Hope filled tributary s feeding fresh water to the polluted mainstream

Published Date 2/29/16 1:55 PM

DRAFT of 3 examples of “working” contemporary alternatives and their malcontent’s.


The Village Butty
A lovely project provided originally by a hard-working individual with small funding and continuing energy. The need, boaters need a warm dry open common place, if their unique contemporary “village” culture is to survive the long term slow and grinding pushing out of CRT and local councils, not to menturn the self inflicted internal sabotage of its own often mad dispoleing crews.

The village butty is a re-booting/rebrinding of the older james’s butty for hiar, the early project had burned out then faded due to the the off balance of money making outreach and community value boater use. In the end it alienated both and with a waning of good will and no money coming in the butty was going to be sold. A new younger more energetic crew came in to save the day, with a real crowed funding outreach, boater community lead, the butty was saved.

But the is a denial/unknowing of the need to balance/manage community that is pushing this out of balance to the money making side (fair anufe the failer of this side of the balance was the resion for the need for the reboot). But if this understandable swing reaction is not brought back into balance then the good will of the community side of sustainability  balance will be lost and with out this it becomes harder to keep a boat working on the water, aspesheraly in such a small place as London. The boater community provides the couler and direct practical support when needed, as well as its own headaches 😉

This needs a community hart-hart gathering to unblock the constipation that is currently blocking the shit from coming out, a bit of composting will need to be preprepared for this gathering for the resulting smell not to drive people away.

The London Hackspace
One of the few continuing/ongoing “secessess” of alt-DIY organising in the UK. It is not only a fantastic place full of interesting, competent and active people, its organised in a way/model for how grassroots could be expanded out to fill in more social spaces.

Was originally set-up and run by a competent invisible affinity group as the space grew this became an opaque affinity group, with suseass and increasing membership this opaque group became visibly dysfunctional due to dilution and burn out of the original core crew. Affinity organising, while still core, was submerged into bureaucracy, hard rules and angry trolls hitting each other with them filled the online spaces and left the real world space dulled and filled with low level broken.

The space continues and a big smoky flare up and resulting gathering helped to resolve the surface issues, but the underlining fractures have not been addressed to truly sustain the project, lets hope it survives the move to the next premisses and continues to grow and mutate.

The Hive Dalston
This one started well but fell into an ideological clash that became hidden in a smoke screen of personalty politics. The lack of any clear vision made it impossible to resolve as the underlining tensions were blocked from being spoken. One side pushed the other aside and took over sole running of the project, it became a ideologically driven shadow of what it needed to be, in this it moved to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution, making it hard to continue to support the project in any way.

This is not beyond rescue, and the balance between (selfish/stupid) evil and (open/growing) good is still in the air. One solution, a moment of evil, a bit of power politics would put this project back on track, light and dark need each other, some times the devil is right.

Conclusion

To move all these projects on we need to reknit the broken bones of the past.

Why did the #openweb flower and die over the last 30 years

Published Date 2/22/16 1:17 AM

Why did the thousands of open internet projects fail? Despite large amounts of state, foundation, #NGO funding. There were early successful activist tech projects, all proved to be pointless or withered with success. In all cases I would argue that the underlining fairer was one of ideology, almost all projects worked against the dominate ideology of the net and web itself. Just as the #dotcons burned and bust repeatedly, traditional media was hopeless in till a new generation came along who had an inclining of the underlining working of the new tech ideology.

The few open projects that worked with in the ideology of the web were swamped by the pushing of the funding of the #mainstreaming of the web/internet. I am arguing here that the majority of people making a living in the #openweb/internet world are core to the problem not the solution, I could name hundreds of projected with the word open/radical in um who actively destroyed “open”.

A tiny minority created a world expanding technology based on the ideology and practices of trust based Anarchism. This exploded into the existing tech/communication worlds, pushing aside, pushing over, all the “better” 20th century vertical (ideology) tech already in place. Open became dominant for a while and this open was “locked in” because of a strong ideological thread throughout the standards and structures of the internet/web, the very “chaos” of the #openweb protected it from the “vertical” (20th century) locking of corporates such as Microsoft etal.

Nothing last forever, a new generation came along who merged the “open” back into the “closed” can’t really blame them, they were children of Thatcher and Reagan. Am amazed to have lived though the time of the #openweb, the world really did feel very different for a time. Who are the heroes and who the villeins, this history is unwritten yet, better get to it.

