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Kyberia is an independent and innovative archipelago of digital commu- nities that emerged in 2001 on the Slovak domain kyberia.sk. Initially a website informing the Slovak public about topics that were ignored on the Slovak web at the time (e.g. trans- and post-humanist philos- ophies, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, entheogens). Kyberia swiftly evolved first into a threaded forum and subsequently into a fully-fledged digital community where hackers, artists and scientists were able to interact in a densely hyperlinked graph. The current version released in 2006 focused more on internal K-econ- omy and the politics of the community. More concretely, a Senate was created and first trials to allow the system to auto-configure by using the parallel democracy model were run. In 2007 Kyberia won the prize of distinction as a “best Slovak virtual community” in the biggest public competition ever organized on the Slovak web. In 2010 code of Kybe ria’s engine was released on GitHub under AGPL and the community was expanded into Czech cyberspace, where a parallel community was launched on the kyberia.cz domain. In over ten years of existence, Kyberia has transformed itself from a science and hackers’ community into a more mainstream communi- ty of thousands of active users discussing myriads diverse topics in more than seven million parallel forums, blogs and/or data nodes. One of the most characteristic features that, we believe, transformed Ky beria into a social body with a collective identity is that Kyberia has a semipermeable membrane (which means that any registration appli- cation of a new user has to be approved by at least five members of the kyberia.sk Senate), a upvoting system implemented years before Facebook’s “Like” button. Other features worth mentioning include a flexible (node-specific) system of access right attribution, an internal bookmarking and mailing system and API templates. These were inno- vative in the period when they were released, although today they are common in other social networks as well. |