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Growing Data Foundation

Supporting Open Solutions for Social Good The Growing Data Foundation (GDF) is a volunteer-based, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to fostering open projects and systems for community improvement and social good. Since its establishment in 2015, the GDF has been a key supporter of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in South Australia, promoting economic, environmental, and social sustainability through technology.

Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems

Part IV: Reclaiming Our Systems, Our Humanity, and the Future We’ve seen the damage. A legal fiction with no conscience now has immense control over how we eat, how we heal, and how we live.

Part III: Sick by Design

Part III: Sick by Design – How Shareholder Health Care Profits from Human Suffering I think most of us want to believe that healthcare exists to make people well. That hospitals are sanctuaries and doctors are healers. That the system, for all its flaws, is fundamentally trying to help.

Part II: Food for Profit

Part II: Food for Profit – How Corporations Engineered Hunger in a World of Plenty In a world of unprecedented agricultural abundance, it strikes me as a cruel paradox that billions still go hungry, while others are dying from diseases of overconsumption. This situation—scarcity amid plenty, malnutrition amid surplus—is no accident. I believe it is the calculated outcome of a food system built not to feed people, but to feed profits.

Part I: The Legal Lie

Part I: The Legal Lie – How Corporate Personhood Broke the World I’ve always held a firm belief that in a democracy, we, the people, are supposed to be in charge. Yet, over the last 150 years, I’ve watched a silent coup unfold—one that has steadily replaced the citizen with the shareholder, the voter with the lobbyist, and the human being with a legal fiction: the corporation as a person.

The Things Network South Australia

In a world dominated by centralised, corporate-owned networks, what if we could build our own? What if the infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT)—the very network that connects our sensors to the digital world—was owned and operated by the community it serves?

Part 4: A Different Path for LoRaWAN

In the history of technology, there are forks in the road. Moments where a different choice, a different philosophy, could have led us to a profoundly different world. In this series, we’ve explored the degenerative path taken by many DePIN projects, with Helium as a case study—a project that captured the incredible energy of a community-built network, only to see that energy diverted down a familiar, extractive path. This is the degenerative trajectory toward techno-feudalism, where centralization and extraction create scarcity and render the network’s builders into a surplus population.

Part 1: The Reality of DePIN

The Seductive Pitch The term DePIN, or Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Networks, carries an almost utopian promise. It paints a picture of a world where the essential physical networks we rely on—from wireless and mobile connectivity to mapping and sensor data—are built not by faceless corporations, but by us. It’s a vision of grassroots collaboration, where individuals are empowered to deploy hardware, share resources, and collectively own the infrastructure of tomorrow.

Part 2: DePIN's Fork in the Road

A Pattern Emerges The story of Helium, as I detailed in my first post, is not an anomaly. The slide from a grand vision of a “People’s Network” into a centrally-controlled system that primarily benefits its founders and a small handful of insiders is, unfortunately, a well-trodden path in the DePIN space. The issues of opaque governance, extractive tokenomics, and a disregard for the actual community that builds the network are not bugs; they are features of a flawed and deeply ingrained model.

Part 3: From Degenerative to Regenerative

The Principles Are Sound After dissecting the broken models of the DePIN space, it would be easy to become cynical and dismiss the entire concept as a failed experiment. But that would be a mistake.