Climate change and our basic environment are running away with our future.  The technology network that could help to save us is splintering. We are fucked, the open web, the thing all progressive geeks build on has plateaued and is visible fading.

A project to play a small role.

It's about stupidly simple and naively open it's an original open Internet Project.

Lest we forget the original Internet was people creating pages linking to people created pages this is what the world wide web is. Networking human beings creating communities using technology.

If you make this too complex to start with you miss the point it's about people and communities facilitated by technology it's not about technology facilitating people and communities.

The difference might seem small but it's important as it's the difference between the original Internet and the intranets that grew up and dominated before the open human powered web swept them away.

Geeks not knowing what they have been doing have been destroying this web of humanity and replacing it with a web of machines clever but inhuman.

If you want to reboot a human Internet it needs to be human first rather than machine first. There is a real challenge for geeks to understand this as it flows against their mindset. CP Snows two cultures is still dominant a strong but invisible flow.

If we are to reboot the open web, we need to put human beings activity, community and empowerment at the root. The counter intuitive is to get humans to do more, not less, as we find the basic satisfaction in life by actively creating the world we live in.

The wiki, the blog, the link, the website.

Don't look down on simple

Put people to work doing something they find meaningful, algorithms can stand in the way as much as they can help here.

All community is based on “open standards” that are widely shared. It's the sharing that makes a standard.

Care for the soil as everything to do with the life world comes from it. To move this forward we need to nurture and create the soil of the open internet. All the high tech seeds you are in love with are falling on barren soil.

To nurture this, one stream would be a human powered semantic web that is based on already widely shared “standards”.  

Many streams, nature loves diversity and simplistic often pushes over complex.

The OMN is a spring, a stream, a river.

The Base idea works with media items (posts) , sites (community's), people (identity).

It digs history and memory deeply into the network without extra work or much thought (through widely distributed redundant data)

At each stage it empowers the individual, the community and fundamentally horizontalists this empowerment.

Geeks can of course build streams of complex from this common soil.

Just as the original web did it is a stream to expand the commons. From its flow life can grow, such a simple project could help save us all.

And build a world based on linked semantic data.

Build simple, build trust, the is power in open.

OMN link

Am not going to say anything you probably do not know in this application so will keep it short.

The project has been inspired by the technical work and ideas of Dave Winer (http://scripting.com) and the practical media work and open web projects of Hamish Campbell (http://visionon.tv and http://hamishcampbell.com)

The aim of the project is to play a small part in overcoming the mind space gap that is highlighted on the side of my blog:

“A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs - On the political side, the is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side the is naivety and over- complexity”

Its a no-brainer to say that the open web is failing as more of our mind share is taken up by closed networks such as #failbook and propitiatory “eco systems” such as apple, google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

If we are to play a meaningful role is saving the commons we all build on we need a raft of projects and more impotently basic infrastructure to help re-boot the open web to push these encloses back. We need to cross the river talked about above, this is much harder than it looks, if you haven’t tried it you probably wont appreciate the difficulty involved.

Rivers, streams and springs and useful metaphors for understanding how we look at “news”.

* The springs are our blogs, our company pages etc.

* The streams are aggregaters based on subjects, our twitter streams and #failbook walls badly for-fill this role

* The rivers are currently our old mainstream media and increasingly the enclosing areas of #failbook and #dotcons.

I have a open standards based project to play a role in building up “news” outside of the #silos and will still work inside the silos so the is little to lose.

The OMN

Before:

 

* Finish kitchen

- crow bar

- make wood structure (Y)

- find table top

- test fridge

- sink waste connection

- put in window

- insulation

- hooks for cups and pans, drying rack

- sheet of hardboard for wall

 

- stool

 

* Electrics

- socket kitchen, wood stove, toilet

- look at underfloor, think about moving

- roof power, light

 

* wind mill email

 

* floor

- look at ballast and storage

 

* sought clothes

 

* look at servicing engine + buy parts.

- deal with fuel leak

 

* look at new ropes?

 

* Fire place lower (complex)

 

* For the trip

- Facebook page for Thames, Medway, Coast, Crossing, North France

- Paul about the convoy

 

* Life Raft and Flare?

* Ask to buy 2 life jacket

 

* Tidy

- clear the seats and back

 

 

* Thames

Book lock

Tell CRT I left their waters

Look at tides and time

Fill up with fuel

Program radio with more resets

Redundant Navigation on black laptop.

