It's been a while since I've posted a general update on Runrig. There are more details below on what's been going on with the project lately, but I also want to take this opportunity to address how I'll be shifting focus a bit going forward.

In brief, I've updated the Runrig Journal to accommodate a more consistent publication schedule for general articles, technical reports, and even the occasional long-form essay. I'll be starting off on a biweekly schedule, posting something new here on the website and sending it out in the newsletter. I've also set up RSS, Atom & JSON feeds you can subscribe to; I took an ad hoc, "roll-your-own" approach to those feeds, so hopefully they all work! 🤞🏻

As a sample of the kind of material I intend to publish in the future, you can take a look at the essay I published last spring titled "Hedgerows in the Sky" or the documents I'm in the process of releasing as part of an ongoing consultation with the Farm Flow app created by Fitzgerald Organics.

What's Been Going On

Eighteen months ago, I laid out a rather elaborate roadmap for what I saw as the best path forward for Runrig in 2024. I felt it was time to narrow my focus on creating reference implementations that would showcase some of the untried strategies behind Runrig – to show rather than merely tell. This would be Phase-Zero in what I considered a Three-Phase Organizing Model. Though I specifically did not intend to pursue sponsorships or funding for that work, I saw it as the basis of an eventual business model for a tech-workers' cooperative.

Of course, putting such meticulous care into any sort of plan practically guarantees the universe will swat it down. That is more or less what happened when I was asked to consult on Farm Flow. In many ways, it was the kind of project I'd have loved to take on in Phase Two, where I envisioned Runrig becoming a sort of "One-stop Platform Co-op Shop." By that I meant that we – and by then, it would surely have to be "we" and not just "I" – could be hired by farming communities or food cooperatives to setup service platforms customized for their region, so they retained full ownership and control while paying a small fee for managed hosting and light sysadmin work. Farm Flow wasn't a perfect 1-to-1 match for that sort of platform, but the more I learned the more I felt it could truly benefit by adapting some of those principles to its development. It seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, to put some theory into practice and see how it measured up.

I've had the good fortune to participate in a few other projects and events over the past year, each working to shape, challenge, and reconfigure my conception of Runrig from what I first sketched out roughly two years ago. Part of my intention with this reorganization of the website is to make The Runrig Plan more of a "living document" once again by enabling a more flexible publication format.

Around this time last spring, I was putting the finishing touches on a 6-month labor of love, which I titled "Hedgerows in the Sky" and published quietly here on the Runrig site, as well as on Commonplace in abridged form. What started off as a belated reflection on the 2022 Gathering for Agricultural Technology (GOAT) had snowballed into a longer rumination on the relationship between agriculture and technology, enclosure and the commons, plus a bit of 18th century English folk poetry. You might call it an intellectual memoir of my own haphazard education in political economy, exploring such unwieldy concepts like usufruct and alienation; then combine that with a little amateur historiography, tracing the various ways the commons – both as a metaphor and as a practice – has shaped food and tech movements in North America since the end of the Cold War. I kept meaning to send a short newsletter regarding the essay, which never happened, but I was (and still am) quite pleased with how it turned out.

Later in August 2024, I carried those same ideas to DWeb Camp in Navarro, CA, taking the main themes from "Hedgerows" as the point of departure for a panel discussion on appropriate technologies and non-extractive forms of sharing knowledge. As someone who rarely travels beyond the Northeastern U.S., the culture shock of Silicon Valley was acute, even in that remote park 2 hours north of the Bay, surrounded by tall redwoods and crunchy decentralized techno-hippies. But I mainly stuck to the "Cultivation Station," a square canopy that housed no more tha 40 people and where the agenda centered on food, ecology, free software, and tech justice. Under that tent in those short few days, I was quite gratified to meet a brilliant cohort of engineers, designers, and activists. Joining me on the panel were two familiar faces from my previous work with OpenTEAM and farmOS, Dr. Ankita Raturi from Purdue University's Axilab and Tibet Sprague from Hylo; there were also two new faces, Rudo Kemper, Program Director for Conservation Metrics and Nadia Coelho Pontes, Co-founder of Tekopora in Brazil, who I was very pleased to meet for the first time on that panel. Really, everyone there was doing such phenomenal work; I hope I have a chance to reconnect with them all again and perhaps write a bit about their projects. There was also some vigorous debate around funding models for free & open source software. I'm never short of opinions on that particular subject, so in the weeks after the conference I was compelled to draw some comparisons between Runrig's approach and other proposed methods; I want to rework those slides, too, into something better suited for a general audience.

