The Place

Table of Contents

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1. The Place

.. 1. What is it?

.. 2. Values and themes

.. 3. Inspiration

.. 4. Projects

1 The Place

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I guess that this must be the place

1.1 What is it?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In short:

- an environment imbued with certain values

- a community informed by those values

Slightly more concretely:

- a virtual environment and meeting space facilitating collaborative

creative expression and the exchange of ideas

1.2 Values and themes

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In no particular order yet, some ideas about the types of values and

themes that might inform the direction of this project.

- the inherent dignity of every human person

- kindness

- informed optimism

- fun

- progressive enhancement

- speculative fiction

- mutual aid

- learning (education) for its own sake

- sustainability

- accessibility

- most technical problems are primarily political problems

- themes to explore (to further inform values):

- the power of language

- the power of technology

- explorations of ethics and the production of social norms around

the responsible distribution and exercise of power in the contexts

of language (and) technology

- the implications of scale

- electricity

- related themes:

- software user freedom

- open hardware

- the production of basic necessities (food, shelter, etc.)

- retro-computing

- science and technology studies (STS)

- interactive fiction

- role playing games

- science fiction and fantasy

- worker cooperatives

- decentralization

- federation

- documentation

- distributism

- contextual integrity

- citizen science

- software development / programming / programming language theory

- architecture and urban planning

- information theory

1.3 Inspiration

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Again, in no particular order yet, some existing works and projects

which may provide some inspiration for the direction of this project

Books:

- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

- Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich

- ...

Technologies:

- MOO / LambdaMOO

- Telnet

- AX.25

- IRC

- XMPP

- ActivityPub

- Matrix

Communities:

- tilde.club

- the WELL?

1.4 Projects

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The first project is to create the minimal infrastructure necessary to

support the development of the community itself.