Tag: RIPENCC

A letter from the margins of the #openweb

All the #OMN projects I’ve worked on over the years, from #OGB to #indymediaback, are not directly about social change. They are about creating the possibility of social change. A subtle, but critical difference.

We don’t claim to have the answers. What we do offer are tools, networks, and processes that make it easier for people to imagine that the world can be different, and then help them to take the first step. Yet here’s the mess that keeps being pushed over us.

We are told this work is “too high up the stack,” “too fuzzy,” or “too political.” But in reality, the same topics and themes do receive funding, just safely sanitized within the logic of the #deathcult. The “shadow” gets funded, but the light source is ignored.

When we say “the world can be different,” we’re not talking about abstract theory. We mean literally:

  • Media that people control from the grassroots up
  • Governance that isn’t locked behind elite gates
  • A web that grows through trust not platforms
  • Protocols that reflect values, not just efficiency

But the funding, even in the so-called ‘alternative’ spaces, is trapped in a conservative loop. People working in these orgs are either too captured by their own #geekproblem funding logic, or too afraid to support anything that might really challenge the status quo, thus threaten the funding flows they live in.

Some of the real replies to the over 20 funding applications I have put in for the last ten years: “This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for…” “I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to, either.”

What these polite deferrals mask is a structural failure of imagination. The fear of change is so strong that even funders tasked with enabling alternatives end up only supporting work that conforms to existing institutional logics and barely deviates in meaningful ways from the normal #mainstreaming paths.

So, where does that leave those of us pushing for a real #openweb reboot? We get silence or slow-walked rejections. We burn out or pivot to “safer” projects. Or worst of all, we get absorbed by the very forces we wanted to challenge. And look, maybe that’s the plan. Maybe co-option is the endgame for the #openweb: a slick, tamed version of rebellion, friendly enough for NGOs and palatable to #EU bureaucrats.

But that’s not our plan. Not the plan we’ve been composting all these years. The challenge:

  • Funders: If you want the future to be different, stop only funding its imitation. Step outside the safety of compliance. Trust radical imaginations.
  • Builders: If you’re still holding the compost shovel, don’t drop it. The real garden will grow, but only if we stop watering the plastic plants.
  • Everyone else, demand more. Not just better bling, but better foundations.

We don’t need more advice, we do need courage. The #openweb is not dead, but it is at risk of becoming another façade unless we build the possibility of real change into its #rebooting core.

I am still digging #makinghistory #OMN #indymediaback #OGB

#RIPENCC #NGI #NLnet

Funding tech outside the shadow of the #deathcult

There is a complete failure of funding for the community (non #mainstreaming) side of tech, I have put in more than ten funding applications over the last few years to all the openweb funding flows.

And the answer, if the is one, is always the same, some of the replies:

” This kind of effort is very hard to seek grants for – which holds for the vast majority of
FOSS efforts, to be sure, but for things this high up in the stack even more.”

“I don’t have an obvious candidate for you to go to either”

The issue is that this is actually a LIE, the funders do fund the subjects we are applying for, just they ONLY fund the shadow of the #deathcult because they do not understand anything outside this. Or if they do understand, they are to afried of their funding flows drying up if they did fund anything outside this shadow.

“What the times are and how they are changing is different from every perspective. And so is utility. Not every project can be equally successful from everyone’s point of view. From our vantage point the process we deliver seems to work better than the vast majority of other processes (there are many tens of billions spent less frugality and with no impact at all within the same EC frameworks, I’m sure you’ll agree). Future history will have to prove the approach right or wrong,”

So good advice is nice, change challenge is better, ideas please for change challenge of this funding mess.

Or this openweb reboot is going to be absorbed by the #mainstreaming, not a bad thing, but it’s NOT the project meany of have been working on #KISS

“Obviously, we are always eager to haul in new projects – so do send projects you deem worthy our way.”

Ten funding applications latter, it’s a problem, I think we need both being nice and not being nice, and we need these together to break this LIE in funding.

On https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ we have fucked this path over the last few years – the spiky fluffy debate has not been respected. This holding the “debate” in place is the secret of all working/affective activism, hint, hint. And we are doing activism in this openweb reboot, I understand the majority of people like to deny this, but this denying makes these people prats and the problem not the solution, let’s politicly tell them this.

#KISS PS. there is the word “stupid” in this hashtag, in this am not calling any individual stupid, so please don’t take this as pointing at YOU personally I am talking about social groups, stupid #mainstreaming fearful groups.

#NLnet #NGI #ngizero #summerofprotocols #investinopen #RIPENCC