Funded by a Mozilla Research Grant, the Orkney Cloud project aimed to imagine community-based cloud services.
The Orkney Cloud magazine is an anthology of our islander incubated projects and inspirations that, woven together, could become an Orkney Cloud, services ranging from tourism to transport, from archaeology to addressing fuel poverty.
We invited contributions from those who are building the Orkney Cloud, islanders who are already developing local digital futures, to explain their projects and share their ideas.
Datahowe SF Fable
The magazine includes my science fiction fable, Datahowe. Drawing on haunted Neolithic chambered tombs, such as Maeshowe, it is a fable of how these places might become stores of data…
Orkney Cloud Project
Orkney Cloud Forum is a living laboratory for cloud services at the network edge. Instead of distant, centralised data storage and processing, how might local cloud services support socialised, shared, and distributed data processing?
In a community forum on Orkney, we explored community-led managed cloud services at the edge, where the internet is thin, but the social networks are thick – and the environmental resource to power data processing is huge. Orkney regularly generates over 100% of its energy needs from its local renewable energy.
The project was begun with funding from a Mozilla Research Grant in 2017, and culminated with the Orkney Cloud magazine, which was circulated at the Mozilla All Hands meeting in 2018.