This is my realistic/pessimistic view of where we are at LINK

Support reviewing offgride tech

Published Date 2/21/16 3:07 PM

Would like to test some bits from banggood for cheap offgride life. If you would like to push me a donation on the button on the left would help to make this happen.

Here are 2 potentially useful pieces of off grid kit

12000mAh 12V Car Jump Starter Car and laptop/USB Power Supply Battery


In theory this should charge off a portable solar panel, and run a laptop and any USB device. Almost all of these will fail to charge off 12-14v needing 16-19v to charge properly, this one says it will charge off a boat/car (12-14v) so good to test if this is true so I can recommend it as a backup winter boat/summer travel power source.

Nitecore MH20 CREE XM-L2 U2 1000LM USB Smallest LED Flashlight 18650

This would not only make a good flash light for dark nights on the tow-path it would make a good anti mugging device to scar away undesirables 1000 lumen is blighting bright. The current touch i use for this is only 70 lumen which works fine. This charges by USB so easy plug and forget no battery’s to replace.  Will it work? Hands on testing is the only way to tell.

If you would like to support reviewing these products and many others click the donate link on the side bar

We face a digital cliff the open internet may be over

Published Date 2/11/16 5:30 PM

The is no consensus on this, here are two views on this subject:

We have Phil Windley who thinks the open internet was a historical fluke http://www.windley.com/archives/2016/02/decentralization_is_hard_maybe_too_hard.shtml here he is talking about the very real view that the internet is finished, that the commons have been enclosed by the #dotcons silos and what remains outside are terminally withered and dying.

Then Dave Winer http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/26/0936.html who argues that the #openweb comes in waves and what Phil Windley is arguing is but the drawing back of the water before the next wave of open washes in.

My point of view is that both are right, the open internet was a historical “mistake” and with Winer that there are a few waves left, the storm is not over yet. There is a logic to the digitisation of everything and the web was a living example of this let loss, it was a tsunami that crashed over our cultures and this storm is not over yet.

Yes, the commons opened up by the early web was enclosed by #dotcons, but their sea defences are low and weak and the digitisation storm still rages.

We are free to make our lives have meaning in this stormy weather.

A evil tainted favour leads to a renewable energy mess

Published Date 2/10/16 9:55 PM

To illustrate what a mess we are currently in. Solar power over the last 10 years has plummeted in cost and crept up in efficacy, leading to a shift to sustainable energy in many western country’s. This decrease in cost had nothing to do do with western entrepreneur and the capitalist path. The funding (huge subsidy) was paid by the Chinese government (and the people it taxes). It was a state planed and funded attempt by the chines communist party to gain dominance in this new era, they did this by top down building of huge solar power factory and infrastructure, the plan was to bankrupt the western producers by swamping them with cheap products and then profit from cornering this global future industry.

This seceded up to a point but they over steeped the production so were caught in a spiralling decrease in price that easily swept away the nebulous western solar industry. But also run away and undermined their own economic base, central planing in a “capitalistic” hybrid system is hard to control. So, we have a moment of hugely under priced solar flooding the world market. This has been proven to be very challenging to our existing energy monopoly’s. With no indigenous solar industry left the is nobody to lobby our legislators any more to keep the market open. Our monopolist are putting legislative blocks on solar roll-out in place to prop up their old industry’s and apart from some green’s the is little standing in their way.

China inadvertently doing evil dose the would a huge favour, but the “evil” in the end taints the “favour”. Its clearly a mess and if we still had a grown up politics maybe we could do something to mediate this mess.

There is no such thing as society

Published Date 2/8/16 5:21 PM

At the end of the 20th century we had a forceful right wing ideological push to reshape western society’s. The Thatcher/Ragion years started the push to create a world were “There’s no such thing as society”, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared “There are individual men and women and there are families.”

30 years latter we now live in this world. This idealogical world-view is deeply embed in nearly every part of western cultures and is still pushing to powerfully shape the wider globe. This ideological push was a reaction to/consciously against a 20th century “social liberal” ideologue that had grown from the destruction of 2 world wars in the 20th century.

Were are we now? The enlightening thinking form this is that conscious pushing of ideology has the power to shift society and define what it is to be human. The is proven power in “thought and action” on “human nature” and our social lives are continuously shifting to this “power”. The issue we face today is that we have a denial of this power from both the right and the left which highlights the deepness of the right world view.

Food for thought, can we escape, were is the ideology of the liberal/left?

