Clansurf

Where people and local tech meet everyday human needs.

Clansurf helps a community run itself as a node. A node is a group of people who help each other and make their own rules. Everyone contributes in their own way, and the rules stop anyone from abusing it. It works with tech people own themselves, for everyday needs like food, clothing, repairs and computing.

See how it fits together Read the docs
Who’s in it
Makers, supporters and maintainers
A node
A street, or people spread across countries
Local means
Owned by the people who use it
Status
Beta. The first 25 nodes are starting now.

What local means

Local means owned, not nearby.

A street where the neighbours run their own radios is local. So is someone in Norway who runs their own server, or their own AI, and uses it to help someone in Mauritius. They’re thousands of kilometres apart, but they own the tech. Nobody rents it from a platform that can change the rules or switch it off.

So there are two kinds of node: one tied to a place, and one tied to what people own.

A place node. People who live near each other, on radios they own.

A reach node. People linked by what they own and can offer, wherever they live. We’re still shaping this one.

How it works

Every node decides for itself.

A node is a group of people working together. It makes its own decisions: who joins, who leaves, its own rules and what it offers. Nobody outside can overrule them, Clansurf included.

Many nodes, one network body. The body sends the shared principles down, and maintainers send their research back up.

  1. Makers

    The people who make or provide what others need. The egg seller, the tailor, the carpenter, the person running a server.

  2. Supporters

    The people who use what makers offer, share it with others and help keep the node going.

  3. Maintainers

    The people who make sure the node works and keeps to its principles. They help people join and become easy to find, keep notes on what works and what breaks, and train the next maintainer.

    Joining a node takes a yes from one of each: a maker, a supporter and a maintainer. Then the node’s members vote. The people who approve you can’t be your relatives, and a maker can’t approve someone in their own trade.

The network body is small on purpose. It can’t overrule a node, and it doesn’t run one. The details are in the docs.

Use cases

The first one: a single street.

Most streets have someone selling eggs, someone who sews, someone who fixes things. The people fifty metres away often don’t know. A node on the street makes them findable, on radios the neighbours own, and it keeps working when the internet doesn’t.

See the street use case Read the working paper ↗
MILKEGGSVEGETABLESWATERTAILORCARPENTERREPAIRS
A street with its own node: the radio on the tallest roof reaches every stall below.

Vision

Shaping humanity to serve, to be better and to be productive, for good reasons.

  1. People help each other.Neighbours find the people who can help them, without asking a platform first.
  2. The record of what people do is honest.Everyone keeps the credit for what they contribute, and nobody can quietly change the record.
  3. Nobody can abuse it.Each node writes its own rules, and those rules stop any one person or group from taking over.

25 or more nodes of different kinds, anywhere in the world.

We build each one with the people who will run it. The first 25 are starting now. Help start one.

Local AI agents that work for the node, not the other way round.

Keeping a record current is real clerical work, and it falls on the maintainers. Agents running on the node’s own hardware can take that on. They never decide anything.

The agent
Keeps the record tidy, maps who makes what, and notices when a maker has gone quiet for three weeks
The people
Decide what that means and what happens next

Work with us

Help us shape Clansurf.

We're shaping Clansurf in the open. There are two ways in.