“open industrial standards” nebulous and problematic things, but everything in tech is built on top of a pile of them, It’s where the value is.
Nationalism is a nablus thing as well, and its where the violence is.
Tribalism can be beautiful, it can also be a problem.
Some #dotcons are bigger than nations, so maybe it’s a good metaphor?
The geek “problem” is a 20th century dysfunctional part of a tribe that is damaging to us all, think #climatechaos think #failbook think #diaspora
Talking about real issues I have been fighting for 20 years… The #stupidindividualism that treats this as personal is what am sadly talking about much of the time.
Yes, it becomes a boring circle, but it’s always about the importance of the #geekproblem as a block on the change/challenge that we need #XR
I wrote this in 2005 what has changed:
“Its going slow but we are getting there… One of the main problems seams to be a dysfunctional idea of a division of labour – ie. Every one seams to think I should do everything – as I am pretty useless at many things its no wonder it is going so slow… If you wona see something miracles happen you gota wave year arms around a bit and mutter some arcane words… Go on you can do something… Just look at the blog page to see what”
The #fedivers was booted up on grassroot #openweb passion and crowed funding, it was sustained in the early growth by crowed funding and expanded (in an often not helpful way) by #geekproblem passion. Over the last 2 years we have seen this shift sharply to “institutional” funding, some of this has been behind the seanes “think-tanks/academia” but over the last years the #EU though #NGI and more specifically #NGIzero have taken a central role in funding just about all fedivers #mainstreaming projects and much background technology.
In this, we have moved from meany 1000’s of people shaping the direction in a radically #4opens transparent way to handfuls of people controlling the levers of influence in a more opaque process. This is a clear and very obvues failing of #openweb governance, kinda normal and very obvuesly fail.
Now the wider #NGI project pour funding directly down the drain, which is a normal outcome so not an issue for us as the money is wasted anyway. #NGIzero are doing good, they are funding grassroots #openweb technology, so they are people we should work with.
How do we start to mediate this issue “In this we have moved from meany 1000’s of people shaping the direction in a transparent way to handfuls of people controlling the levers of influence in a more opaque process” And more importantly rebalance the #mainstreaming agenda that flows with this funding https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki/Funding-of-openweb-projects this second part is a BIG problem, this first part is about democracy, the second part is hard politics, and is more nasty.
The issue around funding and its impact on grassroots and radical projects. The balance between maintaining integrity and openness while navigating external funding is a difficult one. The #4opens provide a guiding framework, but the challenge remains to implement these in ways that avoid the corruption and failure which is normal for the #NGO funding models.
Running projects on minimal funding forces a degree of focus and prioritization that can be beneficial, but, it also comes with limitations. Trust-based models, like those from the direct action movement in the 1990s, show that alternative funding approaches can work, but they require strong social structures, trust, and transparency.
Finding ways to mediate this tension between the potential of funding and the risks it brings is key. What do people think of a more formalized version of those trust-based funding models, could they work today within the #openweb or #OMN?
We start with the assumption that 90-100% of funding on this subject is simply pored down the drain, most of it into pointless NGO projects and #fashernista individuals “careers”. The best#openweb funders I have found recently https://nlnet.nl/ who have money from NGI Zero which is from the EU
* https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network/wiki Simple #OMN is a standards based political software framework to build #KISS and #4opens grassroots semantic web of trust links and flows. We do this by outlining a human understandable workflow and then building apps for real-world use. We are agnostic on the underling technology and programming as long as it is #4opens based.
Hope is a swift left wing flow and the strong current that pushes change/challenge. Simple truth telling is a deep upwelling, the spring that feeds this fresh flow. We need to nurture truth and hope in every part of our society, both our tribalism and bureaucracy are part of this river, more important than ever in the era of #climatechaos we are fast moving into #XR
Bring simple truth to the surface, pure spring waters helps to nourish.
In the #fedivers and wider #openweb rivers, we have increasing inflows of funding from the traditional bureaucracy. This, on the one hand, is feeding the grassroots and on the other hand shaping to a more #mainstreaming river. We need to strive to have a better outcome from this, the tools they are funding are all open licence, we need to build into them that the more bureaucratic/closed agender can be switched on and off in all these funded projects. This is a simple solution we can work towards.
