Ethics and Philosophy

Wiki ▸ Ethics and Philosophy

Buoy is a deeply politically motivated project rooted in specific ethical principles and philosophical beliefs. These greatly influence both what we work on and how we work on it.

What we mean by "community-based"

Buoy is a community-based crisis response system. By community-based, we mean several things:

• Separate communities can have their own, independent "Buoys," without needing to know about one another.
• Individual community members can use more than one Buoy, depending on their desires or needs.
• In order to be effective, Buoy relies on groups of people who are willing and able to self-organize their own social network to provide crisis response and survivor support services themselves, separate from (or as a supplement to) corporate, governmental, academic, or non-profit institutions.

This model is radically different from the mass social media model of apps today.

💡 The only grocery store in the whole world

Imagine for a moment if there was only one grocery store on the whole planet. Everyone knows where to go to get food, because there is only one possible place on the planet to get it. This makes answering the question, "Where can I get dinner?" easy because, obviously, there is only one possible answer. But the problems with this model are immediately obvious. What if I live far away from the food store? If the food store owner does not like me, will he sell me food? Not only is this clearly a bad way of providing access to food for anyone who is not near the store (which would be most people on the planet), it also inherently creates a terrifyingly dystopian reality in which a small number of people have a huge amount of power and control over a much larger number of people. This model is called a centralized architecture because it centralizes power and control into the hands of a few people. Technologists sometimes call this a "SaaS" or "Software as a Service" architecture, and it is a way of building software tools designed to take people's freedom from them.

An alternative to this is, of course, to grow one's own food and then share extra food one grows with friends and neighbors. By growing and sharing food themselves, people far away from the grocery store no longer need to rely on other people for access to food. They can make their own choices about what to grow and, therefor, what to eat. And most importantly, they will gain the freedom to never need to buy food from someone else again. This is called a decentralized architecture because there is no central authority from which one must receive approval before one can act autonomously in one's own community.

That's where Buoy gets its name. Rather than put just one buoy on the vast ocean of the Internet, it makes more sense to put as many buoys as possible in as many places on the ocean as possible. To do otherwise would just be silly.

• In a centralized model, one big company controls the tool. (Think Facebook.) In order to talk to your friends, you first have to talk to the company (Facebook) and ask them to relay your message to your friend. This happens so fast and automatically that you may not know it is happening, but it is. And this architecture means that you are only able to reach your friends if the people at the company choose to allow you the privilege of doing so.
• In the decentralized model Buoy uses, rather than providing a single, large intermediary through which all information flows, you can choose from one of many intermediaries based on whatever criteria you like. You can also become one of these intermediaries yourself, which is by definition infeasible for most people in other models.