Features

Bivouac Wiki is open source software that you can self host. Ornithopter is the SaaS platform for easily configuring, migrating, and recovering bivouac instances.

Modes:

• Personal: contribute/curate as an individual
• Movement: mostly aligned, isolated-ish groups (e.g. didn’t peer with threads)
• Deliberative: civil discussion, mixing grounds (e.g., did peer with threads)

This page has a bunch of nerd words. If you’re interested in /even more/ nerd words, the bivouac specification is at bivouac.wiki.

Or, maybe you’d just like to give it a spin? app.ornithopter.me - video tutorials are planned, too!

Bivouac Wiki: Healthy Collective Decisions Across Computers

Bivouac Wiki is a novel governance sandbox, meant for democratizing decisions.

Bivouac decisions function without a block chain.

• network graph
  • web-of-trust trust-on-first-use petnames and fediverse bridged identities, simplified key provenance
  • non-global namespace (unlike DNS, instead names have meaning based on your friends)
  • non-DAO, non-blockchain, non-web3 governance (no gross cryptobros)
• collaboration
  • federated tag curation, distributed forkable wikis (you don’t need an account on a remote instance to participate)
  • configurable per-topic delegation, liquid democracy
  • membership verification (e.g., opencollective, SSO,)
  • relationship based access control, configurable karma/sandboxing, roles
• governance
  • several voting algorithms & decision types (approval, score, ranked, STV, consensus, multi-member)
  • decision state machines and result event buses
• hosting
  • mirrored/seeded sites (simplified migration, wikis and groups span servers)
  • static file based - ornithopter generates files to serve via HTTP (webmention requires access to logs)
  • ActivityPub federation mode does require a running server
  • localhost single-user mode or multi-user email-signups mode
  • onion and clearnet based petnames, activitypub federation
  • RSS & Torrent-like, last write wins
  • unified diff and/or CRDTs for later
• single golang binary
  • storage is SQLite for private data, XML for synced data
  • server side functionality, dead simple, basic & lightweight.
  • rendered static HTML
• Cryptography: Minisign & Age
  • vote is plaintext to instance admins (or those who you delegate a vote, or those counting votes). Not a PHD thesis double-spend preventing private e-voting system.
  • editor has access to your keys. self host an editor if that’s a problem.

Ornithopter

If you don’t want to self host, Ornithopter offers simple infrastructure management made for Bivouac Wiki.

This means you can focus on your community, instead of sysadmin overhead.

We handle:

• software upgrades
• migrations, sizing
• backups and restores
• antivirus (CrowdStrike)
• firewalls (BunkerWeb)

For features specific to each tier, see pricing.