2026-07-09 –, Decentralized Hardware @ Hackers Lab
This hands-on technical workshop walks through the architecture of the Farm Hack Box — a Raspberry Pi 5 with 1 TB of NVMe storage, drawing 27 watts on a 50-watt solar panel, hosting approximately thirty services and over a million records, federating with peer boxes through a Tailscale tailnet, a Forgejo git server, an experimental Holochain layer, and a content-addressed Concordance card registry — and shows in operation how each layer of the stack maps to a specific DWeb Principle: Human Agency, Distributed Benefits, Mutual Respect, Humanity, and Ecological Awareness. The workshop is the technical companion to the political and institutional framings of the same infrastructure, and is calibrated for DWeb participants who want to see the protocols compose in service of a real working community before the abstractions appear.
Agricultural knowledge systems face a structural crisis of governance at least as much as a technical one. The GIAA Infrastructure Working Group's April 2026 working paper Commons-Enabling Infrastructure for Agroecological Knowledge identifies four failure modes characterizing existing agricultural data infrastructure, each with both a technical and a governance dimension: vendor lock-in (proprietary schemas, closed APIs, no community recourse when terms change unilaterally); cloud dependency (all compute requires connectivity; control concentrated in distant data centers legally subject to CLOUD Act jurisdiction); centralization (single authoritative database; single point of governance failure; power concentration by corpus weight); and consent opacity (data use in fine print; community cannot enforce consent because it is not machine-readable). Each of these failure modes is also recognizable to DWeb developers working on every other domain of distributed infrastructure. The Farm Hack Box is one working answer to all four.
This session is a technical workshop, not a presentation. Two physical Boxes will be on the table — The projector shows whichever screen is being driven. Participants handle the running hardware, query the local database, watch a signed peer query commit across the tailnet, watch a Concordance card propagate with consent metadata intact, and leave with the configuration files and Git repositories needed to clone the setup onto their own Raspberry Pi 5.
The hardware specification, briefly. Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 to 16 GB of RAM. 1 TB NVMe SSD over PCIe. 27 watts nominal — solar-deployable on a single 50-watt panel. Ubuntu 24 LTS or Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit, hardened, with auto-update and systemd service management. Ethernet plus WiFi plus a Tailscale VPN mesh for federation. LAN-first; internet optional; sneaker-net USB sync as a fallback for places where bandwidth is unreliable. Total cost: USD $200–450 fully assembled, all open hardware with no proprietary components. This is the physical substrate. Everything that follows runs on it.
The software stack, mapped to the failure modes it addresses. PostgreSQL with PostGIS for the relational store and spatial queries — under PostgreSQL's permissive license, with no vendor lock-in. farmOS for field-level provenance hub work (GPL v2). Forgejo for version control and federation (GPL v3, governed by Codeberg e.V. as a German nonprofit — explicitly named the workshop's ETA Top Pick for governance, not just for code). Holochain for peer-to-peer federation with chain-of-custody and no central broker (Apache 2 plus CAL). Ollama plus Llama 3 for on-device AI inference (MIT). Whisper for on-device speech-to-text (MIT). The Farm Hack POS for community-currency-aware commerce (AGPL v3). A Commons Lending Library for books, seeds, and tools with provenance chains (AGPL v3). Tailscale or WireGuard for the zero-config VPN with NAT traversal and sneaker-net fallback. Every layer of the stack is auditable, modifiable, and forkable. No proprietary dependency, anywhere.
The federation protocol, the part DWeb developers care most about. Four design constraints. Intermittent connectivity — nodes function fully offline and sync opportunistically. Asymmetric corpora — the Honey Bee Network's one-million-plus records must not dominate smaller networks by weight; the federation enforces proportional, thematic contribution rather than naive full-corpus merge. Consent enforcement at query time — the rules travel with the data, not only in paper agreements. No central broker — no single node is authoritative; the federation is Byzantine fault-tolerant. The catalog manifest is broadcast every six hours at approximately 50 KB per 500-item node, with full records fetched on-demand only, keeping bandwidth below 1 MB per day on a typical rural cellular link. For higher-stakes coordination — seed provenance chains, tool custody, community currency, multi-party signing — the federation uses Holochain's agent-centric DHT, with each node holding its own cryptographically signed source chain. The workshop demonstrates each of these mechanisms in operation, in front of the audience.
