Magnova
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About
The first project of Magnova is to create Magnova: a digital platform to massively organize and empower grassroots action around the world. Currently, Lavra is programming the platform, to first create a solid product that people can believe in. Once enough of the website is up to provide project management tools, this website will be used as a proof of concept to actually get Magnova off the ground. This process involves learning how to create a business, learning how to program, learning how to publicize a grassroots project, learning about intersectional socio-economic forces, learning about economic principles and game theory, and a lot of time and energy.
Magnova's long term goal is to create a sustainable infrastructure for direct action on important issues. Karl Marx demonstrated that the value of society stems directly from the labor done by individual people, and the system of private ownership exploits and wastes much of that value to create profit—which goes directly to the owner of the business, who comes to own a business in the first place by having privileged access to capital and resources. Magnova aims to provide a place where individual people can innovate on problems together, and accumulate that knowledge into a crucible of practical guides. Where Wikipedia (apophatically) serves to inform for the sake of knowledge, Magnova serves to educate for the sake of action, for the sake of community and individual empowerment.
All for one, and one for all:
This website is a nexus. A place for people to distill generations of knowledge about how to solve problems, as well as create a public forum for innovation, where the most effective solutions are amplified and spread to all other communities facing the same problem. You must log in to edit things and cast votes.
Issues
It starts with making a list of issues: all the things that are bad in the world. You can create issues by going to the Wiki landing page, and using the "Identify a new issue" form. Then, issues are mapped semantically by users. Users can upvote and downvote the links between issues, where a link means "issue A is caused by, or is partly composed of, issue B". You can do this on the Nexus (click the menu button at the top left of the screen) by clicking load, typing in an issue name, clicking the node that shows up, clicking "add link", typing in the sub-issue, and clicking it if it shows up. Or you could go to the wiki, search for the bigger/more complex issue's page, typing in the sub-issue under "Identify sub-issue of __", and clicking it if it shows up. If the sub-issue hasn't been identified itself, you'll need to create it on the wiki page (To do: make it possible to submit a new sub-issue from this searchbar).
Connecting issues like this creates a map that lets users get from big problems like Climate Change to more specific problems, like fossil fuel overuse or deforestation, and those issues can be broken down into whatever more specific problems can be identified. To navigate down the chain of issues, use the nexus or the list of sub-issues on each issue's wiki page.
Projects
To deal with these issues, users can create project templates: community-curated manuals on how to implement a given course of action. You do this in the same place on the wiki landing that you can create an issue. You can associate projects with issues by going to the project page, finding the box that says "Link project _ to an issue", typing in the issue name, and clicking it if it shows up. Or, you could go to the issue page, find the box that says "Identify project that deals with _", typing in the project name, and clicking it if it shows up. Projects are action plans for making change in the world, such as water distribution to combat failing water infrastructure, like we saw in Flint. Projects have a list of task templates as well, which describe chunks of action that can be done, e.g. "deliver a case of water to X charity", "hand out informational pamphlets about available resources", etc. To create tasks, navigate to a project page and in the "Tasks" section, fill out the form to create a new task.
Templates vs Local
Issues, projects, and tasks are all handled as templates that can be deployed at specific places. I'm working now on a comprehensive location schema and populating a database using open datasets (OpenStreetMaps possibly). On issue and project pages, users will be able to add location specific information (whether the location is a country, state, city, or a simple point on the map). This way, a handful, or hundreds, or thousands of people can contribute to knowledge about issues and project planning, then different communities can tweak this knowledge to work for their unique needs. Users will be able to volunteer for tasks that are cloned to a location, getting credit for hours that they've put in to earn badges and increase their spot on the leaderboards for hours of labor they've contributed to the community.
Tags
Tags will be hooked up to pretty much everything, to allow for users to organize things in innovative ways and learn about new things that match their interests. Tags will also help users find content related to what they're already looking at.
Task Verification
To certify these hours, a community of verified users will act as mods. Instead of me hand-picking my favorite sycophants, this will be a self-expanding community where anybody can onboard another trustworthy individual. This is a community owned community! To orchestrate this more elegantly, I have designs for a git-like, democratic system for verified users changing rules. Imagine a web document where you can make edits, and the community can vote on each one, meaning that laws rules can be modular and adaptive to the community's specific desires for how they should run. This is something that governments could be doing For Real, and I hope for Magnova to be the first ever test of this new, direct-democratic system of lawmaking.