A big socerty community center the Hive Dalston

Published Date 2/6/16 5:05 PM

The Hive Dalston – big society community centre a product of voluntarism and activist fashion with dose of hipster. Started out as an exciting project between radical (free party/activist) squatters and a more mainstream arts groups. The idea was to take up and use the Tory “big society” legalisation that had been pushed though at the start of the Cameroon government but has been lieing fallow since.

The is a incentive for the social use of empty property, that landlords could get local tax exceptions for their empty buildings if these buildings were put into local community use. As with most Tory ideas this was actually a direct attack on locale democracy, by starving it of the tax revenue and potently replacing its core social services with volunteers rather than paid professionals. Any use of this “legislation” would have to walk a tipe rope to stay within the system, to sustain the project, while not falling into the trap of pushing the Tory agenda of privatisation and NGO thinking that are core to the ideas of a “big society”.

The Hive soon failed this tightrope walk and fell into the direct Tory project, the fragile radicalism pushed aside and the space filled with wannabe “arts” and NGO spiritual fashion, it became a scruffy “community centre” on the cheap. If it survives and spreads its a viable model for replacing what’s left of the pail shades of the bureaucratic “pay your way” centres that are left over from the more rigid social justice/culture as social good of the 1970’s heydays.

The resulting burn out and walk away has left the Hive project less than shiny, its make or brake for it to find the next space. Can projects like this walk a tipe rope to stay sustainable while remaining relevant is the question. And do people care unuf for this question. to actually matter is the root of the issue of this post.

Looking back looking forward Village Hall or Church Hall

Published Date 2/1/16 6:52 PM

I’m writing this for people who are actively stepping away from the mainstream 9–5 world and moving into disreputable subcultures to live their lives differently.

One issue that comes up again and again in these spaces is group organisation. It usually comes up at moments of stress, and it is usually handled badly. The result is familiar: drained energy, burnt-out people, accumulated bad will, and long trails of failed groups.

For most people passing through these subcultures, this isn’t a pressing concern. Many dip in and out of the shifting social soup. The mainstream remains an easy fallback. They don’t stay long enough to notice the deeper patterns of growth and decay – and by the time they do, they’re often ready to retreat back to the (dulling) safety of “normal life”.

Rinse and repeat.

Each short generation leaves behind another layer of wreckage, and the result is predictable: alternative culture acquires a bad reputation in the mainstream, which then feeds back into the next cycle of failure.

Over the next few posts, I want to look at several groups I’m involved in that are currently at different stages of what might politely be called “crisis”. Before doing that, it’s useful to look at two organising models that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries and still quietly shape how we think about shared space today.

Village Hall

Small, less-radical groups have traditionally organised around structures like the village hall.

A village hall is a non-commercial space for community events – an open space for the social, political, and cultural activities a community holds in common. It’s a neutral space, designed to support cohesion rather than impose values. Typically, it’s run by an elected committee drawn from an active and open local membership.

The strength of the village hall model is its openness: it assumes that difference exists and that the role of the space is to hold that difference together rather than filter it.

Church Hall

A church hall often looks similar on the surface and shares many practical uses, but the underlying logic is different.

Church halls tend to be more narrowly focused, shaped by the moral and ideological positions of the institution that owns them. A Catholic church is unlikely to host meetings supporting abortion rights. More conservative churches won’t host young socialists, anarchist legal support groups, or black-flag collectives. Other religions may also be excluded.

In short, access is conditional.

While there may be a local management committee, the final authority usually rests with the church hierarchy, often mediated through the vicar or equivalent figure. The space highlights some parts of the community while marginalising others.

Why We Had Both

The reason villages often had both village halls and church halls should now be obvious. They served different social functions and embodied different values. One aimed for neutrality and shared ownership; the other for moral guidance and ideological boundaries.

In the mid-20th century, a third model emerged, particularly in urban areas: the community centre.

Community centres grew out of ideas about social justice, public culture, and collective empowerment. They expanded the role of the village hall while explicitly moving away from church-centred moral authority.

This wiki page is worth reading, it’s the most developed of the three.

Decline and Degradation

By the late 20th century, community centres were steadily degraded.

Commercialisation hollowed them out: “community empowerment” became “must pay your way”. At the same time, bureaucratisation suffocated them – a legacy of mid-20th-century managerial thinking that prioritised control, reporting, and risk avoidance over living social use.