 

* Medway

- the mud or the party

- tender?

 

 

* Coast

- talk to coast guard

- look for ports

 

* Crossing

- talk to coast guard

- bit of research

 

* French port

- what papers?

- Wallets of ships papers

- inshoreces

- licence river

- Vat paid, VAT fuel

“A river that needs crossing political and tech culture - On the political side, the is arrogance and ignorance, on the Geek side the is naivety and over- complexity”

 

What am highlighting here, Geeks think this is to simple to think about, the politicos have no understanding of this. Both are happy with silos as it gives them “total control” of there tiny things. These isolated siloed islands are no match for the continents that the dotcons control. The issue here is that nobody cares for the big thing that all these tiny things grow from, this big thing “the open internet” is withered from neglect. The shrinking “open internet” is further perverted by political legislation and Dotcon grasping/enclosing it becomes a ghost of its old self.

 

Thinking to escape this sad and bad fate.

 

The web is made of links:

 

* Articles are just data objects

 

* Data flows

 

* Feeds are living links to move data object flows

 

* The link is were the value is (google learned this a long time ago)

 

* Synchronisation and redundancy of data is key to resilience and remembering the past links (value)

 

This is hard for the politicos to hear, but, content is just something to link to.

 

This simple thinking is held safe by the 4 opens.

 

The is a small resurgence of alt-media projects (such as LINKS ) but each of them is a silo and will likely flower and fade.

DRAFT of 3 examples of “working” contemporary alternatives and their malcontent’s.

The Village Butty
A lovely project provided originally by a hard-working individual with small funding and continuing energy. The need, boaters need a warm dry open common place, if their unique contemporary “village” culture is to survive the long term slow and grinding pushing out of CRT and local councils, not to menturn the self inflicted internal sabotage of its own often mad dispoleing crews.

The village butty is a re-booting/rebrinding of the older james's butty for hiar, the early project had burned out then faded due to the the off balance of money making outreach and community value boater use. In the end it alienated both and with a waning of good will and no money coming in the butty was going to be sold. A new younger more energetic crew came in to save the day, with a real crowed funding outreach, boater community lead, the butty was saved.

But the is a denial/unknowing of the need to balance/manage community that is pushing this out of balance to the money making side (fair anufe the failer of this side of the balance was the resion for the need for the reboot). But if this understandable swing reaction is not brought back into balance then the good will of the community side of sustainability  balance will be lost and with out this it becomes harder to keep a boat working on the water, aspesheraly in such a small place as London. The boater community provides the couler and direct practical support when needed, as well as its own headaches ;)

This needs a community hart-hart gathering to unblock the constipation that is currently blocking the shit from coming out, a bit of composting will need to be preprepared for this gathering for the resulting smell not to drive people away.

The London Hackspace
One of the few continuing/ongoing “secessess” of alt-DIY organising in the UK. It is not only a fantastic place full of interesting, competent and active people, its organised in a way/model for how grassroots could be expanded out to fill in more social spaces.

Was originally set-up and run by a competent invisible affinity group as the space grew this became an opaque affinity group, with suseass and increasing membership this opaque group became visibly dysfunctional due to dilution and burn out of the original core crew. Affinity organising, while still core, was submerged into bureaucracy, hard rules and angry trolls hitting each other with them filled the online spaces and left the real world space dulled and filled with low level broken.

The space continues and a big smoky flare up and resulting gathering helped to resolve the surface issues, but the underlining fractures have not been addressed to truly sustain the project, lets hope it survives the move to the next premisses and continues to grow and mutate.

The Hive Dalston
This one started well but fell into an ideological clash that became hidden in a smoke screen of personalty politics. The lack of any clear vision made it impossible to resolve as the underlining tensions were blocked from being spoken. One side pushed the other aside and took over sole running of the project, it became a ideologically driven shadow of what it needed to be, in this it moved to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution, making it hard to continue to support the project in any way.

This is not beyond rescue, and the balance between (selfish/stupid) evil and (open/growing) good is still in the air. One solution, a moment of evil, a bit of power politics would put this project back on track, light and dark need each other, some times the devil is right.

 

Conclusion

To move all these projects on we need to reknit the broken bones of the past.