QCRS August: Land, Nostr & What We’re Building
Our August Queen City Resiliency Salon was a look at what we've built, what we're building next, and two experiments I'm particularly excited about: Farm Commons Shenandoah and Opossum Wire, our new community platform built on Nostr.
Below is a video of the presentation.
If you would like the presentation slides, here they are!
Jump to: Farm Commons · Project Updates · Opossum Wire & Nostr
Farm Commons Shenandoah
Land has a problem.
People who already own it increasingly treat it as a store of wealth. People who would actually like to farm it increasingly can't afford it.
So we introduced Farm Commons Shenandoah, an experiment we're developing with friends of QCRS to explore ways of connecting more people (especially younger people!) to land.
The question is simple even if the answer isn't:
How do we make access to farmland possible without requiring every new farmer to first become rich enough to buy a farm?
Learn more about Farm Commons Shenandoah
Meanwhile, at QCRS...
A surprising amount has happened in less than a year.
Food & Land: We're continuing our Staunton Farmers' Market table, exploring time-bank potlucks with local partners, and participating in Reimagined Runway Staunton.
Goods & Services: Two Repair Cafés down, another coming November 14. Our first Linux Community Tech Workshop is coming up, and we're exploring barter markets.
Tech & Communication: There's now a community Meshtastic node on the roof of the Staunton Innovation Hub, hopefully the first of many around our city. What-the-Node Wednesdays continue, and we're planning an ATAK Airsoft demonstration of mesh-enabled GPS.
Money & Exchange: The Staunton hOUR Economy Time Bank is alive again, now with physical wooden tokens.
With all of these projects there was repeatedly expressed a need for a centralized way to directly communicate, especially for the time bank service requests and possibly coordinating barter. I previously said that would be a future state project, because coding is a winter activity for me.
Alas, as fate had it I spent much of the summer indoors. But what a wonderful opportunity to build some solutions!
Opossum Wire & Nostr
Meet Opossum Wire.
We needed somewhere for time-bank requests, barter coordination, community events, and local conversation. We could have put everybody onto another centralized social platform and hoped its owners remained charming and benevolent forever.
Instead, we're experimenting with Nostr.
The beginner version is:
Nostr is the protocol. Clients are the doors. Relays are the mailboxes. Your keys are your identity.
Opossum Wire operates its own Pyramid relay, and we're experimenting with Hallway as a friendly front door.
But Hallway isn't the network. That's the important bit.
Other Nostr clients can use the same underlying protocol. A community can operate another relay. A makerspace could operate one. A library could. Your weird neighbor with a home server probably already wants to.
Our Nostr experiment also starts bumping into our mesh-radio experiment. Projects such as Nostrastic and Noshtastic are already exploring Nostr communication over LoRa/Meshtastic. So we're interested in a much bigger question:
Could communities eventually operate communication infrastructure that remains useful even when pieces of the conventional internet don't?
We're starting much smaller than that. One community, one relay, one experimental platform in the Shenandoah Valley. Hopefully soon it will be one of many!
Distributed systems get interesting precisely because nobody has to build the whole thing. Harrisonburg could build one. Lexington could build one. A library, makerspace, neighborhood, or group we've never met could build one.
Different doors. Different stewards. Same protocol.
It's buggy. It's new. It's exploring some interesting possibilities. Excellent! That's what experiments are for 😁