Here we outline the notion of media space and its significance.
Media space is one of the social layers of the full stack of commons. - The social layers - A real full stack
We use meet.coop as an illustration.
Media space in meet.coop - which is fundamentally a commons in platform space - was a **commons of documentary media** (mostly text, some video) required to operate and deploy the tech, and to run and develop the coop and its multistakeholder community of ops and user members.
It included a handbook/repo for reference (FAQs) on tech and coop governance matters, threaded text conversations in a forum for ongoing conversations and deliberations (also a way of spanning time zones worldwide) and live text messaging for real-time coordination. The media space also included the public website front-end for the coop, an email service for coop-member communications and libraries of video recordings for each user account, from sessions held on the platform.
Media space was thus fundamental - and surprisingly so, for a platform-provisioning coop which was basically concerned with venue spaces: live meetings. Some of the media arose from the back-end communications of tech-operational members. Some arose from the desire to involve all members in reflections and deliberations on the coop and the platform. Some arose from the democratic requrement to document and to formalise some provisions, privileges, obligations and protocols involved in a commons or in a coop, per se. Altogether, the meet.coop experience underlines the importance of media spaces in superficially tech provisions . . in the commons.
Generalising, for the Foundation, the media layer involves: > A **commons of digital media**: documentation, mediation, representation, including synchronous and asynchronous communication and also including means of organisational memory. Including all the associated practices such as editing, co-authoring and reviewing, moderating and curating.
Any fundable tech-layer project proposal will need to have coherent, well-defined media- and venue-layers.