A JAM · SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 · FROM THE COMMONS · REMIX THIS

COMMUNITY
DATA
CENTERS

A data center doesn’t have to be a warehouse a company builds on the edge of your town. It can be a used office computer in a utility closet, run by the people who live in the house.

Fourteen people, five time zones, one bad rural internet connection, and a tour of somebody’s utility closet.

Hosted by Deborah T. · Kitsap Peninsula, WA · The Relational Tech Project

▶ WATCH THE RECORDING

A GLOBAL
WEATHER REPORT

Everyone answered the same question in the chat as they arrived: your name, where you’re calling in from, and one thing you’ve noticed about your neighborhood lately.

“Based on your experiences, what would be the minimum requirements in tech stack and community size to run a CDC experiment?”

Bruno — Mexico City, asked in the chat

Spencer answered: “It’s relatively affordable, hardware-wise. We have a couple of these, and even just one is a decent starting place — so on the order of a few hundred dollars?” The machine he linked was a used Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro.

On people: “I’d say having some minor % of ‘tech people’, and then the majority of people don’t need to be technical at all.”

And the honest caveat, from Danny: “The first half of ‘hey, you can set this up on an old computer’ — that is true. But a lot of the AI stuff is kind of expensive, and an old computer is not the thing that will run it.”

So: one used machine and one person willing to get under the hood is the floor. Everything below is what three groups actually built on top of that — and what a fourth is building right now.

SHOW
& TELL

An hour in, somebody asked what the setups actually look like. Photos started landing in the chat.

The Embassy

San Francisco, CA · a 13-year-old group house

Who it serves: Nine people living there full time, sometimes over twenty with guests, plus monthly DWeb meetups hosted in the house.
Hardware: Several used Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micros — about $300 each. Two of them were given to the house by a friend whose company was going to liquidate them.
Money: Bills paid from what residents and short-term guests pay to live there. Month to month. Looking into municipal grants for neighborhood resiliency infrastructure.
Its closet: Spencer’s tour of what’s actually running on it is the centerfold, just below.

Z-Space

Vancouver, BC · top floor of a 100-year-old building

Who it serves: A nonprofit society of technologists, visual artists and designers sharing a coworking floor — about 15 paying members, plus friends who just come and hang out. Access works by knowing someone.
Hardware: Three machines — ORCA, SALMON, and the Spark. One does OCR, text embeddings and speech-to-text. One is an Nvidia DGX Spark. One is an experiment. Roughly $10,000 of computer altogether — two of the three were donated.
Running on it: A “shared computer”: any member can deploy their own small site or app on it, plus open-source office tools. Coolify handles the deploying. Open-source models on the shared GPUs for anyone who wants to play.
AI: The 8 GB Gemma is the most practical day to day.
Money: Members pay $200–$400 a month for the space. Old building, reasonable rent. The servers came from donations, not a budget line.

The Co-op Cluster

Boulder, CO · a co-op coworking space

Who it serves: The people who work out of the space.
Hardware: A small cluster on a wire shelf in the corner of a room — a few machines, a switch, a keyboard balanced on top.
Running on it: Coolify, same as Z-Space, for putting things online without much ceremony.

And one getting started

A rig in Houston

Houston, TX · a home rig and a spec, mid-build

Who it serves: Not a house or a coworking floor — not yet. Megan and her husband, who’s an engineer, with the first data collection event happening this month and the rest of the call invited to it.
What’s still unanswered: The things the other three had to work out — who it’s for, who gets access, who pays — are all still ahead of her. That’s what this stage looks like.

STILL
OPEN

Nobody on the call had these solved. If you start one of these, you’ll meet them too — and the answers are worth sending back.

Who pays, once the donated hardware runs out Both houses got started on machines someone else was throwing away. Neither has a funding model yet. Municipal grants for local resiliency infrastructure came up as the most promising lead.
What stays confidential House finances can mostly be transparent — who pays what for which room. But if someone falls behind on rent and the house quietly agrees to a discount, that probably shouldn’t be on the dashboard. The edge cases are the whole question.
Who gets access, and how you decide Friends of members? Anyone in the building? The block? Everyone wanted the answer to be generous and nobody had written the rule down.
How several people share one server without stepping on each other Pilot it on your personal machine, then stage it into the shared one — that’s the pattern that emerged. Self-hosted git, some kind of regular check-in before merging, and shared written context so several people’s AI assistants aren’t making conflicting changes.
Why anyone in the community should care “It’s not like everyone in the space cares about it. It is something that we have to do a better job of telling people — why, what they get out of it.”

SAID
OUT LOUD

THE LUCK
CIRCLE

To close, everyone named one thing they wanted luck on. A practice Deborah learned from her organizer friend Jordan.

THE LINK
PILE

Everything anyone dropped in the chat, credited to whoever dropped it.

embassy.communityThe Embassy, San Francisco — Spencer

z-space.caZ-Space, Vancouver — Danny M.

Home-Cooked SoftwareThe article half the call referenced — Jon B.

Speak for the TreesEcoregion newsletters from public environmental data — Robinson G.

Houston BloomResource mapping in Houston — Megan D.

DWeb CampWhere several people on this call first met — Spencer

Folk TechnologyA new(ish) aligned group — Spencer

LM StudioTells you which local models your hardware can fit — Megan D.

BuzzSelf-hosted Slack alternative, built on Nostr — Spencer

KiwixHow rural schools carry the internet offline — Megan D.

KanpaiEvent sponsorship, from a housemate — Spencer

CoolifyWhat both coworking spaces deploy with — Danny M.

A GLOBALWEATHER REPORT

SHOW& TELL