Conclusion
* All flows have value, we need this influx of funding to grow the #openweb and #fedivers if we are to do challenge/change, so use this opening to shape the influx of value and to shape these institutions that push this flow. See this as an opportune for activism, rather than something to be #blocked
* On our-side, we can nurture our tribalism to this “common” course with the #4opens and simple political statements like #PGA hallmarks.
* Our more theoretical friends can use their skills to resurrect the ideas that shaped past movements and feed these into the new movements.
How can we make our media better.
* Use the carrot and the stick, talk about balance rather than conflict.
* Bring the liberals in, but keep the basic #4opens#PGA strong and visible, everyone has a role in the era of #climatechaos so be hopeful and friendly.
* If the river is cool and fresh, the #mainstreaming and #fashernistas will soon jump and swim with this flow.
We live in creative times, let’s enjoy creativity.
#NGO crew are wannabe hierarchical who hide in plain site inside every grassroots movement, they push “common-sense” agenda to “tidy” the mess that is essential to horizontal organisation. If/when the NGO crew take “power” they slowly kill the organisations they “care” for. This has happened to just about every alt org I have been involved in for more than 30 years.
Now this is not black and white as you likely jump to understand, the horizontal people let them do this each time, so the better outcome is to balance this issue, not fight for one to the other in till all is sterile dust. The horizontal crew will stand by, being feed the #stupidindividualism of #mainstreaming culture, in meany cases their tribalism means that small alt groups flower and die without laying seeds in the ground. I have seen this meany times.
Link to type article ****
Conclusion.
* NEVER let the #NGO crew take the hiricical power that they strongly desire, don’t except there “common sense” be mad and bad on this one. I mean be really mad and bad to stop this crap.
* Keep the tribalism of the horizontal crew open to fresh flows, the #4opens helps with this, making people uncomfortable is needed at times.
* DO useful stuff, if people are only talking and not doing they have less voice, repeatedly give people a chance to DO in the end you might have to be quite rood to them about this, this is a normal outcome.
Q. who are the YOU, who are the people doing, who should be mad and bad, how to make people “uncomfortable” in a useful way, how can being rood be constructive?
Why is communication so bad in our media.
* The post-truth people are full of nastiness, as this is their only reaction to challenge/change.
* Our liberals are defensive as their ideas are pushing us to extinction, they tend to join the post-truth crew in reaction to challenge/change.
* The #fashernistas go with the flow of the above, if they even see the change/challenge they react in the same way.
An important word that needs some thought is “permissionless”
The body is made up of three different, balanced groups:
Stakeholders – the people who do the work, who run/mod the fediverse
Users – the people who use the tools/services, who use the fediverse
The Affiliate Stakeholders – the people who commit time to support the work of the fediverse
This is a very broken web we live in so let’s clarify issues. The names can change, they are placeholders
Anybody can become a stakeholder, in the case of the fediverse this is setting up and running an active instance – could use mastohost for the less technical to do this or a home hosted instance on a old laptop.
If’s simple if a user wont to become a stakeholder setup and mod an instance.
Users are self-explanatory, they buy in but don’t have time or focuses or inclination to run a part of the fedivers.
The Affiliate Stakeholders are a little more complex and are thus treated differently, it’s up to the body itself to decide if the play a active and useful role.
Nothing in this is top down, nothing is this elitist, nothing in this is discriminatory, nothing in this is undemocratic. Its #KISS and looks safe to the “normal world” while at the same time being native to the fediverse and its roots.
Coding projects that come from the humanity’s general fail as they are not technically coherent and build out from abstract ideas without real relevance to lived humanity, they are too disconnected to become relevant to communertys of use.
Coding from science tend to fail because they are inhuman, and are built for mashions. They serve abstract ideas based on numbers and thus can reach only tiny numbers of people and can build no outreach social groups of use being irrelevant to “real/normal” people.
Coding from life has a better chance of success BUT only if balanced with a science based discipline and some academic rigour of soiled social thinking
Let’s look at examples:
Knight News challenge was captured by academics and thus has produced a slew of irrelevant projects – the money and focus was poured down the drain.
Diaspora was a pure geekproblem project so found few humans to use it, the resources were poured down the drain.
