A project outline for the OGB

Project description

The Open Governance Body (#OGB) project is a set of software tools that encode a governance model structured on traditional grassroots activism.
Further, the OGB – for which the code base is named – is a decentralized and democratic system for “governance” of any collective/community consisting of (generally speaking) #1 – Producers and #2 -Consumers.

The #Fediverse is used as the example herein.

To explore and develop better ways of having trust-based conversations and governance within the #openweb. To utilize comprehensive experience gained through greater than 5 years active, “on-the-ground” organization of instances within the #Fediverse as a technological toolkit for horizontal scaling of social
power.

The #OGB is a #Fediverse native process of working that emphasizes voluntary cooperation and collaboration with a standard #KISS approach.
The #OGB prioritizes focus on sortition and “messy consensus” in order to achieve decision-making and equitable power distribution.

The project is not about creating a single organization that dictates what protocols and standards to use within the #Fediverse. #OGB is about developing better processes for healthy, trust-based conversations and forging governance
accessible and equitable to all

Project results

Developing/creating a framework to demonstrate improved ways for “trust” based dialogue/conversation and “trust” based governance within the #openweb.
Building a true cooperative, a collaborative alliance that is native to the #Fediverse and #openweb.

Emphasizing the importance of recognizing where power originates in the context of the #Fediverse and #openweb.

Developing/creating improved technological tools as a solution to problems arising through social organization enabling problem-solving in a native #openweb manner.

Removing current hard coded defaults by providing an alternative standardized set of #KISS framework tools to empower active body members a space to utilise said tools deeply and to begin proficient instruction of their use.

Developing/creating a permission-less structure that is open to and for all. One which enables the active group through organic process, a framework of tools to decide who is a part of their group/groups.

Emphasizing that there is no exclusion and that there will always be diversity, making it an organic piece for the #Fediverse.

Building governance where the “way”, “rules”, “norms” and “actions” are structured, sustained, regulated, and held with accountability

Benefits to the Community

There are challenges and conflicts that arise within grassroots organisation or #DIY governance. In developing/creating a #KISS standard such as the #OGB framework to address said problems, we will enable a more true democratic and equitable process that benefits any and all involved.

Through empowering a more diverse scope of voices, decision-making is made more collectively. These tools utilize a greater range of voice, preventing polarization from smaller groups using perhaps limited perspectives and or values.

Additionally, through a strong ethical foundation, decision-making is ensured a more progressive development. With a focus on the primary needs of the community as a whole, rather than individuals or polarized groups.

As a social coding project, the #OGB is neither a traditional top down distribution of power or project derived of a normal #mainstreaming agenda. Rather, it is a bottom-up grassroots empowerment for sharing of knowledge and power. An example of what is found in many of the 20th century social movements,
movements responsible for the birth of what is said to be today’s best current progressive mainstream.

Through the #OGB project the “we” will facilitate the forming, communication and governance.

Timeline and important milestones

Upon securing foundation funding, negotiations for immediate ICT services will begin with respected clients for future partnership to cement project longevity and sustainability.
As described above within the KPI outline, the progression of timelines is a basic and #KISS standard
project operation where in all tasks/tiers are realistically achievable to ensure project success.
The following is an initial outline – it can be extended when possible:
9 months to Alpha testing with #Fediverse
12 months to Beta testing with #Fediverse
12 months to Beta testing with offline communities
24 months to public launch

Key Performance Indicators

Tier 1 – Source code development from base developers and progressive training through the scaling of
outreach servers through the use of MOOC LMS training platforms.
Beginner – Test Community… Local Distribution – Flea Market,Sunday Market – APP Progressive Code
9 months to Alpha testing within Fediverse
12 months to Beta testing within Fediverse
Tier 2 – Test Community… #Fediverse – Web Code
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Intermediate – Test Community… Local Distribution – Boating Community,Hiking Community – APP
Progressive Code
Tier 3 – Progressive Web App
12 months to Beta testing with offline communities
24 months to public launch
Tier 4 – The below distributions are escalations through our developed outreach scheme.
Advanced – Test Community… Local Distribution – Schools/classrooms

Project publicity

Utilizing the recent promotion of approximately 10 million people encompassing 1 million active Twitter migration users to #Mastodon to further bring awareness.

