I’m toying with names for this “brand” I’m creating, and maybe something around a curious little beast, or pequinha fera curiosa (PFC) in Portuguese. Fera to link with feral, but also to alliterate with FOSS. The newspaper idea I still have in the back of my head has Curvy Cavy as working title, and our virtual world project is called peduncle, with a snail-type mascot, also a curious little beast. I, too, am a curious little beast.
So I’m thinking, this is a nice TLA (three letter acronym), but as a community – a three-letter community (TLC) – and people can then adapt their version of it to whatever they want – either “Curious little beasts” in their language or whatever TLA they want – bloodthirsty murderous vikings (BMV), whatever.
These TLCs are also the city bubbles visualised in peduncle.
The flag, or logo, can be some border, like a “cut along these lines” with the TLC, say, CLB or PFC or BMV, in the brand font, in the specified location. The background is transparent and people can fill it with what they want, or we can define the style. But I then also think the style of the background image can evolve into guilds – there can be a crafters guild, a paper guild, an anime guild, a robot guild, whatever.
The brand elements can have something with boundaries, but still free enough for people to make their own. So, like, what are your three core values (say, humility, curiosity, community, select from a list) or what are your three affiliated brands (say, parkrun, indie events and permaculture, selected from a list – all other TLCs are also included in the list). The affiliated brands serve to cross-pollinate across communities, to prevent isolation.
It’s like the overlapping mushroom root structure of a mycelium (https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TheEternalNetwork.pdf page 121)
Then the Curvy Cavy newsletter can be one manifestation of how we connect across geography.
Each TLC has the option of having their own server, in the form of a SolidBox. This can be used to host their email, data generated for community resource management (the peduncle project) and local area networks (LANs), a type of small internet.
Friend of a friend FOAF webs of trust
“De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of content moderation approaches. The Fediverse, in other words.” https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/
End to end (E2E) – https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/07/disenshittification/#e2e
Really I want a way for people to communicate when faced with climate change, disaster preparedness, government shutdowns. But people are not going to start using a resilient, E2E, decentralised system during times of crisis. They need to use these better systems, rather than the enshittified versions, as Cory Doctorow calls them, like Facebook, before disaster hits. It needs to be fun, and well designed from the user perspective.
I want this initiative to help train people in how to use the various FOSS things, better email, better social media, how encryption works, gamify some of these things. This tangentially links to the new FOSS user process we’re working on under the Debian umbrella.
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