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PeerPoint
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PeerPoint

An Open P2P Requirements Definition and Design Specification Proposal

Google Doc created June 6, 2012

Last updated October 19, 2012

PeerPoint shares a vision of “Sovereign Computing”:

“To be the true owner of your information and of your computer's hardware resources, as well as to share these things in any way you want and only with whomever you want. To participate in the Internet free of the middleman, as an autonomous, independent and sovereign individual.” (Klaus Wuestefeld)

PeerPoint’s version of the sovereign individual is the peer. A peer is a critter of the bio-digital ecosystem. The bio-digital ecosystem includes nature, human culture, machine devices and the internet. The term "peer" can apply to a person or a machine, and either kind of peer can play different roles in various groups, networks, and communities. But there are no "second class" peers -- only variable trust relations between sovereign peers. A sovereign peer may choose to interact through any kind of network and with any entity whether it be a trusted equal or an untrusted corporate giant.  A peer always retains an autonomy of agency to consent to or reject any relationship. There is no particular entity, group, or service in the “internets” that a sovereign peer can't go around or do without.

Arguably life on the internet is already like that and always has been. The problem is that for most internet users their agency, or sovereignty, is severely compromised. They submit to many relationships and services without really being informed. Is it their own fault? No, because the deck is stacked against them. Important facts and choices are unknown, withheld, or obfuscated. There are either insufficient alternatives or so many choices no human person has time to evaluate them all. Out of necessity we put our trust in proxies (others who make decisions for us), and that trust is very often betrayed.

The PeerPoint project is intended to serve several communities of interest from average internet users to social entrepreneurs and technology innovators. The project will need to present different faces and appropriate on-ramps to these different communities. This document is only a beginning.

Abstract

The Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Los Indignados, and similar uprisings around the world demonstrate that a new, open society and open democracy is struggling to rise from the bottom up. But the internet has been captured by giant corporations whose business models are based on centralized infrastructure, proprietary technology, user surveillance and censorship, and unilateral terms of service. These developments threaten the success of our collective aspirations.

The PeerPoint Open P2P Requirements Definition and Design Specification Proposal describes an evolving, crowdsourced design specification for sovereign computing in the form of a suite of inter-operating peer-to-peer (p2p) applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, distributed database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowdfunding, and others. This specification overlaps with existing p2p projects but also goes substantially beyond anything currently in the pipeline.

The PeerPoint Open Design Specification is not meant to replace or down-play existing p2p initiatives. It is intended to complement such efforts by providing an open vehicle for cross-community collaboration involving users and developers alike and by working to facilitate technical interoperability and synergy between open P2P implementations. PeerPoint aims to involve a broad base of stakeholders to jointly:

  1. identify detailed user requirements across a broad range of social and digital collaboration needs
  2. document best practices and solution sets favored by the technical community
  3. make informed and detailed correlations between the requirements and prefered solutions

The project is intended to clarify and prioritize what the user community needs from the technical community, in order to prevail in the social, political, and economic struggles facing our digital society now and in coming years. With the participation of the developer community it could also become an open reference and repository of best practices and prefered solution sets in p2p technology.

Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, activists, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the open PeerPoint Design Specification and to adopt any part of the specs they can use in their own work.

Collaboration

The initial methods for collaboration are limited, and one of the first priorities is to expand them.

Joining the Next Net Google group automatically enables edit permission for the present document.

As soon as an appropriate wiki-based platform is selected the project will move there. A GitHub wiki was created but it was too bare bones. A better wiki platform is desired and suggestions would be appreciated. We are considering the Referata hosted semantic mediawiki platform. If you know of an existing Referata wiki that might welcome this kind of content please let us know.

To begin actively participating in the PeerPoint project, please read the PeerPoint topic thread at the Next Net Google Group.

Editing of this document by Next Net members is encouraged but please:

  1. don’t delete existing material without permission (discuss at PeerPoint topic @ Next Net)
  2. do add new text in a color other than black-on-white and add your name below in that color (I suggest including the RGB values so you can reproduce your selection later)
  3. Or, if you prefer, make a copy of this doc and edit that, but please share what you come up with!

Collaborators:

PeerPoint = Peer-to-Peer Everything

[This is a back-of-the-envelope first draft of top-level design specifications.]

PeerPoint is an evolving, crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer (p2p) applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, distributed database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowdfunding, etc.

The PeerPoint Requirements and Design Specification is not meant to replace or supersede existing software and technology development efforts. It is intended to elicit and catalog the needs of the user community and to help inform and coordinate the work of the floss / p2p / hacker community to promote more rapid convergence towards common standards and interoperable solutions. It is intended to be an open P2P development roadmap, collectively designed by all the stakeholders in a free, democratic future for the internet and its users.

Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, activists, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the PeerPoint project.

The initial scope consists of:

All of these threads can be pursued in parallel with only a minimal amount of sequential dependencies.

PeerPoint is a design to Occupy the Internet.

The PeerPoint project might ultimately produce far more than a set of design documents. The PeerPoint design specifications could contribute to the development of an operational suite of improved application software specifically designed for social collaboration and activism. The PeerPoint project could also help to create new software development tools and new distributed network infrastructures.  But more than that, PeerPoint could help to shift the balance of power from central, corporate authorities to independent digital citizens.

At its most extreme potential, the PeerPoint specification could lead to an inexpensive (or free) self-contained, all-in-one, plug-and-play personal network appliance. Such an appliance would be connected between a user’s PC, home network, or mobile device and a network access point such as a connection to an internet service provider (ISP). It would support multiple access methods (phone lines, mobile devices, wifi, ethernet, etc.) for maximum connectivity. It might be accessed by remote mobile devices either over commercial cellular networks or over independent wireless mesh networks like those used by Occupy Wall Street.

With the PeerPoint approach, each user would retain ownership and control of all the data and content they created. PeerPoint users might connect to the internet via commercial ISPs, but those ISP’s would, if the user so desired, only act as blind, passive carriers of PeerPoint encrypted communications and content.

That is the ultimate vision behind the PeerPoint project framework, but PeerPoint is not intended to be the “one true path” to that goal or any other. It is a complementary and parallel process among all the other R&D efforts in the diverse and evolving ecosystem of open, p2p technology.

Regardless of how far the PeerPoint project evolves, it is designed to create some value at each step along the way. The PeerPoint conceptual framework already adds some value to the conversation among internet stakeholders. The project will evolve outward from this initial nucleus with each incremental addition requiring minimal investment and adding some immediate value for stakeholders.

The Need

The social tools provided by Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. have been fun and fairly useful, but if we think about the serious and intensive collaborative effort it will take to shift an entire civilization onto a more principled, democratic, and sustainable footing, we are going to need more powerful and comprehensive digital work tools. Those tools need to belong to us and they need to meet the social and political needs of our time, not the needs of a few self-serving corporations or their shareholders.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are proprietary, for-profit platforms that exploit users to create content and value. But they provide value as well, so a “Facebook killer” must provide greater user value (functionality, privacy, etc.) than Facebook. For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%. They are not up to the tasks that participatory democracy, non-violent social change, and sustainable economic systems will demand of our internet communications and our evolving cooperative methods of creating, working, organizing, negotiating, and decision-making together, in groups large and small, regardless of the geographical distances between us. This new kind of group interaction over distances is what allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements. It is also what will enable direct participation in the legislative process to function at a large scale for the first time in human history.

The corporate internet business model is based on surveillance of our online activity, our thought, and our expression. By data mining the vast amounts of our information in their custody, they identify our patterns of thought and behavior. They do this ostensibly to sell us stuff and to make money, and so far we have accepted this as the cost of our “free” use of corporatized internet services. But what other, less benign uses can this surveillance and data mining be put to?

I have been hoping for somebody like the Linux community or Wikipedia Community to step up and create an appliance-like p2p node that provides all the apps needed for secure (and when desired, anonymous) social networking, voting, collaboration, crowdfunding, etc. -- something that comes complete, out of the box, with the apps pre-installed; that connects easily to your personal computer, home network, or mobile device, and solves all our needs for personal and social digital tools... But it ain’t happening. Most existing organizations and projects already have a particular vision, scope, or direction that stops somewhere short of the PeerPoint scope or heads in a different technology direction. On the other hand there is a variety of visionary writers and thinkers who imagine next generation networks or future netscapes in graphic terms, but who haven’t created detailed roadmaps to, or technical specifications for, those inspiring visions. PeerPoint is trying to work the middle space between the brick-and-mortar institutions and the visionaries -- with the intent to lay some track between the two.

What to what?

Peer to peer (p2p) theory can be applied to many different domains. The three domains most important to the PeerPoint project are p2p culture, p2p production, and p2p technology. There are a number of different (and sometimes conflicting) versions or interpretations of these domains.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is not restricted to technology, but covers every social process with a peer-to-peer dynamic, whether these peers are humans or computers. Peer-to-peer as a term originated from the popular concept of P2P distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s. The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P human dynamic affords a critical look at current authoritarian and centralized social structures. Peer-to-peer is also a political and social program for those who believe that in many cases, peer-to-peer modes are a preferable option.

An encyclopedic wiki on every p2p topic imaginable is maintained at the Foundation for P2P Alternatives.

The PeerPoint project will use the following summaries of the three domains as a jumping off point, but participants are encouraged to consider these as open definitions. No attempt to establish a PeerPoint p2p orthodoxy is implied.

