I want to start an online anarchist research university. Fuck signalling and degrees and publication count, I want to host a place where people come to collaborate on building knowledge and to learn and teach things. Not so you can "improve your resume" or "get a job" or create connections to help get you hired or any capitalist bullshit. Just specifically because you either want to know something, or you do know something and want to share it with others.
And I want to build it starting now.
I think one of the first steps is to create some online collaboration space and recruit some people to participate. I want to host it myself for the moment. And I want something I can host on yunohost to keep the cost of admin down.
i looked at "collaboration" in the app list and found "Tracim" and it looks... pretty interesting? Who has used it?
Its not easy to imagine how this thing works exactly. But I want to recruit people who have questions and potential research projects, as well as people who have mentorship and skills to help guide that research.
This kind of expands beyond my original idea of doing some videos where I personally help people do some kind of modeling and data analysis, and into a kind of broader ecosystem not focused on me but focused on groups collaborating on common goals...
How are we gonna afford this? you ask... no idea. But let's put people together to work on projects and see if we can get institutions to fund the projects, or fucking kickstarter or gofundme or whatever the projects.
What if RAND corporation except for socialist anarchist peacenik weirdos?
You get me? Sign up... right here in the frikin comments.
The larger question becomes - how shall such a research university govern itself ?
The ancient universities of Paris and Bologna give us two different models. Bologna gave us the student-controlled model and Paris gave us the model we sorta see today, faculty and departments in charge.
Our problem today is the Paris model didn't see the scheming administrators seizing control of the academic rudder.
Well. sure, but at some level we need kook detection and principled reviewers etc.
If one of these becomes kooky, it gets ignored. People move their efforts elsewhere. right now its just proof of concept, create a smallish one... 10-20 people, get the infrastructure set up, probably some kind of existing ongoing projects that get adopted or something.
So the university president is sitting in the doctor's office with a frog on his head.
"What's going on here?" asks the doc.
"Well, it started out as a wart on my ass" says the frog.
Daniel Lakeland
tuban_muzuru