The WWW was born with a decentralised structure based on distributed protocols. Little by little the network was using new tools to simplify and organise content, with syndication and intermediation services. Several search engines and web sites were launched with mail and other services, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Terra, Google … And finally the GAFAM empire arrived (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft), extractivist platforms, social control tools and speech infrastructures, which concentrate almost all internet’s traffic.
At CommonsCloud we can’t or want to do it alone. We work with other teams and look to network with other collectives in the world. That is why we have a decentralised design for integration of tools, which others can replicate, and we look to interconnect with other similar projects, through social and technical intercooperation agreements.
The CommonsCloud services architecture aims to decentralize power, in several ways:
1) The team of systems administrators is not made up of a single person or a single organisation: we seek to share and distribute knowledge;
2) The CommonsCloud accounts management depends on Collectives or organisations: each Collective (or entity) designates one or more managers that validate and manage the user accounts within their Collective, decide on what services they access and the they offer a first layer of support;
3) We conceive the whole of the users as the CommonsCloud Community, in which we promote empowering over the tools;
4) We co-produce services between organisations committed to technological sovereignty, always documenting to be replicable;
5) To facilitate replicability and operational efficiency we produce and share deployment scripts and maintenance methodologies so that other groups around the world can replicate the parts that most interest them;
6) We prefer federated tools that allow user-level interconnection, such as NextCloud, and at a servers level, the account manager, to interconnect between different cooperative cloud clusters.