The continuance of our work within #SocialHub will continue to build on the origins of #OGB Promoting publicity through the building “governance” through #ActivityPub

Why you

We would like to reboot the #openweb and the way we communicate, interact and govern as a whole.
We know what works socially… grassroots movements
We know what works technologically… #Fediverse
We are the people developing the symbiosis for all to utilise for our futures

Activities that will benefit

FOSS and open-source frameworks are facing a continual social challenge of balancing their grassroots paradigm within corporate parameters. #OGB aims to develop/create a set of tools to encourage and aide balance.

The efforts of the #Fediverse community have been successful in shifting the EU closer through our outreach to promoting a more humane internet. #Mastodon and technologies like #ActivityPub have become important players in the EU’s initiatives for a more inclusive and equitable online environment.
The huge growth of Mastodon, one of the most popular social networking platforms in the #Fediverse, due to the #Twitter migration attracted a large and diverse, vibrant community of users from across the EU and
the world. This growth helped to validate the importance of decentralized internet and its potential to shape a more humane world by relieving the community of hosting burdens so we can focus on collective
governance and the formation of a collective governing body for decentralized efforts

As the righwing is failing, the mess is growing in the left…

What #mastodon is doing now is going to lead to a lot of mess, duo to people squabbling. This might or might not be a level of mess that negates the vertical move to “simplicity” of a single codebase and a single instance. That would be a waste… and it was the king and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite that are pushing this mess, good not to get confused about this part.

This is actually the same as the #NGO mess we see in #XR at the same time

As the righwing is failing, the mess is growing in the left…

Why is Mastodon so dominant in the fediverse?

Q. Why is Mastodon so dominant in the fediverse?

A. It had better #UX and @Gargron running it was an effective communicator at #KISS and built it out as a #4opens project alongside a healthy (white) lie about security and privacy.
The rest of the projects lacked these things – #Pleroma the obverse compaine was ripped apart by the #geekproblem then embraced by the right-wing. #Peertube was stuck in a good but closed development for years. #Pixelfed is a little brother project to #mastodon. Then there are a whole flood of #NGO funded projects that have no community.

Might be useful to see it as we’re having a “KING” problem, then the rest are #feudalism all the way down. This should be easy to fix as its #4opens and all #openweb, but it’s not. Just about everyone is hard #BLOCKING the obvuse need for “democracy” as a path out of the mess #OGB

How is the #NOSTR world doing on this?

Talking about tech – Enclosing the “commons” is a bad history for native societies

White Lies About Security and Privacy in the Fediverse

We’re told small white lies about security and privacy to boot up #Mastodon. But the truth is, this #openweb tech is about dancing elephants throwing paper planes as a security/privacy model.

Yes, this is simply not the right tool for the “common sense” privacy and control needs the #geekproblem have. In reality, there’s already a wealth of mature, privacy-focused tech out there built specifically for that path.

Enclosing the “commons” is a dark chapter in history for native societies, and we risk repeating this mistake if we misunderstand the political roots of decentralized social media.

Let’s pause and check the unspoken/unthinking political aspect of this. Much of the desire to retrofit heavy privacy into the #Fediverse comes from #mainstreaming liberalism, which frames everything through fear and control. But the Fediverse wasn’t born from that path, it emerged from a trust-based, anarchistic culture.

At its core, social media is:

Social (one-to-many)
Media (sharing news and events)

It’s an inherently public activity.

On the other hand, encrypted chat (one-on-one or in small groups) is an inherently private activity.

The #dotcons messily mix these two spheres together, but only because their centralized architecture makes it possible (and profitable). Of course, this is a black lie, since these platforms don’t actually respect the privacy they promise. Their entire business model depends on violating it.

In the decentralized #openweb, public and private spaces have generally been separate and tidy, and that’s a good thing. But lately, some online discussions feel like an attempt to deliberately blur these lines, reproducing the #mainstreaming model under the guise of “common sense”, to take the same failed path we’ve been trapped in for 20 years.

