Our Ktopians Ibrahim and André kickstarted the new year of project growth at the Oxford Real Farming Conference – tuning into the spirit of regenerating our food systems from the soil – as grassroots and farmers.

The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is an annual gathering in Oxford, UK that brings together farmers, growers, researchers, activists, policymakers and others committed to transforming the global food and farming system. It started in 2010 as an alternative to the more traditional Oxford Farming Conference, with a strong focus on agroecology, regenerative practices, food sovereignty, and nature-friendly approaches rather than conventional industrial agriculture.

Our radiating, almost 90 year old Elder Satish condensed the last, rich, nutritious 2 Days at the Oxford Real Farming Conference with simplicity and rooted us in the beauty of our shared home…all around us.. before we ended.

This awe inspiring Diversity of Beauty – our shared home. The burning passion to serve it in a healthy relationship and regenerative practice, has been clearly our “common soil” als delegates and speakers during the last packed days.

“We heard powerful stories of Indigenous communities who are architects of abundant ecosystems – defying narratives that humans are inevitably destructive, and urging us to restore our sense of belonging on the planet. Thrilling debates were held on glyphosate, the future of plant based foods and animal agriculture, sentience and AI, water and plastics. We mobilised for land justice and against corporate control. Our farm practice sessions brought together practical advice on everything from trees for livestock and climate change crops.” ORFC in the after conference Newsletter

We are grateful for everything, we have learned in the nutricious, packed session days and walked out inspired and filled with active hope. 

AI runs fine on tiny Computers offline at home, on small, self hosted web servers in the world Web as well as on local grids powered by decentralised Energy grids.

Helpful Large Language Models, Assistance and Agents can be accessed through customizable visual interfaces familiar with wide spread Big Tec Corp AI Apps.

Image/Illustration Generation AI runs great on an outdated Gamer PC as well. Locally and/ or shared with the Web.

As all of these solutions are Open Source, they can be customized with rules, datasets and models, which are — for example — not Europe US centric, but instead trained in the cultural imagery, languages, context and models in regions on the African continent.

As I have upgraded our Open Cloud and local Grid Infrastructure for Ktopia and the fsysgame.org this week, I feel amazed, how far we have come in the “AI rEvolution”, where Small has become beautiful.
AI no longer necessarily needs the large, massive, expensive, exploitive, energy hungry Hardware Server Parks owned by Corporations with an own Agenda closely tight with Special interest Politics.

Judging from the first test runs of our upgraded AI and Cloud infrastructure, we can now completely move away from ChatGPT, Gemini, MetaAI, etc. in our educational programs and daily operations as all the open alternatives out there have ripened super fast….

This Big Leap into the Small is Huge and in my view often overlooked in polarized AI Good/Evil discussions.

Our self hosted Mistral Instruct Model has been running for 6 month and supports daily work perfectly: https://docs.mistral.ai/getting-started/models
As a visual interface to communicate with Mistral we use Open WebUI
https://github.com/open-webui
also installed for testing: gpt oss 120B, Whisper Large Turbo V3, Devstral Instruct. –
Everything runs smoothly on just 4 vCPU’s and 8 GB RAM – together with our other Containers, websites and Nextcloud.

For Image Generation we began tuning Stable Diffusion on a local installation on a low budget Gamer PC
https://stable-diffusion-art.com/install-windows/
and giving Flux a deeper use next.