Archives for August 2026

At the Ecorestoration Camp on the North West side of Mount Shasta at Hotlum we are hosting a three day unconfernece September 11-13th. [registration link] You can arrive as early as Thursday afternoon and leave as late as Tuesday morning.

• Friday — Hands on the Land. We begin with workshops to steward and care for the land. This is how we arrive — not by sitting in chairs, but by putting our hands in the work together.
• Saturday — Open Space Unconference. A full day of participant-driven dialogue about water, watersheds, and our relationship to this place.
• Sunday — Back to the Land. We close the way we opened — with hands-on stewardship.

The location is special because it is at the confluence between two bioregions Northern Califas / Southern Cascadia, where Six major mountain ranges & ecological areas converge, Klamath Mountains, Coast Range, Southern Cascades, Sierra Nevada, Modoc Plateau, and Sacramento Valley receive their water from. Several members of the team shared why the conference matters to us and this synthesis was written.

Saturday runs on Open Space Technology. We gather in a circle, anyone who cares about a question can propose a session, and within an hour we have a full day’s agenda made by the people who actually showed up. No keynotes. No panel of talking heads. If you find yourself in a session where you’re neither learning nor contributing, use your feet.

Water doesn’t respect agendas. How watersheds heal, how we relate to water cycles, how land stewardship and policy and science and indigenous knowledge weave together — these are living questions. No single expert can set the right agenda for that conversation. A circle of people who care deeply about this land and this water can. You can learn about how to prepare for an unconfernece on my unconfernece.net site.

A Tech Substrate to Anchor our collective relationship to Land

The team of 4 that began the conversation about this event was myself, Nik Bertulis, Jonathan Kabat and Frank Sanborn. I first met Frank at the Cascadia BioFi conference in Seattle in May 2025. He caught my attention because he was using verifiable credentials out in the wild – helping to manage connections between people in vehicular residency camps. Now with vibe coding he is leveraging the technology to have a substrate of connection where land is the starting point of identity. We are experimenting with his platform and a mesh network for the event.

Who this is for

If you’re already in the bioregional world — this is a working gathering in a watershed that sits at a real bioregional seam. Cascadia meets California here. If you’re organizing in a watershed anywhere on this continent, the questions you’re wrestling with will find company in this circle. Bring them.

If you’re a technologist practicing deceleration — this event is for you. I spend most of my year in rooms full of people building protocols and infrastructure at a speed that is getting harder to metabolize. A number of you have been talking about slowing down deliberately. This is a place to actually do it: three days in wilderness, limited cell service, hands in dirt, and one day of the same Open Space format you know from IIW and AIW — pointed at water instead of identity. The method travels. The subject matter is a different order of problem, and I think that’s the point.

If you’re coming off Burning Man — the timing is deliberate. This is right after, and it is genuinely independent camping in a high desert wilderness setting. You bring what you need. There’s limited parking on the property and dispersed camping below it, walk-in sites, a volunteer kitchen, work-trade opportunities, and real conditions to plan for — fire restrictions, lava terrain, weather. If self-reliant camping is a skill you already have and you’re looking for somewhere to land that isn’t straight back to a screen, come north.

Extreme independent camping, or staying in town

You can stay in the town of Weed (15 min way). If you stay on site we are in wilderness. You need to bring your own camping gear, drinking water and layers for high desert temperature swings. We will have a wilderness kitchen and will be using composting toilets and there are no showers. We’re planning for roughly 50+ people with a maximum of 100. I will be staying in my mini-van camper.

On the Way the Turtle Island (North American) Bioregional Congress

Tuesday September 15th the 11th Turtle Island Bioregional Congress, begins near Portland. They are reconvening after seventeen years. I’m participating with other folks from the San Francisco Bay Delta.

Join us

Registration Link to the Hotlum Water Unconference, September 11-13, Mount Shasta, California.

Please pass this to anyone working on watershed restoration, water policy, or bioregional organizing — and to anyone you know who needs three days off the accelerator with their hands in the ground.

Questions: kaliya@identitywoman.net

TLDR Infographic:

What does it actually take for digital technology to be regenerative?

