Thoughts On Content, Seeding Personal Clouds, and Learning To Love Local

As you, my kind readers, have noticed I am working on projects that deal with being your own personal internet. Local wikimedia serves, library/pirate box variations, chess servers, voip, chat, etc etc.

In some form or another have been asked several times "Wut dis good 4? Kan Mamez?"

(Mame, while having nothing to do with local wikimedia, is a whole other weekend project (short answer.. yes) )

What is this good for is something that has a clearer answer.

Not everyone has access to the internet or the access is monitored/censored. This is not just a problem "over there" it is a problem nearly everywhere. Even in countries with fast seemingly open access think of schools, libraries and other state run points of access that are required to run filters, blocks, and in many cases monitoring. That is a best case. Worst cases abound in the news.

Add into this the fact that even if you can get an always on pure and open access …does everything need to be up there somewhere or can some of it be closer to where the usage is? Factor in that if just one person downloads a copy they can then share it out locally to many … the one becomes the some becomes a source.

This comes in handy when the clouds goes down, when the service you were placing all your eggs in gets bought out or goes out of business or when the political climate of your country turns foul.

Then there are times and situations where having a locally accessible store of this data is one of many tools you can use at the drop of a hat or in the spur of the moment. School age folks should have no trouble thinking of a few such situations and most everyone has probably wished at some point or another they had a Stephensonian Illustrated Primer / Adamseque HHGthG at their ready.

A data store in the hand is worth two in the cloud. [1]

Then there are places that are struggling with basic electricity and plumbing. Places where access to the vast treasures some take for granted is still science fiction. For these places a Pi/CHIP with a 128gb flash acting as a server and a few PocketCHIPS as clients is the start of something amazing. Serving up wikimedia, broadcasting audio streams, securely being able to talk to each other, securely collaborating on projects both meat and cyber space related, and on and on.

Kiwiz, KAlite, Library/Pirate box, Anyfesto and projects like it are being worked on it part to reach as many people as possible, be it in first world fully modernized areas or in places just getting their first taste of the information age.

So as the usefulness of our new wonders unfold, take a moment and think about how you can make them work for the betterment of you, those around you and those around them. Be the propagation of progress.

And Don't Panic.

.[1] Some of you will have started mumbling about updates, stale data and issues of data integrity. You are a frood who really knows where their towel is. Yes these are issues and with Kiwix there are options. As we move on with all this hopefully we will see the need to solve for these issues more robustly. Lets start on that soon.

Diplomacy – The Zines
A great game with a rich culture which has been archived at Internet Archive. If you were. are or about to be into this game it is worth a look.