Tag: Boateurope

Introduction

Hamish Campbell is an #openweb organic intellectual and a core contributor to the #OMN (Open Media Network). He publishes at http://hamishcampbell.com, where he documents decades of radical media work, social tech projects, and reflections on activist culture. You’ll find him across the #Fediverse, on the #dotcons, and on #YouTube – pushing for open dialogue around politics, technology, and media.

Over the years, Hamish has been central to a number of grassroots tech and media initiatives, including:

  • Undercurrents – video activism documenting direct action and alternative culture.
  • Ruffcuts – Copy left (before, Creative Commons) licensed video CD-ROMs project distributed across UK and global activist networks.
  • UK Indymedia – part of the global Indymedia network, building open publishing platforms for activist journalism.
  • VisionOnTV – producing and distributing social movement video through peer-to-peer networks and open tools. Now in its fourth generation of FOSS tech, the project has been running on and off for nearly 20 years.
  • The PeoplesTV Project – creating low-cost, live-edit, and video aggregation tools for real-time, mobile grassroots reporting.
  • 4opens – a framework for ethical #FOSS tech development, demanding openness of code, data, standards, and governance.
  • OMN (Open Media Network) – building a trust-based federated media infrastructure for alternative publishing.
  • ActivityPub and the Fediverse – working with native protocols and community to develop open, decentralized publishing tools and outreach them. 
  • OGB (Open Governance Body) – prototyping grassroots governance models tailored to activist and Fediverse cultures.
  • Rebooting Indymedia – re-energising grassroots media infrastructure with fediverse tech and horizontal process. This Fediverse tech got to roll out before covid but did not survive the pandemic
  • MakingHistory – a new project under active development, exploring collective memory and storytelling.

Hamish approaches all of this through a political lens – believing that code is ideology made real. He is sharply critical of tech shaped by capitalism, which he sees as systemically extractive, closed, and hostile to real social change. His approach to “humane coding” centres on designing systems that embrace complexity, emergence, and care – tools that reflect human relationships rather than enforce control.

Beyond the tech world, Hamish has been involved in hundreds of activist campaigns and alternative life experiments. He’s written academically on vagabond culture and hitchhiking, and has produced and edited over 1,000 videos and documentaries in the last 20 years.

For the past decade, he has lived aboard a semi-off-grid lifeboat, navigating Europe’s canals and coasts — a real-world metaphor for the digital values he champions: autonomy, resilience, and mutual aid. #BoatEurope