permaculture

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> Your email and internet service don't have to be the
> same.  If yahoo and gmail email services scare you as
> well, then I have an option still.  Each of us would
> still have to pay for service to "connect" to the
> internet, or ISP.  However, I asked the permaculture
> community for their support in the past for a web site
> "hosting" cooperative.

This is the sort of solution that seems most permaculturish to me.

By contracting directly with an infrastructure provider and leveraging 
our own techno-permie guild(s) we bypass as much as currently possible 
of corporate control.

In keeping with the permaculture theme of sharing surplus, of course all 
software would be open-source.  :-)

A colleague and I already have a small-scale personalized hosting and 
development operation.  Our infrastructure is provided by John Companies

http://www.johncompanies.com/

...which is a colocation/hosting service in the same vein as the Layered 
Technologies example that Sean gives.
We are using one of their virtual private server packages at present, 
which is quite reasonable cost-wise.
My colleague, who is sysadmin, has complete root control of the virtual 
server and can provide any platforms(s) and service(s) desired (within 
the limits of the underlying system of course).
We've got a handful of clients for whom we provide web hosting and 
development, secure IMAP e-mail with secure web client access, and 
e-mail lists.

I am certainly willing to promote the creation of this sort of 
enterprise and/or be employed on the tech side of it.

Meanwhile, for a quick and relatively cheap solution to having "real" 
(instead of just web-based like Yahoo! etc.) and (most likely) 
uncensored mail you can get a $9.95/month account with a low-cost ISP 
such as flex.com (my ISP, rock-solid for me FWIW) - use their mail 
services for your actual mail account while continuing to use your 
existing high-speed connection.

cheers,
John S.

--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net