So today, we’re left with three traditional, mainstream approaches to “space for the community”, all carrying the assumptions and limits of their time.

Rebooting for the 21st Century

There’s a current romantic tendency to look backwards – to reboot village halls, and in more conservative circles, to revive church halls. This instinct isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.

These institutions were products of their historical moment. They worked because they matched the social realities of their time. If we want spaces that actually support 21st-century subcultures, post-mainstream lives, and horizontal organising, then we need to reboot the underlying ideas, not just recreate the forms.

The question isn’t which old model we choose. The question is: what kind of shared space fits the society we’re actually living in now?

UPDATE: That’s where things get interesting. With online spaces, the #OMN if you want, next we can:

  • map these models directly onto #OMN / #indymediaback spaces, or
  • talk about where horizontal projects rot and how to slow that rot, or
  • sketch what a post-village-hall model might actually look like in practice.

Training video livestream local meetings

Published Date 1/27/16 7:49 PM

I have my doubts with this would be effective but it has the potential if you could get groups of people to actually use the technology consistently and setup the online infrastructure to back it up then I think actually might/could have an effect.

Using mobile phone with an external microphone and mini tripod the meeting would have to take place in a circle around a small coffee table. The microphone would be connected to the phone by an adaptor then a long cable. This would act as a talking stick which might improve the meeting process anyway 😉

The microphone acting as a talking stick would go round the circle. The camera mobile phone in the centre could be turned to face the person talking if that person wanted to be on camera.

With permanent online inbeds and an video list archive it could actually be quite interesting.

Optional: People could join the meeting virtually however this would be harder to manage for various reasons, audio feedback ect.

That said it’s a lot of work for probably possable little outcome. If it was done well and people stick to it, might have an effect as it could expand your outreach and create a lot of online content.

Upsell: Would give a constant overview of the network and link diffrent groups.

Student Loans

Published Date 1/22/16 6:16 PM

Update

The lone has timed out so it is written off.

Just to be clear what the root of the issue I have with them. They repeatedly failed to implement a basic change to my account, to synchronise the lone deferment dates, they agreed to do this (repeatedly recorded in my files) but failed to do this. This coursed unnecessary problems for them and me over the 20 years or so and in the end directly lead to the failer of the deferment with them, even though I was already deferred with the other lone company, if you are deferred with one you are deferred with the other. I left them to sought out this mess as they had directly coursed, they did not, and slapped lots of fines and costs onto me and now refuse to right the lone off as its timed out.

———

This will be an interesting test for the company, as each time I needed to resolve the issue I asked for the agreement that the accounts would be synchronised next year to be added to my record, I was told this was added to my recoreds. I should receive back hundreds of pages detailing broken agreements. Lets see what happens.

Account number 6319**********
Hamish Campbell

**********

london

******
*****

“I apologise if you feel that the level of service you have received has not met your expectations. At Honours Student Loans Ltd we strive to offer the highest possible standard of customer service. Our staff are aware of the level of service expected and having reviewed our records I believe our staff have provided you with the correct information.”

As I clearly pointed out this in no way address the issues here http://hamishcampbell.com/en/studentloan
 

You are talking about hundreds of pages of complainants and communication, repeated broken agreements from you to me, year in year out over nearly 20 years.
 

Can you please advice me of your procedures for you to send me a copy of the files/data you hold on me, thank you for your time.
 

Hamish Campbell
 

(£20 for the letter, invoice sent on resolution of this issue)

A simple guide on how to use boat batteries

Published Date 1/10/16 8:06 PM

The only time you can get a “true’ish” reading is after they have been sitting without charge in or out for a few hours. The rest of the time it’s a “ruleofthumb” reading, you need to get used to this.

Don’t go lower than 12.2v if you want your battery’s to last any time and 12.4v would be sensible cut off point to extend their life.

If you have limited power generation you need to run your battery’s on full rather than empty. Otherwise your paying out big time in a year or less. It’s normal that everyone wrecks their first set of batteries. Learn from this for the next set, this is a first step for new boaters.

You’re living on a boat not a house, you can’t just turn the lights on without thinking about all the above. The sooner you get used to this the sooner you can let it drift to the back of your mind.

Happy boating, my your lights shine bright and your laptop be fully charged.

Ps. Ignore anything beyond this as it’s likely to do more harm than good. Pss. Does not apply to geeks.

More info http://hamishcampbell.com/en/home/-/blogs/basic-boat-12v-electrics