Thanks Henk for that project!

It would be great if people would Jitsi/Big Blue Button in during the workshop (3 hours):

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System design for establishing The Internet of People in a post-oil-world

In 2011 Christian Nold and me wrote The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World.
Downloadable here:
https://archleague.org/publications/situated-technologies-pamphlets-8/
We had a conversation informed by what we saw happening in Internet of Things and open source 3D Printing like the RepRap. Discussion went on on the bricolist that is still active (sometimes):
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/brico
Another part: The temporary alliance that you are describing reminds me of the Belgian town of Geel where inmates from the psychiatric asylum are living with families. This is a practice that has a 700-year history. In recent decades, researchers examined this living together of “sane” and “insane” people and found that it was an incredibly successful model for “community recovery” where communities strive to live with, rather than fear, mental illness. It created local solidarity.

In this workshop we want to discuss whether our solutions are pure nostalgia or actually workable as systems that may be resilient to what we saw and see: the breakdown of current technological setups because of peak oil, climate c change and massive unease of citizens with decision making structures all around.
And if so, where do we start?
Maybe by aligning with current protest movements? Design and engineering classes?

What has happened in between?

Open Source went mainstream. "From early-stage startups to the largest global enterprises, open source adoption is on the rise."
https://www.openlogic.com/resources/state-of-open-source-report

On Open Source Hardware:

"Rob Oshana, Chairman of the Board OpenHW Group and VP Software Engineering, NXP

"The electronics industry is embracing open-source processor technologies at an unprecedented rate. At NXP we believe there’s a need to create a deep ecosystem to support adoption of the RISC-V ISA. This includes various components - middleware, stacks and tools - all aligned to move the architecture forward. I’m pleased to serve as Chairman of the OpenHW Group board to help realise this goal.""
https://www.openhwgroup.org

These two trajectories show that open source is a commercial success. This has been a great result.

But the grassroots projects have also continued as we see in the unphone https://unphone.net

#The unPhone is open hardware and open source software and comes with a 300 page textbook on the IoT. It supports teaching and prototyping, and is being developed in parallel with a control and monitoring system for aquaponic sustainable agriculture (the WaterElf)."

On the bricolist Maya says:

"And what might also be important to consider is where the energy and material resources necessary for technology come from. Because we won’t achieve real change if only parts of the process are transparent. Let’s at least be honest with ourselves and acknowledge our anarchistic revolutionary tendencies by asking this question. These resources as we all know, come from neocolonized, severely exploited countries far enough away that consumers are not bothered to think about them. It's getting too complicated."

We ended our text with this:

To finish and to instigate a discussion, we propose a series of indicative standards that test the waters, raise awareness and make visible the gap between where we are now and where have to go. The triple challenges of climate change, peak oil and social breakdown are coming. The question is not if, but when. Our standards are a shock therapy to the current practice of making. The sociability standards are workable and stem directly from the urgencies we have discussed. They will ensure interoperability between all the emerging actors. They require the joining of different actors that so far have not been involved in the making of standards. All technological standards are also social standards.
Proximity
• Systems that are designed by at least twenty people distributed across the world.
• Systems that are built less than 150 miles from where the raw materials are sourced.
• Systems that will not be deployed more than 50 miles from where they are built.
• Systems whose components are modular and backward compatible to allow local repair, upgrade and downgrade.
System Thinking
• Systems that fix end costs as a percentage on top of publicly available production, transportation and disposal costs.
• Systems that communicate the break down of energy costs of pro-dduction, transport and breakdown of the product.
• Systems that automatically generate a fixed, public discussion url for each item.
Affect
• Systems that encourage face-to-face contact.
• Systems that build mutual responsibility.
• Systems that encourage conflict.
• Systems that during their lifetime will be used by more than 5 people.
• Systems that enable strong bonds between people and the environment.
• Systems that treat resources as equals.

On the bricolist Henk says:

This project comes close:

https://meshtastic.org/

Meshtastic is a decentralized wireless off-grid mesh networking LoRa
protocol. The main goal of the project is enabling low-power, long-range
communication over unlicensed radio bands. It is designed around exchanging text
messages and data in off-grid environments, with potential applications in IoT
projects where a decentralized communication system is needed without existing
infrastructure.

Let's talk!

A good weekend all, Rob