September 7, 2026
Community Scale AI: Protocols, Infrastructure, and Local Stewardship
Participants: rafa_0x, borismann, timber1997, jacobsayles
The SIGPfB meeting focused on designing community-scale AI infrastructure that prioritizes local stewardship and human-centered interfaces over traditional software disruption. Boris, Jacob, and Rafa outlined a four-phase architecture: Phase 1 establishes a membership base with OpenAI-compatible API access; Phase 2 introduces a shared data commons and context harness; Phase 3 enables local clients with CRDT-based data mirroring; and Phase 4 creates a federated network where members run their own nodes over open protocols. The technical implementation uses infrastructure-as-code with Proxmox, Ansible, and AT Protocol, with public repositories at zSpace Society.
A core philosophical argument emerged: "self-hosting is selfish" because the technical challenges are trivial compared to the social and support challenges of multiplayer systems. The team argues that open models, while six months behind frontier AI, are sufficient for community use cases and can run locally. Rather than disrupting Discord or other platforms, the project aims to "level up" existing communities—validated through Jacob's 84-unit co-op as a non-technical litmus test. Chat-first interfaces and AI-synthesized community context replace dense documentation since "people wanna talk to people." The model is being piloted for replication in other geographic areas, with emphasis on moving institutional communities away from centralized platforms.
- Self-hosting is only the easy part; the real challenge is building multiplayer systems that serve communities rather than individuals, requiring human support baked into the stewardship model from the start.
- Open source models lag frontier AI by roughly six months but are 'more than good enough' for community-scale applications, with a clear path to running inference locally via CRDTs and local clients.
- The solution to increasingly automated systems is paradoxically human-centered: chat-first interfaces, community context pipelines, and accessibility to non-technical users as the primary litmus test.
- A federated protocol-based approach (Phase 4) enables members to run their own nodes and leave at any time, avoiding platform lock-in while maintaining collaborative shared models over open protocols.
- The model is being validated through Jacob's 84-unit housing co-op and tested for replication in other communities (Salmon Arm, Vancouver coworking spaces), suggesting broader applicability beyond tech communities.
Session Recording Summary · 74m 29s · Full notes ↗
Reading: Not clearly identified in the discussion. This session was not a reading discussion but a cross-group conversation/demo between the Protocol Institute's "Protocols for Business" special interest group (SIG) and the zSpace Society "community-scale AI" / shared computer network project. Reference points mentioned include a Summer of Protocols presentation on "AI as a public service" and Boris's 2024 "community search engines" application.
Rafa convened a call between Protocol Institute members (Rafa, Timber) and two builders from Vancouver's zSpace Society (Boris Mann and Jacob Sayles) to explore possible cross-pollination. After introductions to the Protocol Institute's "context tank" model and its SIGs, Boris and Jacob described their motivation for and progress on a community-scale, self-hosted AI/inference stack. The session closed with a live demo of the running system and a discussion of how the two groups might collaborate.
- **Timber:** PI researches protocols "in the broadest possible sense" — from TCP/IP to handwashing to climate accords — to build a general theory of what a protocol is and how it can be applied in specific fields. It began with the Ethereum Foundation wanting to govern its protocol better, found broader utility, and is now spinning out of the EF into a standalone research institute.
- **Rafa:** Leads the "Protocols for Business" SIG, focused on viewing organizational models emerging from AI/blockchain through a protocol lens.
- **Rafa:** Other SIGs include memory research, protocol fiction, formal protocol theory (currently focused on stigmergy and security implications of stigmergic patterns), a new personhood research group, and distributed robotics. All feed a shared "context pipeline"/"context universe."
- **Timber:** Two additional angles on "context tank": protocols as a first-class lens to reinterpret existing problems, and using AI to synthesize research context within SIGs (though AI "doesn't have really good research taste yet").
- **Boris:** "Self-hosting is selfish" — the technical part of hosting has never been the hard part; the hard part is going *multiplayer* (permissions, privacy, onboarding, support). That's the gap almost no one is working on outside fully-hosted US SaaS clouds.
- **Boris:** The building block is "the group and group coordination"; at a certain scale groups share resources (office, camp, car, compute). AI/community search engines are the next such shared infrastructure.
Questions & Disagreements: - **Rafa** repeatedly pressed on *why* individuals want to self-host given cheap cloud/API subscriptions — is it real utility, or aesthetic/skill exploration? Boris and Jacob answered with the "multiplayer," counterbalance, and community-competency arguments rather than pure cost savings. - **Timber** asked for the individual-utility pitch to "the laziest person in the co-op" (someone who finds Fa
Participants: Timber, Boris Mann UTC-7, rafa (UTC+1), Jacob Sayles