Social Ownership Library
Despite being taught as children to share things, the world doesn't really have any kind of infrastructure for coordinating sharing. Magnova will create it and coordinate donations to a socially owned set of stuff. Tools, resources, and produced goods will be categorized and kept track of in a digital library. Communities will be able to share the burden of acquiring tools and materials for action and commodity production. Socially owned tools make it possible to begin an economy of social profit: those who create things out of socially owned resources and tools, can walk home with what they need, and give the rest back in the library. You'll be able to check out resources and tools of increasing value as you develop your trustworthiness in the sharing economy. Tools will be things you return to the community, whereas resources are expected to be consumed. Magnova will display data on how many people are waiting on tools, resources, and commodities.
Trust
Whereupon the library is implemented, Magnova will track user's contributions to the library, community service, and what they've received. If you haven't returned tools past their return date, if you destroy the community's things, that will be transparently available information. Some people might not want to share things with you, whereas others might see your work towards feeding the hungry and not care that you kept a hammer and saw for yourself.
Production Guides for Commodities
Making things takes not just tools, but knowledge as well. Magnova will allow users to submit and edit Formulas explaining how to turn one set of resources into another using certain tools. This system will integrate with the social ownership library, so that people who want something and don't want to wait for it can just make it themselves.
Social Profit Distribution
Each member of the Magnova community will be able to add things in the library to a personal List of Needs or a List of Wants. Completing tasks that benefit the community or producing things and donating them to the library will award you hours of service. Extra commodities will be distributed to as many people as possible who have that thing on either of their lists. When there's a waiting list, distribution can be organized into three phases: first giving to people who need the thing, then to people who want it, then to anybody else in the world who isn't on Magnova. In each phase, the community will be able to decide what amount (a "quantum") of the thing each person will get before moving onto the next phase. The people who have contributed the most hours benefiting the community will be the first to receive a quantum of each thing on their list.
Harm Quantification
Another wiki-style system will be employed: Harm metrics. Issues, projects, tasks, and locations will all be able to be scored on measurable scales, creating a census of where the most meals are missed, where the water is dirtiest, where the CO2 emissions are highest... whatever you want. Like everything else, Magnova is an infrastructure for user-generated content, not a top-down assertion of what's wrong and what needs to be done.
Additional Comments
For peace of mind, know that Magnova uses SSL and passwords are not stored in plaintext. I'll be programming all the basic website stuff you know and love as things pick up, but frankly there's a lot of stuff wrong with the world and I want to just get it out there. This is a demo website on free-tier Heroku and mongoDB Atlas, so don't compare this to a AAA powerhouse just yet. Just play around with it and see if this is a project you would like to see take off :)
Calls to action:
Mess around with the site. Tell me about the bugs. Tell me what you don't understand or don't think is possible. I know it sounds crazy to say "this could solve every problem", but I've spent years studying capitalism, power, alternative economies, crowd-sourcing, decision markets, programming, ethics, neuroscience, etc. and I genuinely believe the solution to our problems is a different infrastructure. If I don't have that yet, help me mold this website into something that can help us escape our dependence on the failed model of capitalist state monopoly over action and production.
I greatly appreciate feedback, particularly that which acknowledges that the website is in WIP status.
Join my Patreon! I'm a nonbinary trans person with two cats and we need to pay rent. My dream is to just spend my life creating this platform, but I don't have the stamina for full-time this and a full-time, exploitative job. It's literally just me programming this right now.
If you know about funding I could incorporate as a nonprofit/pay my rent with, please send it my way.
Version 8 of 8 - This project was created by lavra on 7/20/2021
- Designers: lavra.
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Issues that Magnova addresses
The Magnova community says Magnova addresses the following issues. (Registered users can upvote/downvote these connections.)
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Tasks that make up this project
Viewing task:None
Completion requirements:
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- Program tasks onto Magnova
- Find Fiscal Sponsorship
- Program Locations
- Program Local Tasks
- Make Passwords Changeable
- Make Comments editable
- Make API and widget for external websites to link to Magnova pages
- Obtain Sustainable Funding
- Fix character encoding problems with some patches
- Implement Home Range
- Enable Task deletion
- Program Local Issues
- Program Local Projects
- Create Role-Based Encryption of PII
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