Mastodawn

So tired of inflated estimates of protest attendance by organizers. And strangely, most media outlets seem these days to just mention organizer counts. It used to be that mainstream media mentioned only police counts, 25 or so years ago. And we wouldtake #indymedia numbers and police numbers and split the difference.

Id love to believe there were 8 million at #nokings total, but when i see with my own eyes for years the protests being inflated by at least an order of magnitude locally, it just does not inspire trust. I know how to estimate big crowds; stand up high, count people in a row, roughly, multiply by rows as they march by or as you scan the area. You can get pretty close. And then thenext day the orgs say thousands when i know it’s hundreds. Or 100,000 when my count was maybe 5000.

It’s shameful when progressives pride themselves on science and verifiable stats and facts. It’s pure wishful thinking, confirmation bias.

And we have easy access to drones and machine vision technologies! It should be easy to get more accurate numbers.

#OMN (Open Media Network)1d ago

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product)

It should be obvious that we need a path back to good journalism - journalism that sheds light on facts, connects the dots, and lets people trace those dots back to sources. This is what allows us to share, question, and discuss within our own trusted communities, and then spread that knowledge outward through federation, always linking back to the source. Right now, the #mainstreaming path is broken. It’s sometimes hard for people to see this because the decline has been slow, a gradual […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/rebuilding-journalism-as-commons-not-a-product/

Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product) – #OMN (Open Media Network)

#OMN (Open Media Network)5d ago

What We Can Learn from Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders

In #mainstreaming and alt political cultures there’s a constant call in messy times for “strong leaders” to cut through the chaos, but this is the wrong path. What Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders actually show is something more uncomfortable and more useful that real change doesn’t come from strong individuals - it comes from movements we don’t fully control. They were signals, not saviours. Both figures emerged on the left because something deeper was already shifting with […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/what-we-can-learn-from-jeremy-corbyn-and-bernie-sanders/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 17

A Note on “Security” for the #FOSS Crew

We need to have a clearer, more grounded conversation about “security” and what it actually means in the context of the #openweb. There is a long history of thinking in #FOSS spaces that security is something we can solve purely technically: better encryption, better protocols, better architectures. But in everyday life and practice, people need to work from a much simpler starting point - We do not trust client–server security. We only meaningfully trust what can be verified through […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-note-on-security-to-the-foss-crew/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 15

Thinking of workshops to run at “Nodes On A Web” #NOAW unconference

Hamish Campbell is a long-time #openweb activist and technologist working on grassroots media and digital commons. He was involved in the early development of #Indymedia and continues this work through projects like the Open Media Network (#OMN), which works on how federated tools and community publishing supports public-interest media infrastructure. His focus is balancing building native platforms and on growing the social culture that makes the #openweb work: transparency, […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/thinking-of-workshops-to-run-at-nodes-on-a-web-noaw-unconference/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 14

Why It’s Difficult to Build the #OMN – and What We Can Do About It

One of the biggest barriers to building projects like the #OMN (Open Media Network) is not technical - it is structural - how resources are distributed in our society. Under capitalism, the driving force behind what gets built and what counts as “innovation” is profit. Investment flows toward projects that promise financial returns. Venture capital, grants, and corporate funding all operate under this logic: if a project can generate profit, scale, or market dominance, it is considered […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/why-its-difficult-to-build-the-omn-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 13

A bit of #OMN history and where the current paths come from

For a long time the focus has been on solving two linked problems - both of which are actually #nothingnew. The first is grassroots publishing and organising. The second is network coordination between communities. Neither of these problems started with the internet, and they certainly didn’t start with Silicon Valley. Projects like #Indymedia and community organising networks solved these problems culturally long before modern platforms existed. They worked through shared practice, trust […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-bit-of-omn-history-and-where-the-current-paths-come-from/

witchescauldron Mar 13

Indymedia back https://hamishcampbell.com/indymedia-back/ reviving the #Indymedia project is not just about resurrecting a historical artifact but reclaiming a vision of media activism, grassroots empowerment, and alternative narratives.

Indymedia back – #OMN (Open Media Network)

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 11

A note on the current voices speaking for the #Fediverse

Something that’s worth saying out loud: many of the people currently talking for the #Fediverse had very little to do with the generation that seeded this version. That doesn’t automatically make what they say wrong. But it does mean we should be careful about building strategy around their narratives. A lot of the early Fediverse energy came from the older #openweb traditions of hacker and #FOSS culture, experiments in federated infrastructure and grassroots publishing networks. The […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-note-on-the-current-voices-speaking-for-the-fediverse/

#OMN (Open Media Network)Mar 11

Disciplined curiosity beats IQ, Oxford

There is a persistent myth pushed in our culture that intelligence - high IQ, academic credentials, elitist education - leads naturally to clear thinking. My organic experience suggests the opposite, what matters is disciplined, skeptical, freethinking curiosity. Without that, intelligence simply becomes a tool for defending whatever assumptions people already hold. This is one of the reasons many academic environments produce people who are, bluntly, credulous. Not because they lack […]

https://hamishcampbell.com/disciplined-curiosity-beats-iq-oxford/