Tag: OMN

Projects that need to work to help #reboot the #openweb

The #OGB is important to develop better ways of having “trust” based conversations and “trust” based “governance” in the #openweb. It is built on years of on-the-ground organizing and emphasizes the need for voluntary cooperation and collaboration. The project recognizes the problems in alternative tech, starting with the #4opens to remove complexity to building governance structures that are native to the #fediverse. The #OGB address the limitations of #mainstreaming approaches.

The #OMN (Open Media Network), is a decentralized network of media sites that share content and promote independent media. It aims to provide an alternative to mainstream media by creating a network of interconnected sites that prioritize openness, collaboration, and decentralization.

The #OMN project emphasizes the importance of grassroots community-driven media, where people and groups can create and share their own content. It seeks to challenge the dominance of #mainstreaming media and promote a more equitable and just society.

The project has been running for over ten years and operates with an #openprocess. Users can become mods after being involved for a certain period of time. The modding process is based on a clear project statement and encourages a respectful and inclusive community.

The #OMN project is closely related to the #visionontv project, which is a grassroots media project that creates and distributes independent video content. The two projects share similar values and goals in promoting alternative media and challenging mainstream narratives.

The #indymediaback project is a reboot of the original #Indymedia project, which was a decentralized, grassroots media network that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The project aims to learn from the mistakes and challenges faced by the original Indymedia, particularly the split between the #fashernitas and #geekproblem factions.

The focus of the #indymediaback reboot is to return to the path of the #fashernista, which emphasizes open media and decentralized structures, rather than control and centralization. The project aims to build an open media network (#OMN) that promotes direct democracy, open publishing, and anti-authoritarianism.

The reboot also acknowledges the risk of another split within the community, particularly if some members push for a control/encryptionist path. The challenge is to find a way to navigate this without succumbing to tribalism and power politics.

The #indymediaback project recognizes the importance of hashtags and semantic web technologies, which were not core to the original Indymedia project. Tags and metadata are being used to help organize and categorize content.

Overall, the #indymediaback project aims to revive the spirit of open media and grassroots activism, while learning from past mistakes and embracing new technologies and approaches.

The signal to noise issue of our #geekproblem

#Mastodon and the wider #fedivers are native #openweb project based on the #4opens people who try to “harden” and “secure” these are completely missing where the value is at.

They are spreading #FUD and endangering real activists acting this way.

Media is “open” using #ActivertyPub.

Anything that is not media should use encrypted p2p chat, there are many mature #FOSS projects for this.

At the moment as the #Fediverse is a #OMN based on the #4opens you have very low barrier to running or even developing an instance, this is where the value is.

Adding security generally makes a HUGE barrier to Dev and #DIY running an instance.

The #geekproblem has no idea of the damage they do when pushing their “common sense”. This creates a signal-to-noise issue that has been blocking alt for 20 years.

 

Signal to noise on the #FBI seazing a database of a fediverse instance

https://kolektiva.social/@admin/110637031574056150

The #Fediverse is all #4opens so should not be used for anything that should be P2P encrypted. It’s important to keep this clear to users by not focused on the fig leaf of “hardening” security as the is non. It’s a very successful #OMN open media network, and it’s value lies in this.

Peoples pushing this are often not seeing the point that it’s designed #4opens this is why it works.

Both paths have value, but they are different.

And the push a different project (#closedweb) which is fine. But not a #OMN maybe they would be better off working on bridges as companion projects.

Good to think about this mess they talk about as it is not solved by more tech, we already have most of what we need.

* Open media is #4opens based on trust, the current ActivityPub is a relatively #KISS good example of this.

* Privacy is encrypted p2p chat, which there are meany good #UX mature #FOSS projects you can find

The change we need is social, getting people to use the different approaches for different needs, this is surprisingly difficult.

Bridges while dangerous are needed here, it’s good to talk about this in the sense of “security”.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine

This text reads like a vanguards path, based on #mainstreaming reading and narrow #geekproblem thinking. It’s missing the paths that hold value in #4opens horizontal activist paths we are building. But yes, we are getting lost in the growing #fediverse and the wider spread of #openweb  reboot diversity projects.

What it does highlight is the need for social and political thinking is needed, the is value there.

It’s hard to stress how “nave” meany devs on the #fediverse

#openweb #4opens is about building human trust, hard security is a very slightly overlapping but easy to see different path for building non “trust” based connections.

Some surprisingly hard to build bridges might help with this ongoing mess.

Can you see any of this feedback?

