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Help me build a different kind of platform cooperative | njms

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My Fediring neighbor njms plots a regional-focus community-owned datacenter cooperative.

In short: I have a vision for a platform cooperative—one that aims to serve regional needs, that empowers communities to own and govern their own data and online services along cooperative principles, served from a distributed data center built from improvised and recycled hardware. Will it work? I don't know, but I'd be remiss if I didn't try, and I can't try without your help. If you are a socially/ecologically minded person who wants to make this a reality (whether you have technical skills or don't), I'd love to hear from you.

I have been quietly plotting something like this, in this vague direction; when Eugene Maker Space has a space again I want to start a sort of "hosting guild"

my little closet rolling half-rack w/ some shelves My Homeserver has been great & especially now that i have a stable VPS providing the public IP over a VPN tunnel, but it stinks that it only has one user. i’ve read some things recently about how people are burning out on “self-hosting” because they seem to equate it to open-registration federated service hosting, but it seems like one or two folks should be able to run services for a community of 20-50 people … seems like a community-scale datacenter can be three 1000$ ebay 4U server builds and a kilowatt power hookup in someone’s office closet.

  • Get some hardware from NextStep and a rolling half-rack in some closet at the space

  • monthly website club meetup

    • HTML & CSS workshops

  • the hosting guild

  • public IP over VPN

we're under a 501c3 and can scope the community to that group pretty easily; how can we grow this or spread the model ?

a big part of this is knowledge-sharing and bus-factor reduction. documenting the system and bringing new people in to the skill sets whether the skillsets are html & css, setting up DNS zone files, or installing nginx or whatever. this is what i am trying to accomplish with The Complete Computing Environment, a sort of hypercard interface describing how to use, host, operate, and customize various software.