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Equally important, FLOK evolved a process for the development of these proposals, which was itself modelled upon the principles of the commons, of peer collaboration and free access to knowledge. In this respect, it has been an attempt to reinvent the policy process by organising its development from the bottom up. To achieve this, FLOK sought from the very beginning to engage a wide spectrum of actors in the development of its policy recommendations: not only academics, public servants and policy makers, but also hackers, activists, social movements and civil society at large. To this end, the project evolved a research process that was open, collaborative and distributed. It was open because the results of the research process – as crystallised in the FLOK policy documents – were released under free/open licenses, thus allowing anyone to use them, to modify them and to redistribute them. It was collaborative because FLOK made use of tools and technologies that enable distributed collaboration and promote transparency: for example, the project used wikis and pads for collaborative authorship, the co-ment platform for the process of peer review of the policy documents by the community, mailing lists and Mumble for communication among project contributors. Last, the process was distributed because anyone, regardless of their geographical whereabouts, could participate in the development of those policy proposals which, in order to encourage participation, were released ‘early and often’, thereby opening up their development process from a very early stage to the global community.