We don’t need to reproduce the mess. We can have the best of both worlds:

Public, federated social media built around the #4opens
Private, encrypted communication for individuals and groups in P2P chat

Let’s keep our focus on the true nature of social media and build tools that respect both public and private spheres, without falling back into the traps of the #deathcult.

Libertarian #Fediverse “cats”

This story is about a group of libertarian #Fediverse “cats” who convinced one of the largest and most bureaucratic institutions, the European Union, to embrace decentralized and #openweb technologies. Through outreach efforts, EU-sponsored events and advocating to policy-makers, they raised awareness of the benefits of decentralized models of the internet and the positive impact this has on creating a more equitable and sustainable online environment for European citizens.

As the #Fediverse, #Mastodon, and #ActivityPub continues to rapidly grow in popularity, the #openweb cultural values at the heart of this outreach have been validated. Through continued grassroots community building and outreach efforts, radical activist have the potential to empower users and promote an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable online environment for all of us.

Please help tell this real life story https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/eu-outreach-if-we-dont-tell-our-story-am-not-sure-who-will/2950

A fresh look at #openweb history

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, when it was first introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time, the web was primarily used for academic scientific, #NGO’s hobbyists and activists purposes and less yet widely adopted by the public.

#Web02 refers to the growth and expansion of the World Wide Web during the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the web became more accessible and user-friendly, and was increasingly adopted for commercial purposes. This era saw the rise of #dotcons, characterized by the growth of social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing. The web had become increasingly interactive and interconnected, and has become a critical tool for communication, misinformation, social control and commerce.

#Web03 was a waste of space, focus and money by the #Encryptionists who in bed with the scammers produced meany still born tech children in the last 10 years.

#Web01.5 refer to an intermediate stage between Web01 and Web02, marking a transition between the early and more experimental phase of the web and its more widespread commercial adoption. Web01.5 refers to a time when the web was still growing and evolving, but had already become more accessible and user-friendly, and was being adopted for more diverse purposes. With #mastodon and the #fedivers over the last 5 years, we are rebooting this web01.5 stage.

The patriarchs of the early #openweb

Talking about the #geekproblem in funding

Q. #nlnet – The problem we face with funding http://hamishcampbell.com/2022/06/06/the-problem-we-face-with-funding/

A. KiCAD, some warrant canary and Armbian aren’t “open internet” projects by any stretch of imagination, but the ones relating to routers and mesh networks are. They’re “open internet” at the infrastructure level – like Guifinet or Freifunk.

Q. yep and are useful for a tiny number of people so worth supporting. BUT the call-out for the funding is for a much wider social affect in the #openweb, so the is an obvious #geekproblem can you see this?

A. Whatever funding they put into the applications layer will be cautious because they probably don’t want to be dealing with Twitter-like problems. Infrastructure is more narrowly technical, and so it’s hard for that to blow up into a scandal, which could happen if they were more directly funding social networks.

Q. yep… but the #openweb needs better USER-FACING code not more backend, the backend is not helping to address the social problems we face where it is being digested by the #dotcons and then adding more mess to compost. How to communicate this problem to the geeks?

A. Really it’s the backend – the plumbing – which needs more funding, because when you peel off the layer of ultra-trendy ActivityPub apps underneath you will find tools and systems which have been neglected for years if not decades. The application layer is currently a house built on sand. Or quicksand if you include Javascript.

Q. We do see the #geekproblem here you are right, and at the same time the view is irrelevant when you step back to look at the problem.

An example, #activertypub would have been still born without the outreach social UX of #mastodon. We have the #fediverse due to the social side of the mastodon project.

Adding more backend is feeding the #dotcons not the #openweb because we need BOTH, and we need to fund both. Yes, we can play “safe” and build tools to feed the future #dotcons, or we can do both and live life with the possibility of social change challenge…

UPDATE

Talking about the problem:

Q. Am thinking the #fedivers is in a bad way, so being angry and annoyed is understandable. The #openweb momentum we had is stumbling, the people sellingout growing as funding shifts… the problems grow, am interested in ideas to mediate these? The fedivers is a CULTURE first and a standard second… ideas?