What is visionontv

#Visionontv is a grassroots media project that aims to provide an alternative to mainstream media by creating and distributing independent video content. The project has been running for over ten years and is based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and decentralization. It uses #FOSS open-source software and decentralized platforms to create and distribute activist video content. One of the key features of the project is its participation in the Open Media Network (#OMN), a decentralized network of media sites that share content and promote independent media that is not controlled by any single entity. The project emphasizes the importance of grassroots community-driven media, where people and groups can create and share their own content.

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 #YouTube – pushing for open dialogue around politics, technology, and media.

Over the years, Hamish has been central to meany 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. #BoatingEurope

“Look, these guys are covered in mess, we can’t work with them…”

In the #Fediverse we are going to have waves of #mainstreaming people coming into “our” #openweb counter currents, bringing a lot of non-native, unthinking blinded mess with them, they will push this blindness over us as “common sense” then they will retreat back to #mainstreming and point at us covered in mess… “Look these guys are covered in mess we can’t work with them…”

Yes this is bad behaver, ideas please?

The question I am asking is who is creating the mess, and the very “uncommon sense” obvuse answer is “they” are. Composting comes to mind, do you need a shovel #OMN

And yes, the “us” and “them” are in quote marks, to highlight the need for more composting.

The world walks right past us looking the other way and takes the big bundle of bills from capitalism.

OK, had to close then open new accounts on #visionontv #peertube because of #spam, the spam is starting agen – there is an update that allows you to put new accounts on ask/moderation, we need to upgrade at some point to get this.

Interesting this is exactly the way our ten-year-old #OMN project handles flows as is the “new” moderation in #bluesky… if we don’t manage to go to the world, the world come to us… well more like the world walks right past us looking the other way and takes the big bundle of bills from capitalism.

This is normal, we are still doing needed work, but better would be good to 🙂

#bluesky #Nostr #activertypub

They all share #openweb tech, so this is a win.

Where they differ is in the “culture” they come from and push.

#bluesky comes from surveillance capitalism, it’s from the #dotcons and has meany of the same assumptions, just “better”.

#Nostr comes from the #encryptionists and #bitcoin bro crew and suffers from being from this mess.

#activertypub is #openweb native and comes from the traditions the whole software world is actually built on.

#KISS

The #KISS path is to simply bridge them all and let them cooperate, as they are all a part of the #openweb family.

The more complex and messy path is that some of them might not want to do this… OK now we get to the part where piss is likely signal rather than noise. Let’s draw a line, (a date is good) if they don’t bridge, we let loose the pee, liquid trickling in will short out their servers.

Ending thought:

For a lot of our #fashernistas in our spaces, things only matter if they come from #mainstreaming this is obviously crap blinded behaver – but it’s hard to communicate why, likely they can’t see me 😉

PS. I liked that joke.

A path out of the funding mess

There is an unspoken negative effect of traditional foundation funding agendas on grassroots #openweb projects. These grassroots projects have different priorities and goals than traditional organizations, and the formal processes used by existing #NGO projects, such as decidim.org and loomio.org, may not be well-suited for them.

#The #OMN team is on a mission to address this by focusing on empowering communities through decentralized decision-making processes. Their experience and track record make them well-suited to carry out this mission.

If successful, the #OGB project can have a significant impact on the way communities make decisions in the future. By empowering grassroots movements and organizations, it helps to ensure that their voices are heard and that their needs are addressed.

A draft funding application – OGB

Requesting funding for the Open Governance Body (#OGB) project. Which is being developed by the Open Media Network (#OMN). The OMN is a collective that builds and hosts #4opens standards-based socio-political software. Our mission is to provide communities with the tools they need to organize, communicate, and make decisions.

The #OGB project is a grassroots initiative that seeks to empower communities by giving them a stronger voice in decision-making. We believe that traditional social coding projects that are based on a top-down approach to power are not effective. Our approach is different. We are developing a bottom-up solution that is based on the principles of sharing power and collective decision-making.

Our team has years of experience in grassroots social tech projects. We have been directly involved with #UnderCurrents, #indymedia, #VisionOnTV, #LondonBoating, among others, and have a firm grasp of what does and does not work within organizing both social and technological communities. We have also worked on UN and World Bank projects in West Africa and have decided to manage them through community/scrum, rather than formal methods.

We are seeking funding in the amount of $50,000. This funding will be used to pay four people to work on the project at a fixed rate of ten thousand euros for 9-12 months of work. The bulk of the work will be programming and implementation details. The remaining ten thousand will be used for servers, expenses, outreach work, extensive testing, and basic project upkeep.

