Originally Published 3/15/2016 — Updated 07/2025
“A river that needs crossing: political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance; on the geek side, there is naivety and over-complexity.”This project builds from a simple truth: we’re failing to communicate across divides that matter, and the #openweb continues to decline in the face of #dotcons like Meta (#failbook), Google, Amazon, and Apple.
The inspiration, the technical model draws from Dave Winer’s long-standing work on RSS, OPML, and “Rivers of News” feeds, simple, powerful tools that made the early web thrive. On the social and activist side, it’s grounded in the decades of grassroots media work by Hamish Campbell, through projects like Undercurrents, VisionOn.TV, and now the Open Media Network (OMN).
The gap, at the heart of the OMN’s mission, is bridging a difficult and persistent divide:
On the political/activist side: there is often arrogance and ignorance of tech.
On the geek/tech side: there’s a naïve faith in software as the solution, often built with little understanding of real-world social context.We need projects that cross this river, building trust, tools, and practice between these worlds.
The metaphor: Springs, streams, and rivers. To make sense of the information ecosystem – and its decay – we use a flowing water metaphor:
- Springs are individual sources: blogs, newsletters, independent media sites, the point of origin. Examples: Bella Caledonia, OpenDemocracy, personal activist blogs, or radical local sites.
- Streams are subject-focused aggregators: curated flows around a theme or community, often mixing automated and human input. Examples: Mastodon feeds, PeerTube channels, activist email lists, thematic tag clouds (e.g., #climateaction), or OMN’s tag-based flows.
- Rivers are the broad distributions of media: where most people actually consume content. Right now, these are dominated by enclosed, manipulative platforms. Examples: Meta’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, mainstream news websites, these are algorithmically filtered and socially isolating.
Currently, most alt/progressive content dies in the spring, never even making it to the stream, let alone the river. We’re left isolated, while the #dotcons dominate minds and discourse.
What the #OMN offers is a humble, yet radical, technical and political attempt to build open streams and rivers from our independent springs. The core Ideas:
Use RSS/Activertypub (open standards) as the glue for data portability.
Build lightweight, user-friendly tools that work with existing websites and platforms, not against them.
Encourage tag-based aggregation and curation, so we can collectively build shared narratives.
Keep it KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) to avoid the usual geek over-complexity.
Embed #4opens principles: open data, open source, open process, and open standards.Why this matters (More than ever). We are living through a polycrisis: #climatechaos, rising fascism, digital enclosures, and mass social isolation. Our existing media channels are captured, and many of our alternative channels are either siloed or slowly dying off. We can no longer afford to just make “better content”, we must fix how that content flows.
The OMN is not a silver bullet, but it’s a shovel, a filter, a river guide, simple tools to help rebuild the #openweb and empower people again.
“The link is the currency of the web. In this, we all become richer.”Want to help? Add tags to your posts. Start linking to other sources in your niche. Or just ask your favourite alt-media project to connect with others. Let’s replant the roots and reroute the rivers.
More: https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network
