioners has created a multitude of documents that are only known to very few people. As a consequence, the work and practical knowledge of each group is not spreading into the remaining network. Thus, other groups can neither learn from that knowledge nor provide their own experiences that challenge that work.

Indexing our common work/knowledge allows us to increase the visibility of the work of the whole network, thus it shows the strength of the network and at the same time allows the community to converge to a common set of methodologies.

In order to converge into a common set of methodologies, it is important to work in a scientific way. That means the separation of assumptions from group data, and the repeated experimentation.

In practical terms, that means that we keep raw data in our site so that others can inspect them.

Read the whole document (in progress): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H735-yqHt_MC7TYQvG8inOjEwkQC30HslvQKXOKCOlg/edit?usp=sharing.