Daniel LakelandMar 2

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.

Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2

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?

#tracim #yunohost

Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2

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...

Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2
Unlike the guild like structure of traditional unis where its a hierarchy of president, deans, department chairs, researchers, grad students, undergrads etc. And where the "product" is papers officially sanctioned by publishers who have editors and the editors have anonymous reviewers and theres an acceptance process and a stamp of approval and prestige associated with journal reputation and all that horseshit... our product would be direct knowledge
Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2
Theres like 1M active fediversians out there. I know some of you have research questions, anything from archeology to zoology (A to Z) and I know y'all are weird so you tend to have cross disciplinary interests and regular universities can't parse that cross disciplinary stuff... it doesn't fit into the hierarchy and rules and institutional resource constraints and horseshit like that... So here is an opportunity.
Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2

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.

Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2

And I wanna use the internet in weird and collaboratory ways... anything from multicast conferences without centralized Zoom servers, to maybe building some kind of distributed paper publications, to building hand curated research "editor lists" of recommended publicly published works, etc.

Forget centralized systems like ArXive or whatnot. forget gatekeepers, what could we do if you dont need **permission** to be allowed to do research and create ideas and share them?

Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2
All that being said, we need moderation and federation, because I want people to see this working and be able to just start one of these in their country or municipality or whatever... independent, but connected as needed. Whether its birdwatchers in Costa Rica or mesh networking deployments in Berlin or human rights watch groups spread across 7 countries or whatever... what I do should be a template for others to do similar stuff.
Show threadDaniel LakelandMar 2

Ive had ideas like this bouncing around in my head since like 2013. But now we have lots of tech that we didnt have in 2013. Peertube, Mastodon, IPFS, Moodle, whatever.

so. Thats my idea. My "prefiguration" of a better world.

Cheers BBS

Show threadHenrik Kramselund - kramse 🍉Mar 2

@dlakelan

I would love to see more

I have taught with formal ECTS in Denmark, and am really tired of the formal ways

I also have quite a lot of material in the infosec and network area, at Diploma level, open source

Show threadDaniel Lakeland

@kramse
Thats awesome. I guess I'm gonna post on this idea on the hashtag #anarchistuniversity so follow that

I want to have some kind of collaboration system up and running in the next month where curious people can actually do stuff... I'm not sure what that means, maybe I buy a server and put it in my closet, or rent a Hetzner server or something.

follow the hash tag and chime in let's keep talking

Mar 2 at 6:41amWeb