Mastodon came from a computer scientist but is a human project based on an existing need/use with competent technical agender. It worked and outreached to normal-ish people. Mastodon for filled an existing human need. Thus has real social change/challenge action and potential – we should/need to learn from this.
What has worked for the fedivers to overcome the geekproblem is the copying of existing #dotcons as #openweb tools. This copying has mediated the gap between the humanities and the sciences by taking existing (bad) human technological relationships and building copy’s in the (good) openweb. In clear contrast peoples attempt to build both #geekproblem and academic #NGO tools has (obviously) failed in the fedivers.
We need to build out from this good/bad relationship and nurture the good and push down the bad – while avoiding the pointless ghettos of both geekproblem and academic dogma being pushed by captured funding agenders.
It’s an interesting challenge to have movement on/in. Current foundation funding agenders have been captured by academics on one side and the geekproblem on the other. Capital (#dotcons) funding agenders are dominating and pushing for aristocratic anti-humanistic outcomes and theological neo-liberal group think.
We need to step out of these #mainstreaming flows to push up the good and push down the bad. We are working to do this at the #OMN we’re trying to bring our lived experience (this is always were the value is) to rethink and re-emergence solutions to the old 4 estates thinking:
* The clergy – while being structurally irrelevant are still are at the core of the social condition – belief.
* The nobility – are a dangerous force for social destruction by control and play a bad role at every level, our #dotcons leaders are the new “nobility”.
* And the commoners – are all of us, we need to see this more, our best/worst governance is democratic – we need to embed this is all our social technology.
* The media – is the tools of social control and the path to social liberation we need to chose where we put our power and our intervention in media.
At the OMN we are practical working on the last two – while fighting for humanism is the first and fighting trench warfare agenst the second. In the end it’s a simple path made complex by the forces we are fighting agenst.
The answer is always #KISS the power is always human, the tools #4opens
The children of Thatcher and Reagan are limited in their world views – they have been brought up and nurtured in the neo-liberal #deathcult and have limited experience in the nurturing and socialisation of anything else. Academic and book learning are a poor substitute for evolving in a non #deathcult era, so it is no surprise that they find themselves trapped in the circle of #stupidindividualism
In this #deathcult era, individualism is stupid and individualism makes you stupid. This is a degrading circle that no “self-help” or “whoo spiritualism” can help you to escape.
This manifests like dark “social magic” in many areas:
In social movement we have the take-over of #fashernistas who push “alternatives” aside in their “commonsense” self-interest, building careers and grasping at the illusionists of fame and “influence” they are slaves to #mainstreaming
In tech the #geekproblem has pushed emancipation into darkness. The #encryptionists have dominated alt-tech and the #dotcons of the #mainstreaming path, both are born of this world view and the socialisation that keeps it from sight.
The mainstream is blind in its worship “there is no alternative” for #mainstreaming agendas in this era. Our words and actions are simply spewing shit while the world burns, our ecosystems die and communities implode in manufactured (for profit) infighting #failbook
It’s actually easy to step away from this mess, the issue is: are you brave enough to fall and WILL your community catch you when you do? (both valid worries i’m afraid).
We need hand-holding and most importantly we need alt-social/tech structures in place to build and bind – all human communities are built/bound with/from these structures.
The #OMN and the #4opens are there as shovel for the shit and binding for the community – neither of these have any power but the power you use them with – the steeping and away and dreaming and digging is all down to you and your community.
The#IMC project is an affinity group – so we are planing to work through consensus and diversity of strategy to move the project past where it was ripped apart by internal stresses after 10 years of running as a successfully worldwide radical grassroots media project.
Of course this can and will be updated as needed, but we have a “chicken and egg” issue that we need a working affinity group/s to reach consensus on where we go. The #indymediaback project is a way of bootstrapping this code/process in #4opens way.
To keep “diversity of strategy” in place, we are using the #OMN framework.
If you look at contemporary programming, I don’t think we have properly understood the social damage that our coding culture has already done, and is still doing. We have built enormous parts of modern life out of software, while pretending that software is somehow separate from society. It isn’t, code structures how we communicate, what we can see, who can participate, what gets remembered, what gets deleted, who gets heard and who gets ignored. And much of contemporary programming culture has a deeply contradictory relationship with this power.
