Community owned infra

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

The community-first software era

Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use

Building for Organizers - The People Layer

The most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.

Introducing Acorn: Community Infrastructure That Grows With You

Featured image: Emergence by Paul Lewin

Relational Tech Project — Build what we need

Many of us wish our neighborhoods were more connected. We want to live in neighborhoods where we learn from the creativity, care, and skills of our neighbors — and share our gifts too.

✨🙌 AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms

Open protocols + AI-enabled coding = building what we need for ourselves

Defining groupcore

In a recent post I wrote that Metalabel’s focus is groupcore: software, tools, economics, spaces, and ideas that help creative people cooperate. But what does groupcore mean? Can one groupcore as a verb? Is groupcore distinct from other forms of coordination we already know?  Groupcore is a term I

Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power - The Algo Rhythm by Blacksky

[This document serves as a memo for investors]

First Four Tools Join Schema for Interoperability

And we're looking for more

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments...

I just can't shake this feeling... - We Can Just Do Things

Why is all of this free? What's the plan here? Cui Bono?

Open Source Power

We have to talk about open source licensing.