Open invitation to assemble a co-operative ecosystem to operate a sustainable, resilient infrastructure for Bonfire development, hosting, and technical support.
We're looking for more participants to join in building a sustainable and resilient cooperative hosting ecosystem in the face of digital landscapes dominated by profit-driven giants. Our model, inspired by Open Cooperative Ecosystems and Community Supported Software, proposes a holistic approach where software, infrastructure, and communities are not isolated entities but integral parts of a common ecosystem. This draws parallels with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) to tackle sustainability challenges in not-for-profit tech projects.
Such a cooperative alliance would involve various stakeholders all working collectively: users, communities, moderators, tech supporters, infrastructure operators, translators, designers, developers, and more. Participation and contribution can come in various forms: financial support, resource sharing, labour, and active participation in decision-making and project upkeep.
This approach based on solidarity and mutual aid would ensure resiliency, accessibility and diversity, while promoting open community involvement. This paradigm shift aligns tech development with core values of trust, transparency, and user empowerment.
The Cooperative Hosting Network would greatly simplify the setup, hosting, and operation of a Bonfire instance through an automated install wizard and dashboard, which would act as a gateway to an ecosystem of developers, designers, hosting providers, and other relevant services, which would work together to provide users and communities with:
- Openness: designers, developers, and sysadmins, among other workers, can join the ecosystem to provide services and receive compensation.
- Mutualism: participants that meet specific criteria may exchange services in-kind, and benefit from special rates or pro-bono services.
- Flexibility: from a personal instance to a large community, the hosting ecosystem will guide the user based on their specific needs and budget.
- Inclusivity: users and communities can collectively shape the ecosystem’s roadmaps, by co-designing and funding desired features.
The dashboard would also double as a decentralized economic network, transparently recording every contribution and distributing funds based on value equations democratically defined by the ecosystem stakeholders.
Join the ecosystem
The current proposal is a joint effort between Co-op Cloud and Bonfire Networks, with discussions ongoing with other interested groups. While we are of course focused on a solution for hosting Bonfire instances, the ecosystem could be extended to involve other open source projects as well... We are looking for more partners to build the ecosystem, if you are interested please contact us at team@bonfire.cafe
