Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
For people who like buzzwords The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that is accessed through the Internet. #Web01, #Web02, and #Web03 are terms that are used to refer to different generations or phases of the World Wide Web (#WWW). #Web01 refers to the early days of the World Wide Web, … Continue reading A fresh look at #openweb history
For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems – both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Projects like #Indymedia and community … Continue reading A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from
The lesson from the Leonid Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union is simple but brutal that stability is not strength. From the outside the system looked powerful – armies, rockets, space stations. But internally it had stopped being able to correct itself, criticism became dangerous, information was distorted, and the leadership focused on maintaining control … Continue reading What projects like #OMN can learn from history
Recently I’ve been doing media interviews – one mainstream piece for a #boatingeurope article coming out in traditional media, and another for the Cherwell student paper in Oxford focused more on biography. Both journalists said the same thing: “It was surprisingly hard to find information about you online.” Around the same time, a boater friend … Continue reading Disappearing from Search: A personal story about visibility, #dotcons, and the shrinking #openweb
Looking back at the old TubeMogul stats – the archived page from 2011 – I had a jolt:18 million verified views, and when you added the torrent distribution, RSS syndication, video CDROM redistribution, and all the edge-case channels we seeded into, the total was closer to 34 million views. These were big numbers back then. … Continue reading The History of visionOntv: What We Built, What We Lost, and Why It Matters Again
The scent of damp soil and half-forgotten futures, a version that flow, a sourcebook for day-to-day life and activism from a time when the local living alternatives were not theory but everyday life, in a small English town https://oxford.indymedia.org.uk/ It’s an archive now, a time capsule you can wander through. If this current generation is … Continue reading Oxford radical history, biography
Most of the mess, and most of the #blocking, comes down to the same old story – ownership and control. Who holds the keys? Who decides? Who gets locked out? Instead of wrestling in that cage, the #OMN takes a simpler path: we walk away. We put a class of media into the commons, governed … Continue reading The OMN with indymediaback and makeinghistory are paths
Let’s be clear, this is a historical and political mess, and one worth composting. The original #openweb vision, was wide, from the original European social vs the American libertarian, the person quoted is taking the view from inside the #blinded USA path rather than the original #WWW #mainstreaming of the more native social European path. … Continue reading Composting the confusion: A critical response to the misreading of the #Openweb
The #fashionistas are coming https://yewtu.be/embed/u_Lxkt50xOg? It’s time to become more real before this inflow swamps our “native” reboot, if we let them they will consume it and shit it out as more mess. To mediate this shit storm, it’s time to act, please, feel free to repost these web posts, thanks. To understand where the … Continue reading Rise and Fall of Grassroots #OpenWeb
The struggle to grow the #Fediverse and this #openweb reboot has never been about technology alone – it’s always been about narrative, framing, and belonging. If we want people to step away from the toxic silos of the #closedweb and #dotcons to step into something better, we need more than protocols and servers – we … Continue reading We do need tools to share to help people on the path back onto the #openweb
The #makinghistory project is a decentralized, open-source archiving and storytelling network designed to preserve and amplify grassroots histories. It’s founded on the idea that history isn’t written by the winners – it’s made by those who resist, build, and care. Using digitized collections like the CampbellFamily archive as a seed, the project invites communities to … Continue reading Dev test work for Makinghistory application
All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference. We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for … Continue reading A letter from the margins of the #openweb