In theory, the culture talks like anarchism: decentralisation, freedom, hacking, autonomy, permissionless innovation, open protocols. In practice, the resulting infrastructure feels closer to an authoritarian bureaucracy: rigid hierarchies, centralised control, surveillance, locked-down permissions, opaque decision-making and an almost obsessive belief that more control and more security will produce a safer society. This is part of the #geekproblem.
Closed systems hide power – in a #closed system, the monsters can operate without being easily seen. They can plot, manipulate, divide and control because the surrounding community cannot properly see what is happening. There is no shared social process for checking the claims being made or comparing them against what everyone else can see.
You cannot easily create social “truth” inside a closed system, you can have an official truth, corporate truth, an algorithmically manufactured truth. You can have whatever the people controlling the system want you to believe. But social truth is different, it emerges from people being able to see, question, compare, remember and challenge what is happening, that is one of the powerful things about #open. With genuinely open systems, the monster becomes more obvious. It becomes easier to see the relationships, the decisions, the contradictions and the consequences.
It becomes easier for other people to say – hang on, that’s not what happened – open systems don’t magically prevent abuse, they don’t make people good, but they make some forms of abuse harder to hide. Closed breeds monsters. Open pushes them out of the shadows where they can be seen.
The security paradox – this is where programming culture gets particularly strange. The demand for control and security is to often presented as neutral engineering. We are told that systems need permissions, authentication, central administration, surveillance and increasingly complex layers of security because the world is dangerous.
Of course some security is necessary, but when security becomes the organising principle of the whole system, something changes, the technology begins to reproduce the social assumptions of its creators. People become permissions, communities become accounts, relationships become access-control lists, trust becomes authentication and thus social problems become technical problems. Uncertainty becomes something that must be eliminated rather than something that society needs to learn to live with – this produces systems that are technically impressive but socially impoverished.
The fantasy of perfect control is a deeper problem here. We keep trying to build technology that removes mess, but human society is messy. People disagree, misunderstand each other, change their minds. Communities develop traditions as different groups have different needs. Sometimes things fail or somebody has a better idea, that isn’t necessarily a bug, it is social life. The #geekproblem treats this mess as something that technology should solve. The result, an endless attempt to build cleaner abstractions over increasingly complicated social realities. But the cleaner the technical abstraction becomes, the more human reality gets pushed outside the closeing system.
Then the system becomes brittle, and when it breaks, everyone is surprised. Code should be allowed to be messy – this doesn’t mean writing bad code. It means recognising that good social technology cannot be based on the fantasy of perfect control. We need systems that accommodate disagreement, forks, experiments, mistakes, local variation, negotiation and repair. In that sense, code should be a little bit messy, because society is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate the mess, it is to create structures that help us live with it. That is different from the programming culture of trying to close every possible hole, define every possible behaviour and control every possible interaction.
#OPEN is a direction, not an endpoint – there is also a danger in treating #open as another purity project. Yes, the #openweb isn’t automatically good as open systems can contain abuse, misinformation, exclusion and power games. The #openweb itself contains plenty of contradictions. The #dotcons have their own versions of “openness”, often while retaining enormous concentrations of corporate power. So this isn’t a simple story of good open people versus bad closed people, more a balancing process.
#OPEN is a way to step away from #CLOSED – it creates space for transparency, plurality, experimentation and social accountability, gives communities more opportunities to see what is happening and to build alternatives. And that matters because we are currently living inside an enormous pile of inherited closed #techshit – closed platforms, closed data, closed algorithms, closed governance, closed infrastructures and assumptions about what technology is supposed to do. As a first step we need to compost a lot of this closed crap.
The mistake, we make to often today, is that we believe that we can build the perfect open system and finally end the struggle, we can’t, and we shouldn’t. There is no final technical architecture for society. There is no perfect governance model, no moment when we finally solve disagreement, power or human contradiction. Anyone promising that is either selling something, hiding something, or has fallen deeply into the #geekproblem.
The point is not to end the mess, it is to keep the mess visible, social and negotiable. We need technology that leaves room for people to challenge each other, organise, experiment, repair and move in different directions. That is why the #OMN work matters – to build practical #openweb infrastructure where media, metadata, moderation, governance and community relationships can remain visible, shared and contestable.
