Hey ya’ll.
I’m looking for people who are interested in creating FOSS Software for a solarpunk based agricultural revolution: Bottom up, from the people, for the people - dreaming together, building together. Welcome to Stewbards Hub!
Technolocially, there is but a littlest prototype as of yet. What is of great importance right now is to find a core team and organizational structure to be able to have this thing grow as a community.
Questions of how to foster non-hierarchy, decentralization and diversification of power and architecture and move away from the mono-maintainer are at the center right now. Get involved on the Matrix to discuss these things - or simply underneath this post. Nothing’s set in stone yet :+)
https://matrix.to/#/#stewbards.hub:matrix.org
I’ve personally started working on the MeanderingMap - a tool to mark and track plants on, well, a map, that shall ultimately also link seperate gardens together to turn them turn into a mycelized, decentralized network of collaborateurs sharing materials, plants and labour in a self organized fashion. Think Zenjob meets social media meets openstreetmaps meets Craigslist… This will enable* communal workflows* and labour to be distributed based on wants and inclinations, allowing spontaneity and flexibility instead of the rigidity imposed by current contractual hyperspecializing work culture. “Hey I’ve got cow dung. Anyone want to pick it up”. “We harvesting today. Anyone wanna join? We’ve got e guitars and amplifiers too so the vibe is great!”
Then, besides that, more long term ish, We want to get involved in upcycling old tech and turn them into useful** gardening robots**. Here, we must tread carefully: i think automation must’nt come to early. There needs to be a direct, personal relationship with land and plants before that can be turned into algorithms; otherwise, it’ll likely degenerate into another oppresive, anthropocentric mess. That’s why we’re starting with the map too: it is, also, a library of knowledge! We shall gather all things related to plants, their interactions; ecology, techniques, technology, but also communication, organization, workflow… so that ultimately, we can hopefully then leverage this knowledge and synthesize it to create those robots and systems enabling a transformation of large scale agriculture.
If these topics are of interest to you - be that from a technical perspective, one concerned with social, ecological or ethical perspectives, one that is interested in organizational structures or one of aesthetics - **please reach out to me! ** We are just getting started and its of vital importance that this comes from a place of community. Love ya’ll :+)
Join the Matrix Chat: https://matrix.to/#/#stewbards.hub:matrix.org
if you interact with tech/society at all, you’re going to be close to LLM’S by proxy. and of course theres lots of spam and hype surrounding them, but there’s also very legit use cases for them. esp for what you just described: that’s literally what i’ve done, only, ofc, to have ai handle that instead of people. in this day and age, how do you reckon are people going to approach coding that anyways? theres many cases in which i think letting ai near it would be devastating; having it write some basic GUI i think is a good use case for it if you don’t happen to have a whole team behind you. ofc you can bring up ecological costs; but then - thats something you have to take on even if you forbid AI entirely. 2-3 queries vs 8-10 hrs of programming work where there is some PC on, music playing, perhaps some heavy IDE on, 15-30 online searches… its not like these things are free either. so what i come back to: why wouldn’t you touch that stuff? if the code it produces is reviewed - as it is in this case, i have personally checked every single line of code i’ve uploades - like… the capabilties of these tools are plain and simply amazing. there’s no denying that. theres no denying either that data centers can be problematic. but then i guess we’ve got to choose our poison. i tried to be a seclusive hermit and renounce all society: that didnt work out well for me. if we want to act in this world it seems we need to compromise to some degree. and to me, personally, i think ai could greatly contribute to technological emancipation if used responsibly. as i said, i think its mostly a matter of where, when, how and why you use it.
You could start working on the ‘we’ first - find someone with the skills to write the code for your idea. Find people who can help you bring your project alive. Community is not only an important part, it’s the central part of your project - so there’s no advantage for you and the project in skipping this step.
Yes, we are all entangled in energy-intensive technology - but that is something I want to reduce! So for me the start for a project like you describe would be meeting the neighbours, see what they are growing, and documenting this in the way that is available to me - could be an calc sheet, or even just paper and pen. Only when there is enough information to warrant better organization would I want to consider the need for code, also because before engaging with actual people I would be very unsure what is important and how to organize it well.
Society has been gradually moving from creating stuff with substance to creating stuff with shiny surfaces - and too often software and especially vibecoding play into this. The actual information becomes unimportant, presentation becomes everything. I feel that in order to return to substance we have to look at all tech with a very critical eye, just use what we really can’t do without, and avoid adding shiny new stuff wherever we can.
Now I’m still interested in your project and I’m sure you would find other people who do the coding part for or with you - so please don’t be discouraged by the anti-AI-backlash but maybe see if there’s another way to get this off the ground.