The Spritely Institute
Hello! Continuing with our "what are Spritely's technical values/design goals" threads... https://spritely.institute/about/
Today we are talking about:
- Participatory, gatekeeper-free technology
- We should not pretend we can prevent what we cannot
- Contribute to the commons
Let's go!
The Spritely Institute
"Participatory, gatekeeper-free technology", from our about page:
> Everyone should be able to participate in our tech, without gatekeepers. This means we have a high bar for our tech being possible for individuals to meaningfully run and for a wide variety of participants to be able to cooperate on the network at once.
The Spritely Institute
It should be possible for *ordinary people* to help the network as a whole operate. This means Spritely's tech can't be expensive to run, nor must it take an enormous amount of technical skill and time to operate and administrate.
Open source isn't sufficient. Self-hostable isn't sufficient!
The Spritely Institute
Really, this means several things.
- There should be no central institution declaring, monitoring, surveilling, or approving the use of our technology
- It must be possible to self-host
- And in fact, "self-hosting" is not enough, since "self-hosting" often means a high technical barrier to entry!
The Spritely Institute
Open source and self-hostable are *per-requisites* for Spritely's technology. But right now much decentralized networking tech requires a level of expertise beyond what ordinary users can participate in.
Often times hosting this tech uses devops tooling designed for large corporate dev teams.
The Spritely Institute
As a side note, this also means that it's not sufficient for us to simply "hand users a Docker container": you shouldn't have to trust us that our binary build is enough. Individuals and software distribution centers should be able to fully compile our tech themselves, from top to bottom!
The Spritely Institute
How we'll achieve these goals will be detailed more in the coming weeks as we begin to lay out more publicly what our roadmap, and tech components, are. Suffice to say this packs a high collective set of requirements, and one that most decentralized networking tech systems don't meet today!
The Spritely Institute
Next is "We should not pretend we can prevent what we cannot:" from https://spritely.institute/about/
> Much harm is caused by giving people the impression that we provide features and guarantees that we cannot provide. We should be clear about the limitations of our architecture, because if we don't, users may believe they are operating with safety mechanisms which they do not have, and may thus be hurt in ways they do not expect.
The Spritely Institute
It can be tempting to give users the impression that certain safety mechanisms are in place which are not. If we give the impression that a kind of privacy or security property is provided which is not actually ensured in any real way, vulnerable users may be harmed by depending on that expectation.
The Spritely Institute
In our view, promising levels of safety which are not actually provided is dangerous and can lead to real harm. It can also lead to a scramble of bad design when users discover their expectations are violated.
We wish to provide as much safety ans security as we can. But being clear is important.
The Spritely Institute
Contribute to the commons:
> We are a research institution, and everything we build is free and open source software, user-freedom empowering tech and documentation. This also informs our choice to run the Spritely Institute, organizationally, as a nonprofit building technology for the public good.
The Spritely Institute
As said, we are a research institution. We are trying hard to build the future of the internet so that everyone benefits.
Everything we do, everything we build, we release into the commons: free and open source software, free culture assets and papers.
Everyone can benefit from Spritely's tech!
The Spritely Institute
And indeed, we hope everyone does benefit from our tech.
But of course, the way an organization is organized, and who it reports to, can affect how it can achieve its stated goals.
Having governance and stewardship of the technology of the people as being beholden to its mission is important.
The Spritely Institute
Of course, famously, funding the commons is extremely difficult. Despite how much "easier" short term it would be to take large amounts of VC cash, we are here for the long term vision.
Did we mention we are running a public fundraising campaign? We could use your help! https://spritely.institute/donate/
The Spritely Institute
For this reason, we are a nonprofit (a US 501(c)(3) to be exact).
The Internet's original designs were largely a public works project. Enormously powerful and wonderful things can happen when technology is built in the interest of people and given to the commons.
The Spritely Institute
That's it for today's technical values! Tomorrow we will complete our tech values overview with the most fun one... quite literally! "Fun is a revolutionary act"! https://spritely.institute/about/
Thanks for listening! We appreciate all the support we have gotten so far 💜 https://spritely.institute/donate
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