1. P2P Culture (or p2p social process)

P2P culture is a post-capitalist socio-economic framework that includes but transcends capitalism and encompasses many hybrids of open and closed, public and private, and hierarchical and egalitarian associations.

P2P emphasizes cooperation, openness, fairness, transparency, information symmetry, sustainability, accountability, and innovation motivated by the full range of human aspirations including, but definitely not limited to, personal financial gain.

P2P is a "post-capitalist framework" because many peers are quite happy to abandon capitalism's euphemisms and reductio ad absurdums altogether. However, others consider aspects of capitalism to have played a role in lifting millions from poverty and would rather adapt it to changing social and ecological needs than to abandon it for something novel. I think it is entirely possible to craft new forms of natural, ecological, and democratic capitalism which "do no harm", and I think there is ample room in the p2p community for such a "diversity of tactics."

P2P social process can operate in almost any economic context if two specific rules are respected. P2P capitalism, p2p Marxism, p2p anarchy, or p2p whatever must honor:

  1. the political and legal equality of every peer
  2. the fully informed consent of every peer

The relative degree to which these rules are followed is the relative degree of p2p-correctness, regardless of any other characteristics of the socioeconomic environment. It is entirely up to the self-identified capitalist, Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist, or whatever, to accept or reject these rules, in which case they are (or are not, respectively) a p2p capitalist, p2p Marxist, etc.

However, the simplicity of these two rules is deceptive because they have many corollaries and implications. And they don't solve the problem of competing or conflicting rights and interests among peers--we still require courts, legislatures, and social contracts for that.

In an ideology-agnostic nutshell, you could say the P2P social framework is about cooperative individualism (this is precisely how Michel Bauwens describes peerism in "The Political Economy of Peer Production").

Individuals are interdependent but retain a self-identity, dignity, and an autonomous intellectual and moral agency. Any system which diminishes that diminishes itself.

A peer is a self-directed individual, voluntarily consenting to various cooperative social contracts or arrangements. Whether cooperation is one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, all cooperators are peers. If they are not peers, the enterprise probably should not be called cooperation. Instead it would be some variety of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation.

A person's success at being a peer and cooperating with other peers depends largely on how well they absorb the ideas of composability,  subsidiarity, intersubjectivity and enlightened self-interest.

The mixture of individuality (selfishness) and sociality (cooperation) in each person may reflect the multilevel interaction of individual and group selection in evolution. This often carries a level of cognitive and cultural dissonance that each peer and peer group must grapple with.

2. P2P Production (or Peer Production)

Per Wikipedia: “Peer production (also known by the term mass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome... In these communities, the efforts of a large number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. The information age, especially the Internet, has provided the peer production process with new collaborative possibilities and has become a dominant and important mode of producing information. Free and open source software are two examples of modern processes of peer production. One of the earliest instances of networked peer production is Project Gutenberg, a project that involves volunteers that make "etexts" from out-of-copyright works available online. Modern examples are Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and Linux, a computer operating system. For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production. Amazon built itself around user reviews, Google is constituted by user-generated content (i.e. Youtube). Peer production refers to the production process on which the previous examples are based. Commons-based peer production is a subset of peer production.”

3. P2P Technology

Per Wikipedia: “A peer-to-peer computer network is one in which each computer in the network can act as a client or server for the other computers in the network, allowing shared access to files and peripherals without the need for a central server. P2P networks can be set up in the home, a business or over the Internet... P2P networks can be used for sharing content such as audio, video, data or anything in digital format. P2P is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged participants in the application. Each computer in the network is referred to as a node. The owner of each computer on a P2P network would set aside a portion of its resources - such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth -to be made directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. With this model, peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model where only servers supply (send), and clients consume (receive).”

Important concepts common to p2p culture, p2p production, and p2p…

Important concepts common to p2p culture, p2p production, and p2p technology

All of the following concepts are highly recursive and interwoven so it is difficult to organize them. The following outline could be arranged in many alternate ways.