A Look at Existing Projects

It is important to note that foundation funding agendas can have a negative effect on the agendas of #openweb projects. A brief look at some existing projects highlights this issue. For example, decidim.org, which is an NGO process similar to loomio.org, Formal processes can be a bad tool for “herding cats” in social challenge or activist groups. And has been imposed numerous times in activism but has always failed.

After reviewing loomio.org, it is clear that the same ideas and workflows were pushed onto #climatecamp, #indymedia, and #occupy. In the first two cases, it ossified the projects, and in the last case, it was a mess. The #processgeeks behind these projects have not changed, and their projects are a bad fit for life and a terrible fit for the fediverse and activism. However, they may work for some NGOs and more formal cooperative organizing.

It is important to note the differences between formal and informal governance structures. Both use “consensus,” but the Open Governance Body is more like a do-ocracy than a formal governance structure.

 

The #hashtags embody a story and world-view

My use of #hashtags is confusing a lot of people, good to have some signal in the noise on this subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext I am using them in the way the #WWW was designed to use them #KISS

The #hashtags embody a story and world-view that are rooted in a progressive and critical perspective on technology and society. They highlight the negative impact of neoliberalism (#deathcult) and consumer capitalism (#fashionista) on society, and promote the original ideals of the World Wide Web and internet culture (#openweb). The #closedweb hashtag critiques the for-profit internet and its social consequences, while the #4opens promote the principles of transparency, collaboration, and sharing in open-source development.

The #geekproblem hashtag draws attention to the cultural movement of geeks, who can become blinded by their own technical knowledge and fail to consider the broader social implications of their work (#techshit). The #encryptionists hashtag critiques the dominant belief among some geeks that all solutions need more encryption, which can lead to a desire for total control and artificial scarcity.

Overall, these hashtags are interlocking to tell a wide-ranging story and world-view that advocates for a more humane, collaborative, and transparent path in technology and society. The #nothingnew hashtag raises whether new technological projects are needed, or whether we should focus on improving existing ones. The #techchurn hashtag refers to the technological outcome of the #geekproblem, which can lead to a constant cycle of new projects that do not address underlying social issues. Finally, the #OMN and #indymediaback hashtags promote the idea of an open media network and the rebooting of the altmedia project that was once the size of traditional media on the #openweb. The #OGB hashtag represents the need for open governance and the power of the community to make decisions collectively.

It’s simple #KISS, so please try not to react like a prat about this, thanks.

People destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession

The mess we make, people often destroy things they love, not from hate, more from possession. Let’s look at a few projects on this path to critique the short fall of potential due to a lack of connectivity and maturity

The distributed cooperative organisation project on https://anagora.org while it aims to provide organizational tools for cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economic forms, it lacks the necessary links and connections to be in any way truly effective.

  • http://disco.coop/manifesto/ the same mess, this is the #fashionista view of the 20-year-old #OMN project, it is full of teenage focus and might be interesting if it LINKED, but it does not, flight and scatter to the wind, more to compost.

The #DisCO (Distributed Cooperative Organisations) manifesto at disco.coop is the same project run by #fashionistas

  • https://two.compost.digital/ This is the #NGO # fashionista view of the 20-year-old #OMN project, it is full of teenage focus and might be interesting if it LINKED, but it does not, flight and scatter to the wind, more to compost.

The COMPOST digital magazine (two.compost.digital) is also in similar terms, #NGO and #fashernista path, with no affective linking.

These projects are all #blocking by occupying space. In this #fashernista path, we do need to see how possessiveness leads to unintended destruction of things we cherish. This reflects a common path of human nature, where love and possession become intertwined, with negative consequences.

“Flight and scatter to the wind, more to compost” these projects, despite their intentions, ultimately dissipate or break down without achieving any goals. The use of “compost” as a metaphor that suggests that in their failure, these projects might contribute to future growth or development in unexpected ways. The hashtag “#blocking” is a way too express this ineffective approaches.

Our “common sense” paths are often bad:

This path of possession can easily lead to bad paths in alt organising. Abuse of power, when leadership positions within a cooperative become possessive of their authority, this then lead to corrupt practices and mismanagement, misappropriation of resources, even fraud. The desire to maintain control and cover up misdeeds leads to the destruction of records and falsification of information. Erosion of cooperative principles grow when peoples interests overshadow collective goals, this then destroys the ethos of cooperation. Then trying to fix this becomes much harder with resistance to transparency, and over control of information. This all leads naturally to conflict and retaliation, destructive actions against those who challenge them.

How possessiveness in different forms undermines the collaborative nature of cooperatives, leading to the destruction of trust, resources, and the organisation’s integrity.