Federated Municipal Platforms: A core Runrig design pattern
A federated municipal platform, or FMP, is a communally owned & controlled digital platform, enabling a regional foodshed or bioregion to manage its own land, resources, and labor according to its own needs. It can host a range of free software applications & services, from dedicated food & agricultural software to generic productivity apps, all determined by a local municipality of users. As a federated platform, it can simultaneously cooperate with other community-based platforms to share resources and contribute to global solidarity efforts.
Hey everyone,
Once again, I’m getting this post out the door weeks later than I’d hoped, but this one is really important to me. It might be the most concise formulation of everything that I think makes Runrig a distinct and much-needed contribution to the technological and food sovereignty movements. Honestly, it feels like perhaps the most important thing I’ve ever written? 😬 I dunno, I probably just jinxed it with that! 🤞🏻
Federated Municipal Platforms | Runrig
A federated municipal platform, or FMP, is a communally owned & controlled digital platform, enabling a regional foodshed or bioregion to manage its own land, resources, and labor according to its own needs. It can host a range of free software applications & services, from dedicated food & agricultural software to generic productivity apps, all determined by a local municipality of users. As a federated platform, it can simultaneously cooperate with other community-based platforms to share reso...
Federated Municipal Platform. Now that’s a mouthful. As I lay out in the article, I tried to choose those 3 words carefully for their range of technical and political connotations. I also searched around as best I could for other things that abbreviate to “FMP,” and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing too salacious it can be confused with. 😳
Of course, what matters most is what an FMP does, whatever you call it. As I tried to summarize for the webpage’s description meta-tag (just in case it did’t display above):
A federated municipal platform, or FMP, is a communally owned & controlled digital platform, enabling a regional foodshed or bioregion to manage its own land, resources, and labor according to its own needs. It can host a range of free software applications & services, from dedicated food & agricultural software to generic productivity apps, all determined by a local municipality of users. As a federated platform, it can simultaneously cooperate with other community-based platforms to share resources and contribute to global solidarity efforts.
Still a word salad, I know. But the rest of the article does get down to nitty gritty details, technical architecture, and basic examples, I assure you.
In fact, the whole post is a bit of a beast. But I’ve also taken some pains to make it easy enough to skip around via the subheadings. I think the most important bits are right at the start, but feel free to jump around to the parts that pique your interest most, then cycle back for the rest. I’ve also tried to make it accessible to anyone, whether they have farming or programming expertise or neither, with some added explainers in the footnotes that might help. Still not beach reading material, but not impenetrable I hope.
Like I said, this one is very special to me, so I would be especially grateful for any kind and constructive feedback, plus shares on your social network of choice, if your so inclined. By the time this goes out, I’ll have posts from Runrig’s Bluesky / Mastodon accounts that you can reskeet / retoot. And while I’m at it, let me remind you there’s an RSS feed, too, if you’d prefer that to this newsletter.
Thanks, all, for your continued support! 🙏🏻