#openweb organic intellectual,technologist and part of the #OMN
“The is such a thing as society” we need to build our tools for this anti “common sense” statement.
The advantage of “governance” of the #fediverse (which it needs if it is to become a part of our #openweb based society that is essential for social change/challenge in the era of #climatechaos) is that the is non, this is a good thing.
The Fediverse comes from the “cats” of #libertarianism and to a lesser extent #anarchism without the (O)
In this, we don’t HAVE to think how it fits into current working practices and current economics. Rather, people PUSHING these “common sense” solutions to the fediverse “governance” problems are a part of the problem, not a solution that might work.
To be “native” to the fediverse we need to use code to build “society”. Organizing for SocialHub Community Empowerment has to be anti “common sense” as the fediverse itself is.
Power comes from power, It’s something you TAKE/build and in the best outcome share, it is NEVER given to you.
Private property – Wikipedia was invented in a mythical past when someone with a big club drew a line in the sand and said to the social group step over that, and I kill you.
Notice this is not the foundation of the fediverse, we are base on an open flowing social web and our lines in the sand are “blowing in the wind”. Yes, lots of people do not understand this.
Don’t unthinkingly push current “common sense” #deathcult ist thinking over #openweb projects.
The need for “governance” came out of a practical #openweb problem, the #activitypub community is made up of “cats” you know the slogan “herding cats” we were doing seminars outreach to powerful EU Eurocrats on why they should be interested in #activertypub and interesting they really are interested. We had no voice, only “cats” with everyone pushing their own tiny projects, it was a lot of work and stress, but we got the presentations done.
Back to the questions. A lot of the issues you are outlining are actually covered outside what is normally though of as process – It’s designed to be messy, it’s not designed to be tidy. Let’s illustrate this by answering each point.
Yep, they do, but they are subject to “recall”, and gain a lot from working with the “groups” the voices only get TOTAL power with consensus -1 which is a hard thing to achieve without the first working to building consensus through the body and groups and other voices.
You are right the is no sense checking in the formal sense, but remember the is no hard power, people only have to do things if they want to, its “governance” of a disorganization not a traditional power structure. If people get too “nutty” the is the power of “recall” if the body becomes too nutty the is the power of “dilution” more people can join the body.
The groups don’t have to talk to anyone, though will work better when they do, the voices can be involved or not worked better when they are – good to remember the “cats” at the beginning on this post.
The is no statute and no laws, as this is “governance” with equation marks – there will be a growing body of mythos and traditions that people can call on when making decisions. There are no police or courts, nobody has to do anything agen the “cats”.
The body has negative power over the voices, it can recall them, which is the same as not signing off on their actions. The problem we are trying to solve is focus, in an anarchistic/libertarian movement – how to talk to traditional burocraceys while still talking/being relevant to ourselves. The is a level of trust involved which is held in place by the #4opens
That’s a good question, that is not defined. It’s important to look at the codebase here, everything we talk about is the “default” the actual codebase can redefine just about every variable, it’s a set of tools for horazonatlish “governance” It’s up to the body to decide everything on how to use these tools if they change the default.
We have the traditional voting modals, we have a threshold etc.
The body can be restricted in size by fixing the first variable in this case it would be the instances/stakeholders or can be left to grow organically this is up to the body itself.
The group is made up of anybody in the body who needs to be a part of it – in this everything is a mirror of the same process #KISS You ask a hard question about “outside” experts/original submitter which I don’t have an easy solution to – so we would add it as an option that can be turned on or off.
They serve the same as the body, currently have two options 1 year, half every 6 month rolling to facilitate hand holding or easy/simple one year.
Due to the sortation and work load you will likely have a high turn over of new body members, the “recalling” will add to this as there are a lot of “nutters” sortation will bring up fresh people for the body to work 
this is a good thing as “trust” is built from this.
The voices are “trusted” to be a voice of the Fediverse for their term, if they are not “trusted” they will be recalled to the body, and if they are nutters they will be recalled out of the body and a new member added ECT.
