Growing your idea into a business is a difficult path to take. Some time ago we had a webinar on #opensource software/hardware business management and fundraising. NGI TETRA also organizes more general business/organization bootcamps, which next week will start another one for #NextGenerationInternet funded projects (also including #FSFE to include FLOSS licensing discussion). Check it out, there are still some places open: https://business.ngi.eu/join-now/events/tetra-scale-up-bootcamp-2/
@NGIZero And then people ask me why I think NGI is bullshit. It’s because of crap like this.
Why do you need an accelerator? Why do you need to “scale up” free and open source? That’s the Silicon Valley / venture capital model. And so fitting that you have venture capitalists on board.
I wish you were what you say you are but you aren’t. And that’s what really upsets me.
Aral, what is your scope for "small" tech?
1. running a family
2. running a village
3. running a city
4. running a state
5. running everything globally
I think small does not mean you leave larger infrastructures for "big". Small things can connect, cluster and run a city. Why not? Why not connect globally? And scale-up is needed for that. The software for heterogenous clustered infrastructures has to be far more complex and tested.
That is not venture capital model. You need it with democratic open design model, you need it in coop model.
@michal @NGIZero Small Tech starts with the person. So you are not running anyone else (you running others is the colonial model).
You have your own tools with which to have agency in the digital network age.
1. A family is a collection of people.
2. A village is a collection of people.
3. A city is a collection of people.
4. A state is a collection of people.
5. Humankind is a collection of people.
Small Tech models the person so people don’t have to be “run”; so they can run themselves.
@michal @NGIZero The problem with centralised models is that they model organisations, not people. And that creates a hierarchy where the power, tools, and agency lie with organisations (corporations, cities, nation states, etc.) and not with people. Where people are modeled into such system, it is done so as “the other” (users, customers, citizens) by a privileged few (designers, developers, executives, governments) with varying degrees of democratic legitimacy. Small Tech models people.
@aral @michal @NGIZero this thinking is limited in that we cannot exist as "individuals" only as community. So what makes it possible for us to be "human" is community. And yes this argument is as old as cheese so better to build bridges than fight as the world burns #climatechaos
We need to build code that is nurturing to "individuals" AND works for "community" the only thing "active" in tech that comes close to this is the Activertypub networks #OMN
@hamishcampbell @michal @NGIZero Again: communities are made up of individuals. Unless you model the individual as the atomic unit within your design and privilege the individual with power and agency within your system, you are modeling the organisation and giving whoever runs the organisation power and agency over other people.
Case in point: whoever runs a Mastodon instance is the king of that instance. Not so with Small Web, where each node is individually owned and controlled by a person.
@hamishcampbell @michal @NGIZero What I’m trying to say is that when individuals don’t own and control the means of communication themselves, you don’t have a community, you have an autocracy to whatever degree those who do control the means of communication decree it.
: @hamish campbell @Jens Finkhäuser ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ By running a city or village or community I certainly do not mean ruling them but running the infrastructure for them. Everyone cannot do it. Grandmothers usually do not administer Kubernettes or Ceph. Ill people in hospital want to talk to their relatives and cannot log-in to their Raspberry to restart XMPP server. Babies in kindergarden usually do not know Python very well yet. Somebody has to run communication, organisation or life support infrastructures for them.
Even if it is run in democratic open society design model, decided in respect and empathy for all human agencies or cooperative consensual model, not everyone runs all their information services by themselves individually and alone. Somebody grows food, somebody plays theatre.
@aral @michal @NGIZero the building blocks of humanity are always "communitys" a quick look at history's gives no room for doubting this.
But you would be right to see the last 100 years or more of a balence between "community" and individual and the last 40 years of the #deathcult as the "individual" and the desinergration of community.
@hamishcampbell @aral @michal @NGIZero I think we are at a dangerous time in communications technology. What we're facing, I think, is the prospect of full centralization under some corp/gov synthesis, and the complete elimination of what was once the "open web". Data centres become the mainframes, and everything else will be a terminal into them with next to no local compute. We're not far off from that now, and it can all be justified as "efficiency".
So we need to have a diversity of ways that people can "run their own stuff", individually or as small collectives.
yep, I used to call that digital utopia or distopia, as you say we are well down the digital distopia stream. And the #geekproblem has no paddle, the #NGI funding feeds this problem.
We need to change direction and we need to do this fast #omn #4opens #indymediaback