Overmundo, officially launched on March 2006, is at the same time a community and a software tool. Its goal is to promote the emergence of Brazilian culture in all its complexity and geographical diversity. Overmundo was created by a group of four people (Hermano Vianna, Alexandre Youssef, Ronaldo Lemos, José Marcelo Zacchi) who coordinated the efforts of the other 35 collaborators, with funding from Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company (the largest arts funder in Brazil).

Overmundo consists of the largest community of people in Brazil aimed at promoting a big and never-ending conversation on Brazilian culture. Using Web 2.0 tools, individuals and groups from all over the country write articles and post pictures, films, music, texts, describing their own places and communities, and thereby create national visibility for cultural events and scenes all over the country. A quick glance at just one article on the website demonstrates the diversity and comprehensiveness of the conversations taking place on it. It is easy to see the multiple diversities brought together by Overmundo: diversities of age, gender, race, geography and, above all, world views.

At Overmundo the community is king: it produces all the content and it also decides what content to publish and what content should gain more visibility. To this end, Overmundo has incorporated a broad range of Web 2.0 tools. The strategy for this was primarily inspired by the Kuro5hin (www.kuro5hin.org). Every item contributed to Overmundo goes first to the “editing line” (Fila de Edição). For 48 hours, the item remains “quarantined” here. During this period, any user can make suggestions and comments. The author decides whether the item should be modified or not according to the suggestions. Only the author can modify the item.

After the 48-hour period, the item goes to the “voting line” (Fila de Votação). During this period, users of the website can vote on whether they liked the article. The article has to receive a minimum number of “Overpoints” if it is to be finally published on the website. Once the minimum number of points is achieved, the item is published at an intermediate position. From here, the article can continue to be voted on, moving to the top and possibly achieving a headline on the website. If the item does not receive enough votes, its Overpoints fall over time until it is removed.

Overmundo also uses a system of “karma”, by which users can earn reputation points on the website. Users with higher karmas will have more Overpoints than users with lower karmas, and therefore greater editorial powers. Accordingly, the karma system helps Overmundo to build a decentralized governance model for the website site. The 30 users with the highest karmas are now being invited to a separate discussion list. Our goal is that, in the near future, the whole governance of the website will rely on these 30 users, who will be renewed periodically according to their karma variations over time.

Overmundo is now developing two special projects. The first is the Overmixter (www.overmixter.com), a partnership between CCMixter (www.ccmixter.org), the remix platform built by Creative Commons, and Overmundo. The second special project developed by Overmundo is the Overfeeds, an aggregator of RSS feeds from weblogs dealing with culture in Brazil (www.overmundo.com.br/overfeeds/).
The posts on these weblogs are posted directly on the Overfeeds, and then voted on by the Overmundo community on a special section of the website. The posts with the most votes achieve greater visibility at the Overfeeds page.

Overmundo is already inspiring other initiatives on the same model inside and outside Brazil. Since the technological infrastructure for Overmundo was primarily built from scratch (and entirely licensed as free software), with some parts based upon other free software, its code is free to be re-used by other initiatives. The first institution outside Brazil to re-use the Overmundo code and model is iCommons (www.icommons.org).

At the same time, Overmundo has started producing collaborative content that can be freely disseminated through any media (licensed under a Creative Commons license). The most recent example is the Overmundo Radio Show. This one-hour radio show is produced every month through the spontaneous contribution of collaborators throughout the country. The show is then made available and sent to any interested non-commercial radios in the country, including community radios, pirate radios, podcasts and internet radios. For 2007, Overmundo is planning the development of a TV show based on the same model as the radio show.