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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.

Clansurf began with a simple observation. Most streets already have someone who sells milk, someone who sells eggs, a tailor, a carpenter. People nearby often don’t know they’re there, and they shouldn’t need an app with a server in another country to find them. The street use case and the working paper cover that first idea. A small group on one street uses radios it owns, and keeps working when the internet doesn’t.

Since then the idea has grown. It isn’t only about streets now. It’s about people and the tech they own coming together to meet everyday needs, like food, clothing, repairs or computing, wherever those people are.

We’re deciding how to organise all of this, and we’re doing it in the open. These docs are where we write it down.

Who these pages are for

They’re for contributors, wherever you live. You might know about co-operatives, community radio, open-source projects or village councils, or you might have run something like this yourself. If you’d like to help us think it through, start here.

Please read this as a draft

We haven’t finished any of this. We’d rather share our thinking early and get it wrong in public than polish it alone. Each page shows the date it last changed.

Some things we’re fairly sure about:

• There are three kinds of people in Clansurf: makers, supporters and maintainers.
• Each group (we call it a node) makes its own decisions. Nobody outside can overrule them.
• There will be a body for the whole network that looks after the shared principles, but it won’t run the nodes.
• “Local” means the people own the tech themselves. It doesn’t have to mean they live close together.

Everything else is still open, and the open questions page lists it.

What’s here

• How Clansurf works covers the three roles, the two kinds of node, how someone joins, and what the network body does.
• Open questions lists what we haven’t decided yet, with a note on each about where to look.
• How to contribute is the practical part: writing to us, and sending your work back.
• Help start one of the first 25 nodes if you would rather take part in a node than research one.

How this fits with the paper

The working paper is long. It makes the case for nodes on a street. It covers the radio rules in each country, how the records work without internet, and what happens in a blackout. These docs are shorter, and they’ll change more often. When we’ve researched something well here, it can go into the next version of the paper.