Yep decisions can be made at different levels, on the image the thickness of the arrow coming out (with the blunt end) is the strength of that voice.
The group says it shite, and then move on, if the group keeps pushing shit then the voices ignore this group and in the end the body likely recalls it and replaces it with a new group – this is up to the body/voices.
Yes, sadly some good decisions that are not popular inside/outside the body/groups will be ignored we are still self “governing” cats the is no getting away from this.
Yep, based on the #4opens, so everything is done with activertypub in open process, it’s a trust based network, if people won’t privacy then they can resign/not sign up for public governance and work through people who are happy to do open process.
Whistleblowering is a case for media not “governance” so is dealt with in this sister project Home – Open-Media-Network – Gitea: Open Media Network
Thank you for the interesting questions.
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.”
Dropped into the events for this https://knightcolumbia.org/events/reimagine-the-internet if you won’t an example of pouring hundreds of millions of $$$ down the drain the Knight foundation is it. This is normal, but by doing this they shaped the agender of the #openweb for the last 10 years, this is a problem, a BIG problem, they need to be held to account for.
Feel free to shout at people like this, at the very least we need to make this problem visible.
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.
Had a lot of conversations about privacy and security on the fedivers recently, its an interesting subject that is central to meany people that I tend to leave to one side. Lets take a few moments to look at this.
Mastodon has only a figleaf of hard encrypted security with normal TLS used by meany sites. It is a #openweb app with no internal encryption for any part of its messaging or content. It makes a big play in announcements about security and privacy but if you think of this as hard coded in any way into the system you have been told a “white lie”.
What mastodon has (like all good #openweb apps) is good social security built on intelligent layers of trust and good moderation tools for both users, mods and admins. This soft security is actually mostly real were the hard-security is in the end brittle theatre as the networks and devices it runs on are inherently insecure.
In this we find the opposite of what most people push in technology, real security comes from social trust, with simple strong KISS tools to build this trust. The current #mainstreaming of trust nobody is a dangerous and stupid idea.
What do you think *should* be closed? Or at least is OK to be closed?
Let’s start from a traditional liberal view: The majority of social interactions should be done in the OPEN and some private interactions should be done CLOSED.
We can discuss from this.
What the current dogma misses is that just about all good social power comes from OPEN
And meany social evils come from CLOSED
If we close/lock everything down, we are left with the evil, a bad outcome.
There are world-view gaps that make this a hard bridge to hold in place.
Example Diaspora and RSS based networks – the young Turks did a CLOSED network and shouted down the existing OPEN networks… 10 years go by, and we have to reinvent RSS+ as #ActivityPub to launch open networks a new – lets talk more about examples like this when we talk about the #geekproblem and #encryptionists. The 10 years that is missing is the problem.
It’s mostly a view of human nature, thus sociology and politics, applied to social groups who make and use #openweb technology. So if you are new to thinking about this maybe start with some basic wikipedia though the quality has become well muddy over the last 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies
The #geekproblem has assumptions, so we need to start to think about this, a good start:
Conservatism
Liberalism
Anarchism
Then ask questions with ideology in mind as motivations and course for the #openweb
Q. Grumpy old geeks have a valid point of view http://scripting.com/2021/04/02/145549.html?title=pleadingForStallman
Pleading for Stallman
A. but no TLS.
Q. this is a valid point of view too http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html
My blog doesn’t need HTTPS
A. It’s a valid point that Google and Amazon have monopolist interests and are trying to enforce them. Nevertheless, TLS is an open standard and the owner of that blog would have many other possibilities implementing it. Not having transport encryption is nowadays highly deprecated for good reasons and I don’t see any valid point in not adopting it. Not saying you have to use Google’s or Amazon’s infrastructure for that.
