Hamish Campbell an #openweb organic intellectual and technologist
A. Activist video https://visionon.tv/videos/local?sort=-trending&allVideos=true&c=true&s=3 on the #Fediverse
Or they might have done it on purpose to keep the new feature private…
Did you know they intended to implement the feature you requested, and did you ask to work with them as they did so?
(P.S. if you keep calling them geeks all the time they might not feel like you would be warm and fuzzy to work with…)
Good codeing, bad social – kinda the #geekproblem
Basically funding alowes the geeks to be geeks when the funding comes from geeks.
If you think that’s bad, though, it’s even worst when it comes from academics 😉
Lived and worked through 30 years of this tech shit. Composting, we need some composting 🙂
End thought
Note, I generally only use the “stick” after offering carrots quite a few times. Then alternate between carrot and stick with no plan for a good personal outcome.
Doing this for 20 years, in the medium/long term social change is generally visible. Yes you are right it’s a thankless task but somebody needs to do it and I live on a boat and can sail away, I half joke with the last bit.
This approach has only mediate the problems in my expirence though.
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/4opens/wiki/Funding-of-openweb-projects
To fix some of these issues:
* https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Online-governance- openweb tech from the perspective of a radical, grassroots, social technologist this is distilled into a codebase, as a “permissionless” roll-out of frameworks for social groups to form and see/govern themselves. https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Statements-of-support
* https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody/wiki/Statements-of-support Its easy to see that the #dotcons can not be fixed. The #fashionistas who keep flocking to new “ethical-ish” ones are a problem, not a solution. The #4opens are a simple way to judge the value of an “alt/grassroots” tech project. We need to bring this into our funding agenda.
* 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.
The mess we need to compost is that the verticals are unthinking in their hierarchies, which turns the “value” of horizontals into a negative thing. Meanwhile, the horizontals despise the “power” plays of the verticals and take every measure to block their outcomes.
The world, however is one of balance. Both perspectives have roles and shifting values depending on the problems we collectively need to address. For those pushing #BLOCKING – a few sips to quench your thirst.
If you enjoy playing games, you can spot the word magic in the #hashtags. If you’re more practical, you can translate them into traditional definitions, for example, #deathcult = neoliberalism, #dotcons = the boom-and-bust cycles of the dotcom era, #fashernista = someone fashionable in any subject, i’s not complex at this level.
The complexity lies in the perspective that weaves these elements into a coherent story. Yes, this storytelling could be seen as arrogance – if you choose to view it that way. But that judgment itself makes you a “nut” from the very perspective you critique.
Circles, magic, nets, outcomes – #OMN
Getting a good outcome is hard… And this current influx of EU funding risks doing more damage than good to the health of the #Fediverse, if it continues along its present agenda. Yes, the #Fediverse already has its own lifestyle-driven mess, but we can try to mediate the damage driven by funding first. If we succeed there, maybe the lifestyle drift can self-mediate in time.
Aiming for a better outcome, what we’re looking for is social change and challenge with less mess. This page looks at some of the best funding we’ve found http://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki/Funding-of-openweb-projects Not an attack, but opening a conversation on an obvious issue.
We can also look at funding that is being completely wasted, but that’s likely outside our influence. Lets keeping it positive (When We Can), I like to keep things positive… if possible.
But let’s be honest — a lot of people are BLOCKING, and that’s going to cause fire and a LOT of smoke. This is what real social change/challenge looks like: murky. Focus on #KISS — Keep It Simple — to see through the smoke.
Transparency matters, it’s hard to imagine how you can do a left-wing project without showing your workings:
That’s the core framing this page is about.
#Dotcons & poisoned agenda, Yep, the whole #dotcons side of the EU funding agenda is poison.
It only feeds the mess. And as I’ve pointed out before, most funding ends up poured straight down the drain. Sadly, that’s the default outcome.
#IndymediaBack – Learning the right lessons, one thing to keep in mind: I think we (the #Indymedia crew) learned the wrong lesson from the repression and state raids. We pushed fear/control as the solution, and this added to the #closedweb mess. But as the #Fediverse now shows, the path should have been open/trust — That’s the #openweb path we abandoned. That split ripped Indymedia apart, and we’ve been stuck in the #dotcons mess ever since.
Simplicity as Strategy, when making judgments, keep it #KISS — Simplicity is what cuts through the mess. Shovels and compost, is the #OMN approach.
Trauma, Repression & Healing, Yes, trauma is real. That’s why I lean into basic ways of looking at these things. From there, it’s up to people to build up, DIY style — a real grassroots approach.
