Imperfect Internet

"Imperfect Internet" is a movement towards creating digital services on village scale. It's an attempt to reclaim the means of communication to be designed on the level of the community of it's users, i.e. the village.

For this purpose, East of Moon has developed our Missions.dev software into framework for creating collaborative platforms. Unlike most such solutions, the unit of organisation it’s designed for is not a formal company, but a community, or a set of connected individuals who share common challenges, aspirations and goals, while not necessarily working formally together.

The platform is used in this capacity as the daily-driver of hafnar.haus, a community of almost 300 artists, innovators and activists who share a workspace in downtown Reykjavík, but has also been used by rural villages to connect around shared challenges, as well as networks of creatives with a common purpose across the world. It incorporates features and design that encourage horizontal sharing and collaboration which have helped to support and encourage co-creation between individuals. 

Why do we need new tools?

The majority of existing collaboration software largely focuses on efficiency, productivity, business management, and personal organisation. In contrast, missions.dev utilises features that facilitate collaborative interactions between members of communities.

For example, instead of delegating tasks, you can add a challenge, an idea, or a description of a project you are working on, and receive structured feedback utilising tested methods of cocreation and design, such as de Bono’s six thinking hats. The platform allows you to visualise your own contibutions on a hexagonal type canvas that shows your ideation in context of a tapestry of other community efforts.

Currently, many communities organise themselves via general communications channels such as Facebook groups or Whatsapp chat. These channels give the communities no agency or creative decision making in how to structure the communication between them, often descending into unproductive noise. Worse, often these platforms use dark patterns for engagement farming, structuring the means of communication with an agenda that isn’t aligned with their users themselves.

Reclaiming communication at the level of communities

Missions.dev is not attempting to be a general communication tool or community platform. Rather, it is a tool to organise creative work between groups of people who are not formally members of the same organisation, but connected as a community.

We want to explore the viability of “imperfect internet”—that is to say, the type of digital spaces that requires the constant active design and development of the user to work, and to explore the viability of “digital services on village scale”.

Watch East of Moon present a case for "imperfect internet" below: