Greetings, I’m Danyl Strype, a free human being of this Earth. I’m a professional volunteer and activist, with a passion for environmental regeneration, indigenous sovereignty, labour rights, drug law reform, freedom of expression, software freedom, and independent media, to name a few. I’m from Aotearoa (NZ), but in 2018 I moved to China, where I’m planning to live for a few years, learn some Mandarin, and check out what’s happening there in community tech.
I have a Permaculture Design Certification from Earthcare Education Aotearoa, and I try to apply the ethics and design principles of permaculture to my work with digital technology. I’ve been involved in building and protecting the digital commons for more than 20 years, including work with independent media projects like Aotearoa Indymedia, commons stewardship projects like CreativeCommons Aotearoa/NZ, and coordinating website development and online collaboration for community organizations like Permaculture in NZ. I’ve also been an occasional advisor and beta tester for the Loomio Community.
I founded Disintermedia.net.nz more than a decade ago to research and advise activist and community networks on using decentralized tools based on free code (FLO) software. Some of this work is gradually being ported to the wiki of the P2P Foundation. I also help to cultivate and feedback into community technology forums like the Open App Ecosystem, Collaborative Technology Alliance, SocialHub (ActivityPub developers forum), PrivacyTools, and Microsolidarity.
Among other research interests my work on the Disintermedia blog and wiki has looked into how to store records, collaborate, communicate, both within groups an organizations and between them, and how to publish works for free access by the emerging global society. Over the last few years I’ve become obsessed with the “fediverse”, the federated social web, and I’ve been a volunteer researcher for fediverse.party, a website that introduces new users to fediverse concepts and software. More recently I’ve started to get involved in the building of community teams around Vidcommons and WeDistribute, for which I intend to do some writing next year.
Another major research interest for my Disintermedia work is funding the commons and the people who curate and sustain it, and crowdfunding has been on my radar since Diaspora funded their initial development on Kickstarter in 2010. I believe I first came across Snowdrift in some Loomio groups (maybe OAE? See above) and I’ve had various conversations with Snowdrift folks on the fediverse (I’m strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz). I like the concept of a crowdfunding platform that:
- is focused on sustainably funding the commons, right down the stack (not just the branded UI layers but all the back end and networking components they depend on)
- uses free code software to do its work (ends don’t justify the means, they’re produced by their logic)
- funds itself through the same methods it encourages the projects it hosts to use, as Gratipay did
- has a strong community development ethic, including a commitment to actual diversity and sharing of power, not “diversity” as an excuse for power and control games and other manipulative and anti-social behaviour.
I won’t be online much over the next few months as I’ll be taking a long trip back to Aotearoa to visit family and friends and unplug for a while. But I’ll be back in the studio after attending FOSSasia in March, and I look forward to getting to know you all during the following months.
For this year, I intend to proposal a talk on the fediverse. Any suggestions for how to pitch it, anything in particular to include or avoid?