To make this happen we need #4opens starting points, #OGB experiments with governance, #MakingHistory to keep collective memory alive and #IndymediaBack to remember what grassroots media learned before the current wave of #dotcons.
#indymedia was ripped apart by the war of open/closed
Build open tools without HARD coded defaults – yes you can choose where the switches are flicked on the default install, but that is as much power that the dev team should take in #4opens dev
“War, What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, say it agen…”
You can’t start a war if there is nothing to fight over.
The is a pretty sorted #ActivityPub crew, then some organizing sites/forums, the yearly conference. MOST importantly some “kings”, “princes” a bit of a tech/influencer aristocracy who currently hold much of the “power”.
Where do we go from here?
On online “governing body” to be a VOICE for the #Fediverse – all done #4opens in social code:
We have a yearly voting/consensus (online) body made up of “stakeholders”
Who are the bulk stakeholders-representatives:
One voice one instance – if you run an instance you get a vote – put the URL in as long as it’s online last year your vote counts.
The is then an equal/matching number of votes based on a “user” lottery – have to opt in by adding your account name. This is refreshed every year.
Then we have other more “affiliate” stakeholders that have to be “ratified” through the body
Codebases – could be factored by installed based on instance registered above. Over a basic threshold and the body agrees.
fedivers events – any group that regularly runs events gets a “stakeholder” vote based on them doing it last year. If the body agrees to this.
fedivers support organizations get a vote if the body agrees to this.
activitypub standards crew – get votes through all the rest and can have a vote as a founding fedivers org.
Groups and individuals could get more than one vote – which is fine.
This would give us
A representative “stakeholder” body that could accept proposals and make decisions.
How would the body work?
#techshit all ready has way to much LOOK at ME look AT me. I don’t like competitive elections as the shit float to the top
Let’s do a LOTTERY- from these “voters” that makes up the body a lottery decides 3-5 as #spokespeople then leave um to get on with it. There is a tick box to opt out of being in the “spokespeople” lottery, so you have too wont to do the extra work if you don’t want to, its opt out rather than opt in – this is important.
They have the power to speak for the body and thus the #fedivers and can make policy decisions on consensus minus one process. Or put policy directly to the body to be voted (majority vote) on by the stakeholders. (of course they would be subject to recall/impeachment if they fuckup too much, say proposal and 2/3 vote of the body)
Levels of “voice” anyone with an #activertpub account can put in a public proposal to be voted on by the stakeholders – if it jumps that hoop then it can be edited/pushed by an open group of stakeholders though a semiformal #4opens online process to jump to an agreement. Agreements are acted on by the “spokespeople” up to them to take these ideas forward? If non are interested better luck next year with your agender and new spokes people.
Q. what dose digital online Community “democracy” look like
If it does not have elephants running around throwing paper planes it’s likely the wrong structure.
NOTE: of course these alt-ideas have been tried in the offline world, and they generally DO NOT work. But this is no reason to go down the dead end of “liberal” foundation governances that also does not work. People are trying these ideas in Citizens’ assemblies so no issue not to try them online.
Lotteries take the “power” out of power politics… likely worth an experiment.
Compost and shovels are needed.
The power of the voice
User proposals are excepted by anyone who has an activertypub account- just an idea – this can become a group.
User groups – a part of the process, these come from ideas getting a level of support of the stakeholders.
User agreements come out of groups these can then be enacted by the spokes people if they are interested.
Spokes people can start groups to reach agreements and can enact agreements.
Consensus of spokes people (-1) makes agreements body wide.
What are the risks:
* need basic security and checks – to see if an instance still exists and is real. If a member account is actively posting or a pulpit – all of this can be done with flagging some of them by code some by people – flags stuff goes to the “security group”
* Groups can be captured by agenders – being open to all stakeholder members mediates this – we solve swamping by having a dynamic short non-voting time based on the number of new members in the group.
* Bad group of spokes people, it’s a lottery, it’s up to the groups to influence and as a last resort “impeach” if one goes a new one is chosen by lottery.
* The actual number of spokes people are dynamic depending on the number of stakeholders but between 3-5 is likely a good number.
UPDATE
The body is made up of stakeholder one for each instance – you wont a voice you run an instance and register it. This is clearly the voice of the #Fediverse as they are the people running it.
