Dyne.org, a decade in perspective
Some kind souls are blessing Europe — the souls of reality hackers and change agents. In this post I’ll talk about our international foundation based in Amsterdam, Dyne.org, and share an update that is long-due for all the fellow travelers who have met us along the paths — Die Holzwege.
Lets start with a reference to our Magna Carta Libertatum published on the 8/8/8, because it is very actual today in these times of syndemic crisis, reminding us the dreams and utopias that move us.
The Weaver Birds (english version) — Gli Uccelli Tessitori (italian version)
Who and where are we
For more than 20 years now fellow hackers around the world kept encouraging and helped us to go forward and maintain our concrete example of alter-institutional turn.
We are developing a lot of software as well facilitate communities doing their distributions and we even mentor young ventures.
By reading further you may learn that nerds are everywhere, even if we don’t insist signaling our presence and do not compete with mainstream narratives: our voice and essence ultimately doesn’t belong to propaganda.
We are not the establishment, but we are a friendly fleet in an open “digital Archipelago” and we are open to alliances.
We are here to witness that it exists a way to develop technology for the social good and it can be sustainable.
Facilitators of community development
Through the past 7 years we have been facilitating the growth of a splendid community around a base distro named “Dev 1” (written Devuan) which has released its 4.0 “Chimaera” version this year as usual with press coverage worldwide.
Today Devuan is not just a first choice distro but also an underground meme (just search “devuan” on youtube) for its resistance to failing corporate bloat in GNU/Linux, but also for the flourishing grassroot community that populates places like dev1galaxy.org or several channels on Libera chat (RIP freenode).
Our distro is now placed 2nd in the DistroWatch worldwide Top10 by user ratings.
We knew forking Debian was worth the effort for the many people who still want to rely on its package base for security and stability, but we would never imagine Devuan would be so successful. This success is the merit of a community we love to facilitate and keep alive for many years to come.
At last, contrary to Winslows 11, our latest release does not require you to buy a new PC, but it runs on old ones as well has a record speed on RaspberryPi boards.
Mentors for social innovation
Our short but intense experience working in research and development projects for the European Commission, even leading one of them to flagship status, made us involved in writing a cascade funding plan for “human centric solutions” that ran for the past 3 years with some outstanding results.
We organized our team around the daily activities of technical mentorship for a multiplicity of different solutions and lead to results we can be proud of. While doing so we also learned that many organizations and the EC itself are talking about free and open source, but still need to learn a lot about its development methodologies, its language and its sustainability models.
Most funded initiatives in Europe still do not share social goals nor human values, do not adopt open source licensing and are too myopic to see the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy.
Our colleague Mihaela is now working on a set of tools and methodologies for the reliable implementation of funding programs and their coordination, something that is closely inspired to open source community models and our own ethos, which we intend to share with everyone operating in this field.
Meanwhile our funding program today is not just an achievement for the “Next Generation Internet” initiative, but it is a starting point for all the beneficiaries that have completed the program. There is so much to do and so many people to wake up with our call.
We need to pack our success and tell more institutions and companies in Europe that another way of doing sustainable development is possible, and its here to stay.
Critical engineers for circular economies
The notion of “circular economy” is underpinning the urgent and intense effort of making European societies evolve into environmentally sustainable systems. This notion is rooted in the critical thinking of brilliant people like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen or Ernst Friedrich Schumacher whose theories have been clearly ignored by the industrial development of the past century.
To make circular the economy of today is hard work and takes a good dose of critical thinking as well critical engineering.
This is something we have been dedicated a lot in the past years leading technical developments for the REFLOW project.
Our focus has been in improving the way information about recyclable materials circulates and is made available. We have applied a new paradigm to simplify the complexity of logistics by adopting a Resource Event Agent model (REA) and the Valueflows vocabulary.
Today we can share with all of you a new crypto model to authenticate graph database entries into “digital product passports” as well several free and open source software codebases to host related services and integrate into the wider scale European infrastructure.
Our next step in 2022 together with the Fabcity network in Hamburg will be to bring this technology to adoption also for e-commerce and logistics applications, as an effective tool for the industry 4.0 and the democratization of the designer role in its growth.
Experts in computer heritage and restoration
Our knowledge of information systems comes from a passionate study of their history. We support the community effort of two musea in the south of Italy: the Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante (MUSIF) and the Museo Interattivo di Archeologia Informatica (MIAI). If you are a geek you can’t miss hanging our 2022 calendar in your lab:
We are doing our best to leverage the incredible experience and knowledge accumulated by these initiatives in the framework of new European heritage projects, as it happens already in cooperation with the ZKM institute of Karlsruhe for the restauration of the Zuse, the most ancient computer in Europe.
We are also producing very successful exhibitions in public places like city archives and libraries, in conversation with an audience of all ages about the values we give to our physical and digital interaction, the importance that memory has for our culture and what does it means to rely uniquely on digital supports in order to preserve it and share it.
We do all this to share the wealth of knowledge, relationships and financial resources we manage to gather through our research and development activities and in fact this, together with the publication of free and open source software for social purposes, is what makes us most proud and joyful for the continued existence of the Dyne.org foundation.
The Next Layer for Democracy
We embarked an ambitious journey, equipped with the experience from the Decentralized Citizen Engagement Technologies project guided by Francesca Bria, which saw Dyne.org working for the first time in 2012 as research organization for the European Commission.
In 2021 we accepted the challenge of the Italian Democratic Party and prepared a customized setup of DECIDIM, made it ready to roll in 2 months to withstand the load and attention of a nation-wide party at the lead of the government coalition.
It wasn’t easy, our colleague Puria lead the whole process in cooperation with the good folks at platoniq and of course the involvement of young and smart people working with the party secretary. The results are becoming visible as we speak, 6 months and thousands of participants later, it will likely be an experience we want to continue as well repeat for more organizations around the world.
The European Blockchain Infrastructure
It’s not anymore a dream, but a concrete opportunity to have Europe rely on a fully free and open source software infrastructure for many notarization tasks needed by an initial number of 24 members states adhering to the initiative of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).
Also in the institutional space we decided to take a community development approach and formed a consortium with 2 excellent partners: RIDDLE&CODE and Infocert.
We are at a very good point building and testing a software stack based on DECODE technology (Zenroom) and that provides a consensus-based oracle network that can serve and link multiple distributed ledger technologies while keeping the whole framework blockchain agnostic.
And the good news came in just recently: we passed the second round of selection and we are now among the 5 organizations in Europe asked to demonstrate their prototype to the European Commission!
Success means growth
I won’t hide that the past two years of syndemic crisis rocked our boat, but we managed to stay afloat and deliver even more than we hoped. Our collective at the core of Dyne.org operations kept compact and focused, rowed high through difficult waters and obtained outstanding results. We have achieved all you see without the help of any venture capital and without running any crypto-coin scam.
As much as we believe in the idea that Small is Beautiful, we came to a point in which it is healthy to grow beyond our foundation and clearly make a distinction between what we do for research passion and interest and what we do as capable people hired by public and private ventures needing our help.
Today I am proud to announce the birth of a new company ready to work with you and help you build software products and services that stand out for the quality, passion and attention to details we all put into what we do.
Starting in 2022 you are welcome to contact the Forkbomb Company whenever you need us to work on your project and according to your schedule, write to info@forkbomb.eu and get to know our fresh CEO Andrea D'Intino.
