Seeding and growing #Commons is a collective effort 🤝

Do you represent a funder or organization who could benefit from sovereign data & AI infrastructure? Perhaps you're ready to become the first seeders for a thriving epistemic Commons. If so, we want to hear from you!

9/9 🙏 Huge thanks to our partners @sdi_net, CODOHSAPA, FEDURP, Shack Dwellers Int'l Kenya, and Muungano wa Wanavijiji for co-developing this vision.

We're thrilled to be building community-governed technology ecosystems that strengthen rather than undermine self-determination.

8/9 Another e.g: "Our savings group has money but we're still in shacks. How do we move to building real houses?"

KYCA: "Namibian women's groups allocated 30% for community assets. See Nangolo's methodology used by 400+ groups."

7/9 🏠 E.g: "Governmt. says our house is illegal, eviction notice with 10 days. We lived here 50 years! What did other waterfront communities do?"

KYCA: "Makoko communities documented residence history, created legal settlement maps accepted by Lagos State. See <legal template>"

6/9 🛡️ KYCA operates over decentralised networks without central servers controlled by 3rd-parties. It can't be shut down or privatized. Each community maintains its own node and defines access rules.

Communities decide what knowledge is shared, with whom, and under what terms.

5/9 📱 A mother in Nairobi asks through messaging: "How did other settlements solve blocked drainage in hilly terrain?"

She gets tailored solutions from peer experiences across the SDI network, translated into her language, contextualized for her conditions.

4/9 💡 KYCA creates "Living Libraries"—community knowledge bases that blend structured data with "warm data" (oral histories, images, voice notes) using AI to enable dynamic peer learning.

Think: community-controlled, multilingual knowledge networks.

3/9💡 The challenge: A savings group in Lagos develops flood management while communities in Dhaka face identical problems without access to proven solutions.

Communities keep "reinventing the wheel" when peer knowledge could accelerate local problem-solving.

📸 : A.S Elijah (@as_elijah)

2/9 🏘️ For 28 years, @sdi_net has connected 5,000+ settlements across 18 countries. Communities constantly innovate solutions—but these innovations rarely spread beyond their origins.

Know Your City Academy (KYCA) changes that.

8/ P.s. Our Beta version is going live soon. If your work depends on trust, context, and collective wisdom, then we invite you to join our Beta Network to help shape the direction of data & AI services for communities:
tally.so/r/mKZ6bD

7/ 🙏 Huge gratitude to Sam and Anita for contributing this writeup. Check out their newsletter for more hAppenings in the P2P, data sovereignty and Holochain community.

6/ ..
• Local AI agents that evolve with your group’s values, wisdom and purpose
• Knowledge Graphs that allow diverse worldviews to coexist without flattening
• Real-world pilots: from youth-led climate work in Nairobi to global urban 'learning' networks

5/ 🌀 What’s inside:
• How “safe answers” let you derive insights from private/sensitive data–without revealing the original data!
• “Handshakes”: peer-to-peer data sharing agreements that open collaboration while safeguarding community autonomy
..

4/ As Ché Coelho puts it, “As our lives become increasingly shaped by computational systems, it is vital to ask who owns and stewards the epistemic infrastructure guiding our understanding of the world..”

3/ The P2P Data Commons is an invitation for communities to steward the infrastructure for intelligence. Think: bioregional groups stewarding watershed data, youth in Nairobi mapping flood patterns, local AI agents that learn and encode your values—not Silicon Valley’s.

2/ “AI is too important, too transformational, to be anything other than a public commons.”

We couldn’t agree more—and we’re thrilled to share this bold write-up from the 'What’s hAppening' Substack on our P2P Data Commons project.

3/ We'll be posting more on previous work and current projects from narrative-led systems change, to data commons to cooperative AI ecosystems.

Follow and engage with us here or on LinkedIn, or feel free to reach us via the email address on our website 🌿

2/ We're excited to be sharing the launch of our website— designed by our talented friends Simone Naude (UI/UX designer) and Cara Eyre (creative designer @ Octopi social design studio) in close collaboration with our team.

Have a gander:
arkology.studio