The question matters because most of the digital tools being adopted right now in bioregional movements, community organizing, regenerative finance, and the broader systemic-change ecosystem are being chosen without anyone asking it carefully. The slide decks are beautiful. The intentions are sincere. The category — regenerative technology — is real and growing. But there is a layer underneath the question that deserves to be named explicitly, because without it the regenerative vision doesn’t survive contact with the world it’s deployed in.

The Regenerative Tech Project’s white paper, Regenerative Technology: Technological Innovation in Service to Life, by Jessica Groopman and Danielle Lanyard, is the most rigorous attempt yet to define what regenerative technology actually means. They have done extraordinary conceptual work. They have built a directory of seventy-five-plus regenerative tech initiatives. They have proposed a Regenerative Tech Stack and a set of living-systems principles for designing with it. Their framework is the right place to start.

I want to take their framework seriously enough to point out what it implies — and to argue that the protocols a small community has been quietly building for twenty years are the architectural form their framework’s intentions take when they are built.

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A Note on the Word “Stack”

A brief clarification before we begin.

In tech, the word stack usually refers to a technical layering. The TCP/IP stack — physical, data link, network, transport, application — is the architecture that lets any computer talk to any other. The LAMP stack and the JAM stack are architectures for how web applications are built. The Trust Over IP stack is a four-layer architecture for the trust layer of the internet. The cloud stack — IaaS, PaaS, SaaS — is the architecture of platform abstraction. Each of these is a model of what sits on top of what, technically.

Groopman and Lanyard’s Regenerative Tech Stack is not that kind of stack. It is a contextual model. Every technical stack you know lives entirely inside what they call Layer 2. The contribution of their framework is to name two more layers that most tech discourse never counts: the values that determined what got built (Layer 1) and the consequences of deploying it in a living world (Layer 3). It is not in competition with the technical stacks. It is the framing that puts them in a wider context.

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The Three Layers

Layer 1: Intentions & Values — “the soil upon which any technology is created.” This is where a technology is envisioned, financed, governed, evaluated, and lifecycle-designed. Whose worldview gets baked in? What metrics define success? Who funds it, and what do they expect in return? Layer 1 is the layer of purpose — the one that determines whether a technology is regenerative in aspiration or merely wearing the vocabulary.

Layer 2: Design & Application — the part the industry already obsesses over. The servers, APIs, interfaces, and the applications built on them. The architecture, the code, the user experience. This is where every traditional tech stack lives. It is the “what does it do and how well does it do it” layer.

Layer 3: Systems & Relationships — the “ecology of tech.” The cascading consequences a tool has on community, environment, health, culture, and power once it’s deployed in a living context. What happens to the data? Who benefits and who is harmed? Does it strengthen community bonds or atomize them? Does it build local capacity or create dependency?

Groopman and Lanyard’s diagnosis is blunt: today’s technology focuses almost entirely on Layer 2 and externalizes Layers 1 and 3.

I agree with the diagnosis. What I want to add is what follows from it: the way you stop externalizing Layers 1 and 3 is to choose a Layer 2 substrate that holds Layer 1 intentions and protects Layer 3 consequences as part of its architecture. That substrate is open protocols.

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What the Framework Already Asks For

Read Layer 1 carefully and notice what it asks for. Read the seven living-systems principles the Regenerative Tech Project derived. The vocabulary the framework uses to describe regenerative technology — its own vocabulary, not vocabulary I am importing — includes:

• Interoperability — explicitly named under “Resilience through diversity”: “Design for interoperability and open standards to encourage broader innovation and collaboration.”
• Distribution — the shift the framework calls for moves from “Optimize for centralized control” to “Promote high distribution and sensemaking.” Their own examples for this shift: “Decentralized AI, federated learning, decentralized identity wallets, and personal data sovereignty.”
• Circulatory flows and metabolism — “Life relies on continuous exchange of energy, materials, and information.” As applied to technology: “Facilitate distributive information and value flows, promote information symmetry and value-sharing across networks.”
• Self-sovereignty — the framework names what was lost in the digital economy directly: “Self-sovereignty and agency over our data has been seized from us, just as land was stolen from indigenous and marginalized peoples.”
• Place-based, locally attuned, collaborative, participatory — all language the framework uses repeatedly.

