Distributed Datacenter

Increasingly, our websites and services are hosted on “the cloud”. Who runs “the cloud”? Big Tech companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft – you name it.

The modern internet is much more centralized than people would like to think. A vast majority of the services we use from email, file storage, instant messaging and many more reside on servers and infrastructure owned by these companies.

This represents massive single points of failure, where a datacenter failing or shutting down causes entire swathes of the internet to go offline. Furthermore, social media sites and instant messaging services are largely in the hands of these companies, which allows them to dictate how and what users can communicate on these platforms.

We need community-run, distributed and decentralized networks and server infrastructure where everyone can take back control of their data and privacy, without being subject to the whims of Big Tech.

Verifiable Computing Project

Integrated circuits, or chips, are at the heart of our devices. As they become more integrated with functions, what do we know about how they work? Can we trust they function as intended?

Our methods of designing and scaling computers are not keeping up, while the complexity of our systems increases. This has fundamental implications on the security of our devices.

Exploits and vulnerabilities found in our chips reveal a blunt truth: blindly or begrudgingly, we have to trust that our chips are correctly implemented and without backdoors.

The Verifiable Computing Project seeks to change this by building hardware and software that can be inspected by end-users.

Community Manufacturing Initiative

Our supply chains and manufacturing are also extremely centralized in places such as China, India and Taiwan. The global semiconductor shortage at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies the weaknesses of centralized, just-in-time supply chains.

The environmental impacts of shipping components for assembly as entire products before shipping them to customers is staggering – only for these products to become unusable and replaced in a couple of years due to planned obsolescence.

We are building products that are designed to last, with components and modules that are serviceable by end-users. We want our mechanical enclosures and assemblies that can be fabricated by end-users in their local maker or hackerspaces.

Manufacturing capacity should be based in and around local communities, and we encourage communities to build up the ability to build, modify and repair their own devices. To that end, community engagement and education is vital to realizing these goals.