The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots

^ a long but good explanation of "an organic internet", how local and global networks can coexist, and imaginations of different possible networks, which is all written in a way that I think would be accessible to people without a technical background

#community-infra

recommended to me by @Alice Yuan Zhang

also enjoyed this paragraph

Focusing on this social dimension, DIY networking has some characteristics that could help designers to resolve the tension between anonymity that allows for freedom of expression and identity that helps to build trust and community, in more desirable ways than the corresponding Internet-based solutions. In other words, they can use DIY networking solutions to create a balance between the anonymity offered by modern cities and the social control in traditional local communities by generating ICT-mediated location-based collective awareness with low costs to time and privacy. The most relevant metaphor here is the sidewalk which Jane Jacobs praised as a place for essential informal interactions between strangers that can achieve a very delicate balance between privacy and public exposure (1961). If carefully designed, hybrid ICT applications that enable spontaneous information sharing between strangers can offer new ways to support the capacity of the sidewalk in contemporary cities to generating local knowledge and a sense of belonging.

Made me think that one of the beautiful things about scuttlebutt in its current form, patchwork especially, is “the sidewalk”, via comments on people’s posts allowing strangers/virtual-neighbors to bump into and meet each other

@notplants, this is really interesting! Do you have a pdf or epub of the book that you could share?

Oh just found the download link at the website! And understood this is just a chapter in the book Co-Designing Economies in Transition, which also seems facinating.

@glyph was there suppose to be a pdf blob there? So there's no way to upload other blobs besides images to Manyverse huh... :thinking: And it seems it doesn't even render them...

@bobhaugen I actually already downloaded the fulll book. I would post the blob here, but Manyverse won't let me. I use Library Genesis to find almost any book out there. Here's a direct link to the PDF.

Hope it helps, and long live free spread of knowledge!