Practical approaches, watch the film:
I made this for the legal support crew of a major campaign. The repression was ongoing and intense — But the healing came through mass participation, like walking calmly through police stop and search zones. That likely helped to mediate a lot of growing trauma.
Final thought: #Openweb – all together push through, the HARD block crumbles. We’ve got work to do. Let’s keep it grounded, open, and as clear as we can through the murk.
I start to understand the misunderstanding, blocking many of the people outreaching the #OMN. It’s a DIY project there is the assumption that people will see the need and fill in the missing bits. The “missing bits” have a function, to be filled in otherwise we would be pushing clean non-messy #dotcons world view which is a very different project.
Maybe this is hard to see, but we would be doing something utterly pointless if it is not messy. So people pushing clean are not helping, rather they are #BLOCKING
Must stress the utterly pointless here, as people have done slick/controlled alts many times over the last 30 years and in the medium term this has always proven to be pointless.
It’s a world view problem that’s going to kill us, well lots of us.
Quote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARiaiyHrijw
Meany people reply to outreach by telling the #dotcons story as if it were common sense… where the outreach is telling DIY, so communication is missing/past each other.
The #OMN is offering tools, people are generally looking for shiny toys a different world view. From the DIY prospective shiny toys are just rubbish to add to the landfill were tools you can build a new world if you are motivated and have care and focus.
To put this bluntly, its #DIY or death as #XR says in the streets. Hope this #KISS aproch helps to build a bridge – up to you guys to hold this bridge in place.
#OMN projects are tools for YOU to change/challenge the world we live/die in.
Looking at this event https://2021.ngiforum.eu the is way to meany stuffed shirts, technological fantasists (#blockchain) and a lot of #EU money what could go wrong…
Spent an hour looking through the list of participants opening in new tab all that said something interesting. Of these more than 2/3’s had the tag blockchain, so closed them, and then looked at the rest, then closed them… as we all know the is little hope in places like this, but worth a look, sometimes you find something useful. Someone has to turn over the tech shit pile to make compost.
Last week attended the online event by the Knight Foundation (huge #openweb funders for the last 10 years) in the USA on #reimagining the Internet. It was 100% about the #dotcons kinda nutty, how bad things are in the funded #NGO #openweb world.
With this in mind, I moved the #4opens to its own space https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/wiki it’s a useful #openweb tool for moving tech projects in to the right piles.
Here are 10 sample #4opens reviews to help you to understand what it’s about and how you can use this simple way of judging if a project is worth supporting or not https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/4opens/issues
Please add to this, sign up for the site and add more or just publish them on your own #openweb site with the hashtag #4opens
UPDATE
Why go to these events? It’s about connection to people building bridges and resources for bridge building. The problem is all the resources at these events are poured down the drain and/or consumed by social parasites – the chattering classes.
I spend a bit of time going to the events every 10 years to see if this has changed. COVID-19 and the on lining of the events is a time to do this. This time, like last time, I am feeling an “opening” but think the parasite classes are going to be stampeding through it. For a useful outcome we would need a soughted #openweb group to take up space, without this the opening is not going to have any good outcome.
This mythical group does not exist, there are individuals scattered about, but nothing that has much social power to be able to work with/bridge the power politics.
Kinda sad and bad but its where we are at #XR
UPDATE
This strategy can work (up to a point) to get resources, the last time, 10 years ago, I got a big chunk of dosh to set up http://visionon.tv which the remains of is funding the #OMN infrastructure. But this is another story – you can likely find articles about this back on this blog.
UPDATE
In any burocracy there are always a few people trying to get out, It’s what bridges are for, and there will likely be lots of people on our side who want to get in, also what bridges are for http://hamishcampbell.com/2021/04/16/outreaching-activitypub-to-the-eu-draft/ a post that touches on this bridging subject and why it has value.
UPDATE
Only now reading up on the background of this #EU stuff. “What is Horizon Europe? Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation, with a budget of €95.5 billion.” No wonder the is such a feeding frenzy of pigs at the trough was wondering why this sudden interest in the #openweb
UPDATE
This comes to mind when talking to just about everyone on subjects like this today, “They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.”
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
#nothingnew an old story we are still working through https://theconversation.com/humanities-and-science-collaboration-isnt-well-understood-but-letting-off-steam-is-not-the-answer-92146 today, it’s a good stage to have this conversation in/about #openweb technology.
“You first need to discover as much as possible relevant items within the desired domain, meaning that everything needs to be discoverable (i.e. it needs to be made available and be accessible, but also the right structure and metadata need to be in place for everything to be properly indexed and categorised)”
The #OMN is set out to solve this problem from the bottom-up: the lived communities define the categories.
