Welcome

Welcome to the website of the Elemental Foundation. Our stated goal as a non-profit is to do what we can to make our society more resilient. This can take many forms, from digital resillience (resilient communications, cybersecurity), helping people to prepare for emergencies, and no doubt much more.

Projects

In progress

Comms

Goal: provide or support a user-friendly means of digital communication that doesn't rely on third party services or data centers, or minimally so.
Practical: create a peer to peer messaging service that uses Syncthing as a backend.

First milestone: [[comms - proof of concept]]

Sync

Encrypted syncthing destination as a service. As a supporting service for Comms, or for general purpose encrypted backups of Syncthing folders.

First milestone: [[sync - proof of concept]]

conservenwinkel.nl

Goal: make it easy for people to buy a food surplus for emergencies.
Practical: let people buy canned goods in bulk, with the expiration date given on the website.

First milestone: [[conservenwinkel - eerste verkoop]

Non-profit possibilities

Find out if a non-profit can compete in areas that are usually run by for-profit companies (food or data, for example), and if so, open source everything we do, from code to processes. Maybe it inspires others to start their own non-profits.

First milestone: [[non-profit - getting started]].

Not in progress

Hosting

Provide hosting services for people who want to use more open-source software (Mastodon, Jisti, Bookstack, Git, for example) but don't want to self-host. (just an idea right now)

Domains

Goal: provide people with a non-profit, no-nonsense way of owning a domain.
Practical: Become a non-profit domain registrar.

First milestone: [[become a registrar for .nl domains]] (on hold for now, too expensive)

Grow

Practical: Work on a standardized design for the growing of calorie-rich food, on a relatively small scale, both in and outdoor. Facilitate experimentation and data exchange on cost, materials, resource usage and yield.

First milestone: [[grow - platform 0.1]] (doing research)

Status

Goal: Monitor Internet for "trouble" indicators. Practical: Find, try, support, host and/or build something that gives a feel for how "stable" the Internet is, and possibly try and tie (several methods of) notifications into the status. A "status page" for the Internet, so to speak. But distributed/self-hosted. (just an idea)

FAQ

Are you a proper non-profit?

Yes, the official (Dutch) name is Stichting Elemental, located in Kloosterzande, Netherlands.

Do you accept donations?

No, not at the moment. If people start complaining to me about that I'll change my mind :-)

Do you give back to the open-source community?

We (plan to) contribute servers to the Syncthing relay- and discovery pools (in progress). And if there is any profit from our services, we'll definitely contribute more to Syncthing and other open-source projects we depend on.

Anything else?

We promise to always explicitly say so if anything you read from us is partially or fully AI generated. Unless we explicitly say so, everything you read from us is written by a human. (So feel free to let me know about any typos)

Contact

dieter@elementalfoundation.org