Bridges to Brandenburg

This is an experiment towards a new internet based mode of establishing organic (real world) growth and engagement of social networks. Our approach nurtures independent nodes in making opportunistic connections via search and discovery of one another via online “bridges.” EOTL is currently prototyping a model in Berlin and the surrounding countryside of Brandenburg. While we have a few more aspects that we hope to incorporate in the coming months, for now this initiative consists of the two simple components:

• Webring - a simple list of URLs that we thing share a relationship with a center node
• Search Portal - a custom search engine which only searches the URLs in the webring

Eventually we’ll integrate this more closely with EOTL applications like Open Inventory and Open Dispatch. For now, though, the primary goal is using open internet standards to establish a framework that empowers independent farmers, food producers, artisans, and other suppliers to discover, make contact, and perhaps even engage in collaborative business and resource sharing. As an alternative to using other complicated third parties, we want to make this as easy as walking across short digital Bridges, like using an online search portal.

Reasoning

One guiding light in our quest for technological empowerment was best expressed by a clever technologist friend of EOTL. Their succinct techno-philosophy is basically:NO ADMINS. NO MASTERS. We feel this is a worthy technological pursuit to always keep in mind. However, we also believe in small iterative progress towards larger goals – an empiricism or “praxis” if you will. This iteration of building simple bridges between independent producers and suppliers likewise represents a step towards more complex social networking.

We adore the Fediverse, though at the moment we are not sure how to best integrate it to further our immediate goals. Currently, we see a much higher signal with those who homestead their own websites (on the good ole’ WWW), compared to the exciting and creative noise of the current Fediverse. However, small businesses and niche suppliers may benefit from publishing on the Fediverse whereby they might find it easier to build a following compared to the silos of AmaInstaXBook which are ruled by proprietary algorithms and favor those with deep-pocketed advertising budgets. However, we do have some ideas whereby the Fediverse will likely play some role in our “stack”, but first, we want to explore building other kinds of Bridges.

What kind of bridges you may ask: hopefully flexible ones ;) but also ones that can invite creative, caring, solidarity and sustainability-minded humans to trod across. We hope our digital bridges can also morph into existence in the real physical (meatspace) world.

Why is EOTL creating this? It honestly feels like an intuitive path to start on in order to bring about more sustainable living for the masses who dwell in urban environments (if you’ll allow the Lumpenproletariat to get Marxist for a moment). Let’s look at some objective facts relating to sustainability:

The first is where one particular collection of those masses live, Berlin, and the surrounding rural areas which have a historical and ongoing relationship with agricultural, Brandenburg. There is potential to utilize these geographic and historical relationships and realize sustainable living for the masses in Berlin.

Population Density

The relevant comparison here is population density, and this can be substituted for most modern urban cities. In most urban models, the population density means that there are far too many humans in one area to be sustained by the foods that area could ever feasibly produce.

Under the current status quo, this imbalance is usually addressed by foods that must be shipped from far away, creating large carbon footprints. If we allow business as usual to continue, we will be complicit in ruining the planet while assuring continued profit margins for the ruling classes.

So, our little experiment currently titled Bridges To… still has a lot to flesh out and explore, but we see these two tiny micro-sites and this update as the first in hopefully a series of developments towards empowering Berliners towards radical sustainability.