These are not vague aspirations. They are properties of a particular kind of technical substrate. They are properties of open protocols, not proprietary platforms.

A platform optimizes for centralized control because that is what makes its business model work. A protocol distributes by design because it has no owner to centralize around. A platform encloses the social graph because that is the asset it holds. A protocol holds the social graph as commons because there is no one with a property right to assert. A platform’s incentives, over time, diverge from its users’ — what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification — because the platform has a separate set of shareholders to answer to. A protocol cannot enshittify because there are no shareholders.

The regenerative tech framework, in its own language, names the properties only open protocols deliver. The protocols are the architectural form of the framework’s Layer 1 intentions.

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What Has Already Been Built

This is not theoretical. Open protocols have been delivering Layer 1’s principles in the layers where they exist for four decades.

SMTP, the email protocol, was finalized in 1982. It distributes by design. It interoperates. It supports freedom of exit. It has not been enshittified, because no one owns it. You can use Gmail or Protonmail or run your own mail server, and you can switch between them without losing the ability to reach anyone. The substrate is open. The applications above it compete on quality, not on lock-in.

HTTP, the web protocol, works the same way. You can read these words on any browser, any operating system, without asking permission. The web is good because the protocol underneath it is a commons that has not been enclosed.

These protocols have delivered every Layer 1 principle Groopman and Lanyard named — for messages and documents. But they were never built for identity, relationships, group membership, or trust. When those things became valuable in the early 2000s, there was no commons-holding architecture to receive them. So the platforms enclosed them, and we have lived with the consequences — surveillance capitalism, the captured social graph, the enshittification of every successful platform — ever since.

The work to build the missing commons-holding layer began in 2005, when the leaders of several user-centric identity projects gathered at what became the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). It has been meeting every six months for over twenty years. The pieces have been steadily assembled:

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) — a W3C standard since 2022. A verifiable identifier that no platform owns.
• Verifiable Credentials (VCs) — a digital equivalent of a membership card, cryptographically signed, privacy-preserving, held in your own wallet.
• The Trust Over IP (ToIP) stack — a four-layer protocol architecture for the trust layer of the internet, including the Trust Spanning Protocol.
• Personhood Credentials and Verifiable Relationship Credentials — being developed by The First Person Project with collaborators from the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, the Trust Over IP Foundation, the Ayra Association, and the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Together these form a Decentralized Trust Graph — the social graph held in protocols rather than enclosed in platforms.
• Verifiable Trust Communities (VTCs) — the protocol layer for groups themselves to own their own identity, roster, and history rather than existing as features inside a vendor’s product. Project Weave is building toward this layer for communities of all kinds.

None of this is speculative. All of it is shipping. Hundreds of decentralized identity projects use DIDs in production. The ToIP stack is implemented in open source. The Linux Foundation is adopting First Person credentials for open-source contributor identity.

This is the substrate the regenerative tech framework’s Layer 1 intentions require. It exists. It is being built. And it is currently underrecognized inside the regenerative tech movement that needs it most.

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Why the Substrate Matters at Every Layer

A regenerative-facing Layer 2 application built on a captured platform substrate cannot deliver Layer 1’s intentions, no matter how well-intentioned the build. The substrate determines what is structurally possible.

A community coordination tool that runs on Slack will be enshittified on Slack’s timeline, regardless of how regenerative the tool’s mission statement is. The community’s members, history, and relationships belong to the platform underneath. When the platform’s incentives shift — and they will — the community has no protocol-level exit. Its Layer 1 sovereignty was never actually delivered.

An impact-measurement platform that puts community data on infrastructure controlled by a foreign cloud provider cannot honor indigenous data sovereignty in any meaningful sense. The values are stated; the architecture says otherwise. Layer 3 consequences are determined by the substrate, not by the slide deck.

This is also why the Regenerative Tech Project’s directory of seventy-five-plus initiatives, valuable as it is, leaves something important unmeasured. The directory catalogs what the tools do. It does not yet catalog what substrate they are built on. Two tools with identical Layer 2 capabilities can have completely different Layer 3 trajectories depending on whether their substrate is an open protocol or a captured platform. The regenerative tech community has the framework to ask this question. It has not yet built the practice of asking it.

