Abbondanza is developed and maintained by the Red Shoe Collective, a member-managed, decentralised, autonomous, democratic, cooporative organisation.
A fundemental problem with Internet services is that as the number of users grows, the amount of infrastructure required to support it grows. One or two people may be able to host something that has hundreds or even thousands of users, but when that grows to millions or billions, the hosting and networking costs grow exponentially. Somehow you have to find a way to pay for that and that almost always pushes people into ad-based models which, inevitably, makes everything that was cool about what you built awful. In order to monotise, the users become the product.
Abbondanza offers an alternative.
Services and systems built on top of Abbondanza grow in capacity as more people use them. You still have to find ways to deal with software complexity, but that grows much more slowly than the network so the costs associated remain much more managable, and / ideally things can be developed and maintained using a community-based model supplemented by mutual aid from participants who are willing and able to support that.
All Abbondanza users are members of the Red Shoe Collective with explicit social contracts between them and a community-based philosophy-of-justice informed system for transparently adjudicating disputes with juries and an appeal process. Members are free at any time to enter or exit contracts to maximise indivual autonomy.
Contrats grant rights and privleges in exchange for agreeing to things like a code of conduct.
The Red Shoe Collective's governence is based on this system which allows the collective to grow organically while ensuring that there are real but fair consequences for things like being a douchebag to other members.
In order to save members from worrying about the day-to-day details, indivuals can nominate and select subject matter / domain experts to act as representative proxies through sortition ( random selection ) to enter or exit agreements for them, but with the ability to override those agreements at any time effectively allowing no-confidence removal and replacement of representatives.
In this way, we allow for a concensus-based direct democratic process with representatives to deal with the details rather than forcing indivuals to be bogged down in every decision.
Abbondanza is designed to allow spontaneous fission and fusion of autonomous groups within the Red Shoe Collective sharing resources and effort much as organizations and committees would.
These groups can be cross-cutting and overlapping and they can grow and shrink as required to satsify specific purposes while preventing entrenchment of power and explicitly avoiding concentration of wealth.
Where facilitation is required, indivual roles are selected by sortition with the option of removal through no-confidence votes.
The initial Red Shoe Collective base social contract [ ~ Constitution ] is coming soon as well as additional information about Abbondanza and a reference implementation.
At first we will use other tools to host code and documents, but our roadmap [ also coming soon ] includes moving hosting of everything into Abbondanza, itself.