This is then balanced dynamically by the same number of “users” who are interested in the process, they are chosen by lottery from the registered accounts. Your choice to register or not your account as a possable stakeholder.
On registration the is a box you can untick if you do NOT do this then you are in the lottery to get “governing positions” Sortition – Wikipedia for a background on why this path.
Only people who want to be part of the governing body AND play an active role are enrolled in the lottery.
You second point “common voice” comes from the working groups, agen are made up of ONLY people who are interested in playing a role.
“serving the humans trying to communicate.” we get out of the way and let the humans work it out – we provide structer for the groups, we don’t define the groups.
SocialHub though an interesting tool has strong tech aristocracy which is not surprising as this is how almost all open source project run – the Fediverse is something different which is why we do so badly at governance. Let’s continue to use the SocialHub for #ActivityPub organizing and possibly governance though it has no tools that I have found for the governance.
Sign up for the site, then don’t untick the box for “do work” if you become a “stakeholder” every time a position opens the lottery picks a stakeholder to fill it if it is you and you would like to do the job – get to it. If you do not wont the job then resign and the lottery will pick a new person.
If you are not picked by the lottery for a job opening the is still a meany things you can do as a stakeholder in the groups. If you are not picked as a stakeholder you can still put ideas for the stakeholders to make into group decisions.
The outcome is something much more representative of the #Fediverse than we can currently think about let alone implement.
The is #nothingnew in this idea or implementation, some examples from Wikipedia
Examples
Law court juries are formed through sortition in some countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom.
Citizens’ assemblies have been used to provide input to policy makers. In 2004, a randomly selected group of citizens in British Columbia convened to propose a new electoral system. This Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was repeated three years later in Ontario’scitizens’ assembly. However, neither assembly’s recommendations reached the required thresholds for implementation in subsequent referendums.
MASS LBP, a Canadian company inspired by the work of the Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform, has pioneered the use of Citizens’ Reference Panels for addressing a range of policy issues for public sector clients. The Reference Panels use civic lotteries, a modern form of sortition, to randomly select citizen-representatives from the general public.
Democracy In Practice, an international organization dedicated to democratic innovation, experimentation and capacity-building, has implemented sortition in schools in Bolivia, replacing student government elections with lotteries.[23]
DanishConsensus conferences give ordinary citizens a chance to make their voices heard in debates on public policy. The selection of citizens is not perfectly random, but still aims to be representative.
Private organizations can also use sortition. For example, the Samaritan Ministries health plan sometimes uses a panel of 13 randomly selected members to resolve disputes, which sometimes leads to policy changes.[24]
The Amish use sortition applied to a slate of nominees when they select their community leaders. In their process, formal members of the community each register a single private nomination, and candidates with a minimum threshold of nominations then stand for the random selection that follows.[25]
Citizens’ Initiative Review at Healthy Democracy uses a sortition based panel of citizen voters to review and comment on ballot initiative measures in the United States. The selection process utilizes random and stratified sampling techniques to create a representative 24-person panel which deliberates in order to evaluate the measure in question.[26]
The environmental group Extinction Rebellion has as one of its goals the introduction of a Citizens’ assembly that is given legislative power to make decisions about climate and ecological justice.[1]
Let’s be optimistic and say half the instances signed up that would be over 3000 instances stakeholders and thus 3000 user stakeholders for a total of 6000 and a number from affiliate groups. This number is likely too much, so we can put a limit to 100 chosen by lottery from the stakeholders instances, this is then matched by 100 from the user stakeholders for 200 stakeholders + 5-10 affiliates it’s up to the admin group to choice the right number to build a working community, if you don’t have enough good workers open the pool up if the is to much dicushern close the pool down, try different approaches.
UPDATE
Looking at this in conversation it becomes clear it is a 3 way split of stakolder groups: instances/users/builders&supporters with the last group in big groups could be the size of the others so just to higlight they would be treted in exactly the same way if they are over the number of the body then they would be chosen by lottery just like the others.
This looks like a tech/process based attempt at grassroots governance. Must say straight out, in my expirence, I have seen many process lead models like this, and they have NEVER worked.
Though it is always a good thing to try iteration. And good to contrast this to the humane/serendipity based aproch that we have been working on at the #omn
The 