This is where the stewards come in.

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The Stewards Who Tend the Substrate

In a companion piece, Who Is Tending the Digital Substrate for Bioregional Movements, David Hodgson and I proposed a set of living-systems roles for the technology leadership bioregional movements have never had: Protocol Scouts, Mycelial Stewards, Sentinels, Membrane Tenders, Knowledge Commons Keepers, and Companion-Intelligence Stewards. These roles are drawn from biomimicry, permaculture, permacomputing, and regeneration — the same design grammar the Regenerative Tech Project draws on.

Mapped onto the Regenerative Tech Stack, the roles fall naturally into place.

The Protocol Scout works in Layer 1. Their job is to ask, before a tool is adopted: whose protocols? open or enclosed? whose values baked in? what governance? what happens at end of life? They are the human capacity to distinguish protocol-substrate Layer 2 from platform-substrate Layer 2 — the distinction the directory does not yet make. The Knowledge Commons Keeper also tends Layer 1, holding the decisions about whose knowledge feeds the technology and what its rightful lifecycle looks like.

The Mycelial Steward works across all three layers. Their distinctive contribution is at the seams: keeping energy, materials, and information flowing rather than pooling. Pooling is enclosure. Flow is the commons. The steward’s job is to restore circulation when it stops.

The Sentinel works primarily in Layer 3, watching for what happens after deployment — surveillance risks, adversarial use of “regenerative” tools against the communities they claim to serve, and the slow accumulation of platform power that precedes enshittification. The Membrane Tender bridges Layers 1 and 3, holding the consent-and-sovereignty questions at design time and again after deployment.

These roles are not gaps the regenerative tech movement is missing. They are the human capacity the framework calls for, drawn in its own design grammar. Together with the substrate, they make Layer 1 intentions structurally real at Layer 2 and trustworthy at Layer 3.

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What This Means for the Movement

I want to be clear about what I am arguing and what I am not.

I am not arguing that the Regenerative Tech Project missed something. Their framework is sharp. Their principles are right. Their diagnosis — that tech today externalizes Layers 1 and 3 — is exactly correct.

I am arguing that the framework already implies a substrate, and that the substrate is being quietly built. The IIW lineage of work — DIDs, VCs, ToIP, First Person credentials, the Decentralized Trust Graph, Verifiable Trust Communities — is the protocol-substrate form the framework’s Layer 1 principles take when they are built. Without that substrate, Layer 2 regenerative tools cannot reliably deliver Layer 1 intentions. With it, they can.

A useful question this raises for any Layer 2 tool — any directory entry, any funded project, any adoption decision — is the protocol-substrate question. Is this built on open protocols that hold identity, relationships, groups, and trust as commons, or is it built on a captured platform substrate that will, over time, deliver Layer 3 consequences that contradict its Layer 1 intentions?

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Two Invitations

If you are a technologist embedded in the bioregional or regenerative movement, there is a guild beginning to form — values-aligned technologists who can do the Layer 1 and Layer 3 work the movement has not yet named. The companion piece Who Is Tending the Digital Substrate for Bioregional Movements explains the roles and extends an invitation to be a part of a guild.

Project Weave is one place where the protocol-substrate work is being made real — for the regenerative and bioregional movement, and for democracy more broadly. If you want to see this work in motion, that is where it is happening.

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Kaliya Young is a digital identity expert, co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), co-convener and facilitator of the SF Bay Delta Bioregional Unconference, researcher on the IETF’s regenerative governance patterns, and co-leader of Project Weave.

urther reading in this series:*

• Who Is Tending the Digital Substrate for Bioregional Movements — the living-systems roles bioregional movements need but don’t yet have.
• Protocols as the Grammar of Life — what protocols are and why everyone is making protocol choices without knowing it.
• Enshittification Arises from Enclosure — why open protocols refuse the property right that makes platform capture possible.
• Free Our Groups: From Platforms to Protocols — how communities can hold themselves at the protocol layer rather than existing as features inside someone else’s product.