Bonfire | Ivan Minutillo
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Detailed Description
Bonfire is an open source toolkit for federated digital spaces. We at Bonfire, are on a quest to create meaningful tools that equip groups to manage, self-govern, and shape their own digital social infrastructures, freed from private interests and dopamine addictions patterns.
Project Details
- Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?
We co-design and iterate new features directly on our playground instance ( https://campground.bonfire.cafe) with our community (see as an example: https://campground.bonfire.cafe/post/01H39EJQ8B0SC7BQHDP40TJ0C3#comment-01H3XXNQP1K9R243FSAKDVMYVR) and we engaged in several user research sessions ( https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/user_research/). We also discuss roadmap, bugs, improvements and any new idea in the open on campground. Currently we are drafting several case studies with specific communities that are interested in adopting bonfire, to prioritze features development ( https://notes.zo.team/niboe-use-case ) .
- Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?
Bonfire aims to be a social network tailored for specific community needs. Rather than developing generalistic user experience, we plan to build different flavours of bonfire for different case studies, to unlock the immense powers that relies in online communities, repressed by mainstream social media corporations.
- Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?
All our code is released open source (AGPL3.0). Bonfire adopts a highly modular architecture (https://bonfirenetworks.org/docs/architecture/), where each features (both the backend and the frontend) is packaged in separated extensions that can be enabled or disabled by developers and admins. We invite designers and developers to fork our libraries or build new ones, in order to add specific features or modify the user experience of exisiting ones. We acknowledge that design and development are subjective processes and there's no 'one-size-fits-all' solution, hence any time we can, we develop features that include a default behaviour and several alternatives that can be enabled in the user preferences setting panel.
- Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?
We deeply believe that social network must be a common good for societies to use and customise at their own desire and according to their specific needs and visions. A social network should not be controlled by a single entity nor centralised. We believe those are the minimal requirements for a social network in order to become a powerful tool for change. In Bonfire, we are holding conversation with Sociocracy for All foundation and other interested actors in the fediverse space, to design a governance that can include all the voices in the decision process.
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