My FSCONS

FFKP, The Society for Free Culture and Software, runs a project putting together a guide for how to make an event accessible to all people. In Sweden, there are tons of guides and materials on guidelines, policies, and tips for making different public events more accessible. These are distributed over a large number of government organisations, NGOs and interest groups working with politics for the disabled, and even private business organisations.

What FFKP saw as a challenge was first to make a better overview of all these resources but in one place. Second, we saw the need for a guide written not by or for any one of the stakeholders, which can be very different in nature, but also (with the stakeholders).

Therefore this guide is written in collaboration and in dialogue with what we identified as the three main stakeholders: Organisers, Visitors and the Society. Organisers are anyone who arranges an event or hosts events at their venue. Visitors are anyone who might have any type of disability, or knowledge thereof. By Society, we mean representatives from any national, regional or local government or its organisations.

What makes our approach unique, we believe, is that it aims to produce guidelines, resources and tips produced in dialogue of all three stakeholders, and not from any single perspective. The perspectives of a government authority is very different from that of a society for the rights of the disabled, for instance. We also decided from the very start that we would publish this guide with a free license and we went with Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike. We think it is imperative that a guide like this is a living document which can be built upon, remixed and cited by other forces in the future, without having to ask for permission or going through the hassles of obtaining permissions from the authors.