On Deck

I'm still processing so much of what I've learned and experienced over the last year, between Farm Flow, DWeb, my continuing involvement with GOAT and farmOS, and so forth. Those experiences have certainly left their mark on how I think about Runrig today and I've tried to express their implications in various places. I've committed a great deal of space in my personal journal, but also scattered about in various GitHub repositories, in emails with colleagues, in shared documents and slide presentations. Much of that material material is now enqueued for the Runrig Journal. As a little teaser, here's my working list of provisional titles:

1. Runrig in 2025 [the present article]
2. Scaling & Abstraction
3. Three Layers of Autonomy
4. Federated Autonomous Municipal Platforms
5. Intro to Runrig farmOS
6. Surmounting Local Maxima in the Fitness Landscape
7. Data Independence
8. Illegible Agriculture

In addition, I'll be adding more information to the Farm Flow project profile and creating similar profiles for Runrig farmOS and the MAIA Project. Further on the horizon I still intend to return to parts 2 & 3 of "Hedgerows" and a couple more ambitious concepts I've been mulling on, like "The Semiotics of Data" and "Socially Necessary Computation Time." So all you theory-nerds, stay tuned!

The Future of Runrig

In the course of developing these projects I've learned that perhaps the greatest challenge to realizing Runrig's full potential may lie in communicating its fundamental principles and methodology. From the very start, I've tried to downplay Runrig as any particular technology stack or software application, and instead emphasize the elements I hope can serve as a template for a very different mode of producing technology, regardless the final shape it takes. In other words, Runrig is meant to be more of a social technology than a digital technology, and so more analogous to the way Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) functions as a manner of developing, say, the Linux kernel, rather than an analog to Linux itself. However, Runrig would go beyond free software principles, which I still view to be positively essential to producing good, ethical technology, but which I see as hampered by a narrowly liberal conception of freedom that only considers the individual. Runrig would strive to socialize the project for software freedom. As a radical new design methodology, you might compare Runrig to the Agile Manifesto or Lean Software Development, but diametrically opposed to those paradigms' deeply embedded, capitalistic assumptions about market-driven economics and infinite growth – or what technologists are so fond of calling scalability. Runrig would instead be an explicitly socialist methodology for distributing computational power, control, and ownership based on communalist principles.

The establishment of such a practice cannot be achieved merely through the implementation of one or another software program. As a social project, it first requires a quorum of participants and consensus on a shared set of values, and so those principles must be clearly stated, attested to, and argued for. I fully intend to continue developing software libraries and applications as a central part of this project, but I see their importance as secondary to the methods used to produce them. For those methods to have any meaningful impact, they must be communicated effectively, along with the rationale for employing them in the first place. If Runrig endures long enough to leave any sort of legacy behind, I'd like it to be the documentation of that methodology and the exposition of those principles. That will be the primary task of the Runrig Journal in the weeks ahead.

I still hope for Runrig to support a workers' cooperative in the future, too, so I'm always eager to speak with any other designers, engineers, or food workers who wish to contribute to the implementation and deployment of these kinds of services. Nothing would make me happier than to earn my livelihood with like-minded coworker-owners doing exactly that, maybe even something not too dissimilar from the kind of co-op I described in the roadmap a year and a half ago. At the same time, I've never assumed that it's Runrig's ultimate fate to become a going concern. With that in mind, I will be looking for ways to put Runrig into practice in my own community of New York City and the Hudson Valley region, ideally through mutual aid projects that I can benefit from directly, even if it's not in the form of a paycheck. So I doubly encourage anyone with an interest who also lives in the area to reach out as well. Of course, if you're someone who wants to support Runrig other ways, even if it's not as a dedicated co-op member or as someone in the Northeastern U.S., I'm sure not going to turn down help. And please forward this along to others who might like to get involved. Once I get the details for Runrig farmOS organized on the site, I may look into ways of enabling sponsorship of specific projects as some form of crowdfunding initiative. In any event, if you've read this far and I've piqued your interest somehow, then by all means, please, don't be a stranger!