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We're thrilled to announce that Scuppernong, a truly private cloud drive, is available for public use. Scuppernong is free for everyone in Western North Carolina! For everyone else, we ask that you donate to support the effort.

Scuppernong is an alternative to big tech office suites like Google Drive and Microsoft 365. Unlike those big tech platforms, Scuppernong doesn't harvest your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder, or use it to train AI. In fact, Scuppernong can't even read your personal data because it's completely end-to-end encrypted. Bunk Computer Cooperative couldn't harvest your Scuppernong data even if we wanted to.

But we don't. And frankly we find the idea rather gross.

Like our other public service Hopniss, Scuppernong runs on battle-tested open source software. That software is called CryptPad, and it has a 10-year history of security and user-friendliness. We're incredibly thankful for all the work the CryptPad team puts in to stewarding such a fantastic project.

We hope Western North Carolinians will use Scuppernong for anything and everything they'd like — from working on school essays to securely collaborating on monthly budgets with loved ones. Motivated users may even try using Scuppernong as part of their big tech breakup strategy. Whatever you end up using Scuppernong for, we won't know about it unless you tell us yourself, so please get in touch!

Other updates from Bunk

It's been quite a year, in more ways than one! In the second half of this year, the members of the cooperative sat down and assessed where we were and where we really wanted to go. That conversation led to us shelving a prior project and launching Scuppernong.

We took a big step toward formally establishing our cooperative by adopting our first Operating Agreement — a blueprint for how we practice workplace democracy and share ownership of our cooperative. This year we’ve also put the cooperative principles to purpose by opening our first bank account with local favorite Champion Credit Union.

Finally, we’ve got a new product under development which we’ll share about soon. While still not a full-time project for the cooperators, Bunk is growing. Watch out!

Yours in bits and bytes, Bunk Cooperators

We are Bunk Computer Cooperative — a technology cooperative in Asheville, NC. This is a small post explaining the who, what, where, when, why, and how of our business.

Who?

We are three founding humans — Dani, sorrel, and Maren — all based in Asheville, NC.

What?

We are building local computing infrastructure where the users are not the product. We're also a small business that's structured as a worker cooperative. Being a worker cooperative means that everyone who works at Bunk is also an owner, and we do lots of democratic decision making.

Where?

Right here, in the place that we live! We offer services only to residents of Western North Carolina. The counties in our service area are Cherokee, Graham, Clay, Swain, Macon, Jackson, Haywood, Transylvania, Madison, Buncombe, Henderson, Yancey, McDowell, Rutherford, Polk, Mitchell, Burke, Avery, Caldwell, Watauga, Wilkes, Ashe, and Allegany.

When?

We had our first official meeting in July of 2024, and we hope to offer our first paid service in 2025.

Why?

Why are we starting a local computer cooperative? There are too many reasons to count. But here are a few:

  • We want basic computing tools, like email and a cloud office suite, without giving all our personal data to Big Tech. That doesn't exist locally, so we're making it.
  • Big Tech is awful, but we love computers and want to love what they do for our communities. So we're doing small, local tech.
  • We want a strong local economy that is less tourism-dependent — building local computing infrastructure is one way to do that.
  • Hurricane Helene showed us that resilient, local computing infrastructure is important for disaster preparedness.
  • We want to work in computing without the infinite growth mandate of Big Tech. We don't want to grow beyond Western North Carolina.
  • Remember Google's former “Don't be evil” policy? Well we have that too, but you know where we live 😉

How?

One step at a time! We've started by launching Hopniss, a privacy-focused search engine powered by open-source software. Hopniss is free to use for anyone in the world.

We're still in the early development stages of our local cloud service, powered by the open-source Nextcloud software. After that, there's still so much to do. We may be early in our journey, but we still want to share it with you! Here's how you can follow us and keep in touch:

Yours in bits and bytes, Bunk Cooperators