Q. Good to rethink this view. Have a look at his thinking. This is the difference between closed/open as a world view that #encryptionists blow smoke over to push an agender that does not challenge the #deathcult we all live and breath…
A. Sry, but what? 🤔 Encryption is one of the central tools for a free and open internet, as it enables a much better level of privacy, or in fact even is a hard precondition to it.
Q. if you say so… I have been working for more than 20 years on this and always say clearly that we need 90% open and 10% closed – the #encryptionists are dangerously wrong in their view of 90% closed and 10% open. Its a problem we need to overcome and in no way a solution. Take note you are posting this on mastodon that is 90% open and 10% closed. We are not having this conversation on diaspora (the #encryptionists network) very few people are.
A. 1) What the hack is an “encryptionist”??
2) My friend, all Mastodon instances I know use TLS.
3) What is your definition of “open” and “closed”? Encrypted vs. unencrypted? 🤔 I think YOU should really rethink this kind of definition. A blog for instance can be openly available to everyone and still offer secure transport encryption to protect the privacy of its readers.
4) You are mistaken, almost everyone I met on Mastodon is a huge proponent of encryption. And no, I’m not for 90% encrypted and 10% unencrypted. I am for 100% encrypted.
Q. Nuttiness is good in moderation. You are talking to me on a #openweb project, there are some #closedweb one’s, but they tend to be full of nutters, so can understand why you are here 😉
A. You are calling me nuts? Well, thanks… So please define to me, what “openweb” and “closedweb” have to do with encryption per se.
Q. if you are interested you could start looking here http://hamishcampbell.com/tag/encryptionists/
A. Our current dogmas are a mess… good to take a step away.
Q. Uhm… there is nothing written about why encryption is supposed to be bad… It just uses “encryptionists” as some weird swear word. In general, I don’t really get the text. Sounds very confused to be honest. That being said, I am also against neo-liberalism, individualism and esoterics and for an open web. What this does have to do with encryption remains obscure to me…
And it’s not a dogma. It is a scientific fact, that eavesdropping on well encrypted communication is close to impossible.
A. This is an interesting point:
2) all Mastodon instances I know use TLS.
The dev of mastodon told “white” lies about privacy and security as few #fashernistas would go with a #openweb project that did not pedal this dogma.
#TLS is a fig leaf, everything on the server is in plain text and the admins can read most of what you post and the sysadmin can read and change anything. it’s a trust based #openweb project and works well Because of this building of trust.
Maybe this gives you ideas of what #openweb and #closedweb are about?
“Trust nobody” is the rallying cry of conservatism and an easy-to-understand worship of the #deathcult we need to stop pushing this shit.
It would be an #ecryptionst #geekproblem to call any online project secure in any real senses as the operating steam it runs on for 99.9% of users is insecure and likely backdoored for the state and corporate spy. And even if you are in the 0.1% who run something that just might be secure then the firmware is all insecure with issues that CANNOT be fixed in contempery devices…
The mind set is the problem am talking about – you can blow smoke over conversations by not looking at the big picture.
I don’t think our coders have ANY understanding of the damage they have done and are doing.
The state we live in is full of monsters.
In #closed the monsters can plot and destroy/divide and control because there is no way to make a judgment, you cannot have social “truth” in closed.
With #open, the monster is more obverse and much easier to trip up. As social “truth” is all around you.
Closed breeds monsters/open pushes them into the shadows.
We need to compost a lot of closed crap on the #openweb
If you look at contemporary programming – you will see in theory something that looks like anarchism and in realty something that feels like Stalinist USSR or Nazi Germany. The need for control and security is at the base of our #geekproblem culture, it is an inhumane outcome, code should always be messy as should our society.
Of course, like the above social abominations the real #geekculture hides COMPLETE insecurity and SECRET control by both the #openweb and the #dotcons it’s a mess, but not in a good way.
#OPEN is a way to step away from #CLOSED
We never END in this social balancing, you would be an idiot or a Nazi or more often suffering from unexamined #geekproblem to think that we could or should be building towards ending the mess.
