Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire
A collaboration with Princeton explores how Governance Cards can help communities explain how they organise, make decisions, and care for their shared spaces.
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Explore what your community could build.
FeaturesBUILD Building blocks your community can combine. Comparison tableCOMPARE How Bonfire differs from other community platforms. Case studiesSTORIES How communities are shaping Bonfire for their needs. About BonfireABOUT The project, principles, and people behind it. Try Bonfire at the campground ↗ Launch your BonfireChoose how much you want to run yourself.
Self-hostDIY Your infrastructure and some sysadmin comfort. Cooperative hostingHOST Your own space without a sysadmin job. Co-design with usWITH For communities, organisations and funders with specific needs. Compare all three routes → EcosystemFind people, answers, and tools around Bonfire.
ParticipateJOIN Contribute, collaborate, or help sustain the commons. FAQsASK Licensing, federation, privacy, and governance. DocumentationDOCS Setup guides and technical reference for hosts and builders. Browse the source code ↗ Blog Merch Get startedArticles tagged community
Gifting with Integrity: Federated Digital Spaces for Mutual Aid Networks
Meet Adrian and Lee, two of the people helping shape Bonfire's future. They are gifting group administrators who've been on the frontlines of the Buy Nothing movement, building community, fostering generosity, and fighting against Facebook's enshittification every step of the way.
Matters of care - why maintenance comes first
It was not an easy choice to focus our crowdfunding campaign on care and maintenance as the condition sine qua non to consider it successful.
Bonfire Expeditions - Camp! A bounty programme
This initiative aims to inspire developers to learn the stack and framework and to create Bonfire extensions, while helping to close some issues along the way.
Open source meets open science - announcing the Open Science Network initiative
We’re excited to present the Open Science Network initiative, a first step towards open and federated digital spaces designed to push the boundaries of open science and scholarly communication.
Safer social networking - Bonfire's recent experiment with Prosocial Design Patterns
To better understand the workflow involved in building Bonfire extension from scratch, we implemented a design pattern from the Prosocial Design Network: label misleading content; add links to reliable, related content.
Could you help us with user research?
As we approach v1.0 of Bonfire, we’re looking for volunteers to help us with some user research.
What you can expect from the Bonfire beta
In a few days' time we'd like to invite you to experiment with a 'playground' instance of Bonfire, the federated social networking toolkit for communities. Lots of what you'll see in the Bonfire beta will be recognisable from other social and/or federated apps. There is some functionality that may be a little different with Bonfire as well.