The Ethical Technology Assessment as the governance layer of the stack. The ETA is not an external audit. It is built into the infrastructure's own operating cadence. Every tool, dataset, software component, and seed lot in the federation carries an ETA record. Five assessment modes — Hardware, Software (each with four binary gates plus four scored categories), Dataset/DTAP (six trust dimensions: consent, provenance, access, machine-readability, longitudinal integrity, governance), Guardian Connector for Indigenous data sovereignty (four pillars aligned with the CARE Principles), and Seeds/Germplasm (four pillars derived from the Wheat Workers' Code of Ethics and CARE). Three confidence tiers (Provisional / Peer-reviewed / Audited) with structural decay over time. Claim-level annotation with structured dispute resolution. The workshop walks through the ETA in operation — a tool scored live, a dispute opened, a resolution committed to the Git repository.
Mapping the stack to the DWeb Principles, explicitly. Human Agency — self-hosting, data sovereignty, full-stack open source, multiple technical means rather than a single technical solution as the animating design rule. Distributed Benefits — the federation is designed structurally to prevent any single network from dominating by weight; ETA scoring surfaces where value flows. Mutual Respect — transparent governance through Git-native publishing, versioned decisions, visible source-organization attribution, claim-level evidence threading. Humanity — consent-first data flows, multilingual accessibility, centering marginalized knowledge holders in both the data corpus and the tool design. Ecological Awareness — the 27-watt operating envelope, solar-ready deployment, sneaker-net updates where bandwidth is scarce, the deliberate refusal to add cloud-mediated rounds-trips that the local hardware can handle directly.
This is what commons-enabling infrastructure looks like when it is actually built and actually running. The workshop is the chance to see it operate in front of you, to handle the hardware, to ask the architectural questions, and to leave with what you need to fork it for your own community.
KEY SPEAKERS
Dorn Cox — OpenTEAM · Farm Hack · GIAA Infrastructure Working Group · Tuckaway Farm. Convener of the GIAA Infrastructure Working Group; lead on the Farm Hack Box reference implementation; co-author of WP1. (Drives the projector; runs the live demonstration; technical narration.)
SJ Klein — Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society · Agricultural Knowledge Concordance · Code for Science & Society (CS&S) · Wikimedia · Internet Archive · AI Commons House. (Knowledge-commons and method layer; Internet-in-a-Box and open-knowledge lineage.)
Richard Ng — Commons Governance and Ownership Working Group · co-architect with IndigiDAO, New Mexico Community Capital, and the 11th Hour Foundation. (Trust architecture; consent metadata; role-account governance.)
This is a Joint proposal - but happy to provide my Bio in addition to those of the other participants. - Dorn Cox is a Farmer, Author and Researcher and the editor of the Talk to the... Handbook and has been a steward of Farm Hack and the OpenTEAM federated infrastructure for nearly a decade. He convenes the GIAA Infrastructure Working Group and is the primary practitioner refining the question-design discipline that the tool implements.
Anamika Dey (Honey Bee Network / SRISTI / GIAN) has spent more than a decade documenting and stewarding the Indian grassroots innovation archive — over a million records across three federated databases, with a working multilingual AI agent in production. Caroline (Schola Campesina) carries the European agroecology and CSIPM coordination thread. David Otieno (Kenyan Peasant League) provides the ground-truth demonstration of how a sovereign database is actually used at the mobile-phone ceiling of accessibility.
SJ Klein leads the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance at Code for Science & Society (CS&S), and active in the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, with thought-partner networks across Wikimedia, Internet Archive, Code for Science & Society (CS&S), and the AI Commons House. SJ's background in mass-scale community-edited knowledge infrastructure — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the broader open-knowledge tradition — is the discipline the AKC adapts from millions-of-contributors editing patterns to deep-interview stewardship patterns. Wikipedia is what happens when a community owns its own editorial discipline at scale; the AKC and the tool that supports it are what happens when that ownership extends from the textual content to the knowledge-mapping practice itself.
- Grounded: How Networks that support Grassroots Innovation Share Knowledge ~ A Reality Check
- Federating Tools, Data, and Knowledge Across Grassroots Innovation Networks — In Practice
- Five Minutes on the Ethical Technology Assessment (ETA) — A Community-Owned Living Scoring Assessment for Tools, Datasets, seeds and software