The #OMN is a part of the fediverse to grow an #openweb native approach, creating distributed metadata enriched permanent stores of stories and media/data.
Two examples below:
1. A grassroots news project for the fediverse https://visionon.tv/videos/watch/1e221fdf-1e98-4802-a239-c24399dc3411
2. A data-store for an exhibition, that archives grassroots movements history. (ADD LINK)
The project is KISS (keep it simple stupid) and works at a human scale, to build communities of care.
The data is stored within/across the communities and easily accessed.
It’s a discovery thing (EXAMPLE)
The codebase/tool/networks is applicable to any bottom-up communication/categorization and discovery project.
The #OMN is a simple framework that will use many of the existing #openweb tools:
* A searX plugin opens this data/news to a casual browser.
* ipfs can be used to store the large data objects
* ActivityPub is the flow of data objects through the network
We bring the legacy web via RSS and push out flows to the “Internet of Humans”
“From chaos comes order” from getting the right eyes to see the right news, to putting the right historical object into the right box.
To make sense of the social/tech #hashtags I’ve been using for the last decade, you need a simple but often avoided tool: ideology. This isn’t abstract theory for academics. It’s a practical way of seeing patterns in how people organise, build, and fight over the world. The idea has been around since at least Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and runs through modern political thinking via people like Antonio Gramsci. The core point is straightforward: large groups of people don’t act randomly. They cluster around shared assumptions, about power, about trust, about how the world works. Those shared assumptions are what we call ideology.
Over time, thinkers have “distilled” these patterns into rough categories. Left/right. Socialist/capitalist. Authoritarian/libertarian. These aren’t perfect boxes, but they’re useful shorthand. They let us quickly understand where a movement sits, what it values, and – crucially – how it’s likely to behave under pressure.
Now, here’s the bit people in tech often resist, this applies just as much to coding projects and digital communities as it does to governments or political parties. Code is not neutral, every project embodies choices: Who gets to decide? Who gets to participate? What is visible, and what is hidden? What is trusted, and what is controlled? These are ideological questions, even if developers don’t frame them that way.
Take a simple example – A project built around open standards, transparent decision-making, and shared ownership sits in a very different ideological space to – platform built around central control, proprietary systems, and user extraction. You don’t need to argue about labels to see the difference. But the labels – ideology – help you map it quickly. This is where the hashtags come in. They’re not random slogans – they’re shorthand for ideological positions:
#openweb → trust, interoperability, shared commons
#closedweb → control, enclosure, extraction
#4opens → a practical framework for keeping things accountable
#dotcons → capitalism applied to network effects and data capture
#encryptionists → a drift toward fear/control when taken to extremes
#geekproblem → the cultural blind spot where technical people ignore social context
Each tag is a compressed way of pointing at a cluster of assumptions and behaviours. Once you see them as ideological markers, the landscape becomes much clearer. So why does this matter? Without this lens, people in tech tend to fall into two traps:
They believe they’re building “neutral tools,” and are surprised when those tools reinforce existing power structures.
They see conflicts – over moderation, governance, openness – but treat them as personal disagreements instead of ideological clashes. Using ideology cuts through both problems. It lets you say “This isn’t just a disagreement about features. It’s a disagreement about how power should work.” Applying it to real projects.
These aren’t accidents. They’re outcomes of underlying ideological choices. The hashtag story is a practical tool, not a purity test. This isn’t about forcing everything into rigid categories or arguing over who is “correct.” Ideology is a tool, not a weapon. Used well, it helps you understand why projects succeed or fail, predict where conflicts will emerge to make conscious choices about how you build. Used badly, it turns into dogma and pointless infighting – which is exactly the mess we’re trying to compost.
The #OMN path is grounded in a clear ideological stance of trust over fear, openness over control and commons over extraction. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or pure. It means the direction is explicit. And that’s the real value here: clarity.
Because if you don’t understand the ideological ground you’re standing on, you end up being pushed around by forces you can’t even see. Once you do see it, the landscape changes. Suddenly, the hashtags aren’t just words – they’re a map.
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.
To do this we have a #nothingnew policy, beyond moving the project into modern standards #activertypub we need to reboot the project with work flows intact. Thus, we are working to this #UXhttps://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network/issues/26 and the original workflows and process.
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.
Update
What would a non #mainstreaming movement look like.
* firstly, it would have to get past meany #BLOCKS that are now common sense.
My action is to jump back in time before these blocks solidified and build up from there. Not a bad idea and will likely work if people embrace it.
* Non #mainstreaming tech is SOCIAL/community and needs to step away from the current geek agender to have real power for social change.
#OMN project, we use the #4opens to build from this.
