At the beginning of the year I became increasingly concerned with the state of civil society here in the U.S. and around the world. Polarized online discourse, mental health crises, centralized control, challenges to privacy, continued ecosystem degradation, run-away growth, shifting political landscapes, attacks on civil liberties, and an overall disappearance of civil society as a whole in the face of government and corporate power grabs.
It’s tempting to just throw up my hands and bunker up.
Instead, I dug into root causes and was continually surprised at how many of them were intertwined by how we have adopted and (mis)used information technology in our society. I decided to try to make a difference, and have spent the last 8 months working nights and weekends on something I am terribly excited to share with you all!
Today, I am announcing, Wild Cloud. Wild Cloud provides open-source, self-hosted, independent platforms for hosting your applications and services. Your wild cloud is your own private data center where you can run a suite of community-maintained applications designed to support productivity, privacy, community-building, and intelligence workloads and more.
Imagine your data remaining safely on your own servers; you controlling your own algorithms; your attention only on what you want to put it on; communities interacting with their privacy intact. Wild Cloud takes the power of Internet technology back from corporations and governments and places is squarely back in the hands of civil society. Many believe the only solution to the challenges facing us is to eliminate technology from our lives. I believe we just need to take control of our technology back.
Wild Cloud isn’t just an open source project, it’s the foundation on which I hope we will build a new class of distributed, open software and services aimed squarely at societal needs unmet by commercial pursuits.
To that end, I am also announcing the launch of the Civil Society Technology Foundation. The CSTF’s mission is to empower individuals, communities, and organizations throughout civil society to reclaim digital self-determination through the development and adoption of open-source, self-hosted technologies. We want to put the technology back in the hands of the people.
I’ve worked on bootstrapping these projects for the past 8 months. Today, we have two fully functioning proof-of-concept wild clouds running and I need help moving forward. Do you want to fight for civil society and help me take CSTF and Wild Cloud the rest of the way?? I need board members, developers, marketers, writers, educators, strategists, community builders, and more!
If this idea intrigues you please help me get the conversation going by joining me on the CSTF community forum, and please forward this on to your network.
Exciting times! Lot’s to do!
P.