A. I agree with your observation on the state of the fediverse. And on the cultural aspect too. I envision a Peopleverse (social) that is enabled / supported by the Fediverse (technical). And much more diverse social activity taking place here, that goes well beyond microblogging. And the funding should shift accordingly. You can fund as many innovation projects as you wish, but if the adoption of the technology grinds to a halt, then there’s a high risk this money is wasted.

Cat videos – A “shadow ban” experiment on youtube

Just finished a cat video, it’s an experiment for #YouTube. We have over 7000 subscribers and over 5 million video views on our legacy #visionontv account Our viewing numbers have been dropping over the last few years, and now we get very few views, likely do to do with the activists content not being “ad friendly”. Have recently tried making fluffy content, very few views, so let’s try cats 😉

Am curious if the “algorithm” will pick it up or not. If it does pick up will it feed views onto the other videos on the account, with the suggestions etc.

Pushed it out quite hard on #failbook #twitter and #mastodon, but it did not pickup views on youtube (37 views in 15 hours) which suggests that the visionontv account is “shadowbanned” not surprising I suppose, will try pushing the video on cat forums to test how strong the “ban” is.

You can find much more interesting (but not as cute) videos on http://visionon.tv

Outreaching the openweb

With the current #openweb reboot going on there’s a lot of default thinking that is bad, and we do need to learn to judge between the good and bad paths if it’s to live up to its potential. Let’s start to give examples:

* Promoting silos vs promoting networks – as our current thinking is based on closed/silo thinking then when we promote #openweb projects we continue to use this thinking and promote silo/closed thinking rather than harder to understand open/network thinking.

– Protocols rather than platforms, balance talk about #Fediverse/#ActivityPub and #mastodon or branded projects. Our brand thinking is a failure of networking and contains strong unseen #deathcult thinking.

– Always outreach a wide selection of instances rather than a single one, the strength is in the network and not in the silo. Networks scale downwards, more/balanced, with stability is better than one “solution”. Be weary of sites that push themselves as the “place”.

– Networks are based on trust, in this look for groups/families of projects to support. Lose is always good, do not support “we are THE solution” closed siloed thinking. Write articles about a spread of views is better outreach as this is actually the project.

– be weary of projects that promise digital security/privacy first – these projects are always lying and thus dangerous and unhealthy for trust based networks. This is a hard-to-understand open/closed issue, we all need to have real conversations about this.

More to come…

A look at how technology shapes progressive/radical media-looking forward-looking back

3 events at newspeak house this winter:
Session 1) Looking back – how technology shaped the production and distribution of radical/progressive media like #Undercurrents, #Indymedia etc.

Session 2) The current day – failure of radical media technology. The rise of the #dotcons and the new alt-media projects.

Session 3) Looking forward – The #activetypub meetup. This is an update on the state of current #openweb projects. A continuation of the very successful #Mastodon meetups that I set up last year, opening up to the wider projects like #Peertube, #Pleroma, #Pixalfeed etc.

What kind of format do you imagine?

First two would be presentation, with long Q&A sessions and feedback from other participants that arrive on the day. Following the successful meetups last year, the last session is a user group go round with a few lightening talks and Q&A.

Session 1) I’m planning to invite one of the founders of both Undercurrents and #IMC to speak. I was also involved in both, so we would have 3 perspectives. I would have to cover the expenses of these speakers.

Session 2) I’m currently looking for speakers. I can talk/guide on this subject to shape the agenda to the subject.

Session 3) We have a list of people to invite from our meetup group from last year, so it will be a continuity user group meetup with fresh outreach.

And who do you imagine as your target audience?

Session 1) People who were involved (a lot) in the production and distribution of radical/progressive media. Historians (a few), and people interested in the 3 workshops and the subject of tech and politics in general.

Session 2) The same people from the first session will come to the second one, plus next generation who built good things inside the #doctons (for example UK uncut, student protests, current radical media projects and their ordinances).

Session 3) The same people from the first two sessions, plus the people running the Mastodon instances. Both developers and users, as well as the new alt media producers to connect with the developers/sysadmins

For outreach, there will be two bites of the cherry, the publicity for the event and the publicity for each of the sessions.