  1. Individual sovereignty (need definitions--what it is & isn’t in p2p context)

  1. Interdependence
  2. Equality of agency

  1. Cooperation (need definitions--what it is & isn’t in p2p context)

  1. Intersubjectivity
  2. Reciprocity
  3. Meritocracy
  4. Enlightened self-interest

  1. Openness (need p2p definitions)

  1. Transparency
  2. Security
  3. Anonymity
  4. Informed Consent
  5. Open participation

  1. Commons (need p2p definitions)

  1. Physical & virtual
  2. enclosure
  3. boundaries
  1. logical
  2. physical
  3. social
  4. political
  5. geographic
  1. Geography
  1. locality
  2. bioregions
  1. Sustainability
  1. Renewable
  1. cradle to cradle metrics
  1. Resilient
  1. Diversity
  2. Capacity
  3. Aware & Adaptive
  1. Climax, steady-state, homeostasis
  2. Externality
  3. Conservation
  1. metrics
  2. Efficiency
  3. recycling & reuse
  1. Access
  1. openness
  1. public/private
  1. Scarcity and rivalry
  2. Contestability: There are alternatives in principle to the dominant solution, even if everyone takes the dominant solution. In economics it often stands for a Thatcherist abuse of the term, meaning you don't need antitrust, it is enough to make dominant players contestable. But what is meant here is "contestability" of technical solutions. E.g. I am not forced to use Internet Explorer anymore.
  1. Production
  1. supply chains
  2. adding value
  3. value chains
  4. recycling
  5. scale & scope
  6. economy and efficiency
  1. Distribution
  1. exchange
  1. valuation
  2. reciprocity
  3. symmetrical
  1. one to one
  2. many to many
  3. fair trade
  1. asymmetrical
  1. one to many
  2. net gain or loss
  1. free?
  1. gifts
  2. sharing
  1. co-consumption
  2. markets
  1. composite networks
  1. nodes
  2. structures (ring, star, cluster, etc.)
  3. relational algorithms
  1. metrics & accounting
  2. profit
  3. externalities
  4. intangibles
  5. currencies
  6. barter
  7. trust/reputation
  8. regulation
  1. free vs fair

  1. Composability

  1. Per Wikipedia: Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides recombinant components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. In information systems, the essential features that make a component composable are that it be:

  1. Subsidiarity

 

  1. (Christianity / Roman Catholic Church) (in the Roman Catholic Church) a principle of social doctrine that all social bodies exist for the sake of the individual so that what individuals are able to do, society should not take over, and what small societies can do, larger societies should not take over

  1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) (in political systems) the principle of devolving decisions to the lowest practical level

  1. Per Wikipedia: The concept of subsidiarity is applicable in the fields of government, political science, cybernetics, management, military (Mission Command) and, metaphorically, in the distribution of software module responsibilities in object-oriented programming. Subsidiarity is, ideally or in principle, one of the features of federalism, where it asserts the rights of the parts over the whole.

------------------------------

Sidebar for developers:

One approach to the PeeerPoint design process would be to start with an existing foundation platform like the FreedomBox and extend the spec outward from that. If a FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.

The PeerPoint apps don’t yet exist as an integrated package, or even as individual apps that are adequate to replace Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Google Search, Google Earth, YouTube, Kick-Starter, etc. etc. All this functionality is envisioned for the PeerPoint eventually.

It will be necessary to include interfaces/connectors to the most popular proprietary client-server applications like Google and Facebook so that PeerPoint adopters can choose to abandon those systems (or not) in their own good time. This contingency is important because some users will adopt PeerPoint entirely for its collaboration facilities rather than its security or privacy features.

Initially the specified solution set would consist of a first tier of essential apps that must be tightly integrated in their interfaces/connectors, protocols, and data structures. After defining the first tier, development of the specs would continue on a second-tier of applications. Work on the second-tier specs could be much more distributed and parallel since the final specs for all the basic interfaces, protocols and data structures of the first tier modules would be available to all interested designers and developers.

A minimalist approach to the solution side of the PeerPoint design spec would be to identify existing p2p applications that could be stitched together with the least amount of effort and then create specs for the glue, string, and middleware required to hang it all together.

However, p2p architecture has some additional wrinkles or permutations that might expand the range of potential PeerPoint components beyond the classical or “pure” p2p applications.

Peer-to-peer can mean client-to-client or server-to-server, and within one node it can include client-server, too. Multiple clients and/or servers can reside on a node and act as a team. Stand-alone or conventional free/open (non-p2p) client-side applications can potentially be modified to communicate with remote peers.

---------------------------------------------------------

The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are:

First tier services & applications (this needs to be expanded and organized into user requirements, systems requirements, and proposed solution sets for the services and apps in each category)

  1. integrated development tools: comparison of open source code repository/hosting facilities, Comparison of IDEs, application life-cycle management (ALM), open source ALMs, open-source collaborative IDEs: Cloud9, Collide
  3. identity management
  4. semantic web ontology specs, APIs, and libraries
  5. security & anonymity platform (FreedomBox, Freenet, I2P or better)
  6. a system library that is really good at security, p2p service discovery, storing & transmitting data, etc. Application developers can build on this to make p2p applications.
  7. a library of p2p middleware and APIs for interfacing with conventional apps and between p2p apps
  8. ubiquitous trust/reputation metrics (like/dislike, trust/distrust, P2P Metrics, Connect.me )
  9. distributed data store (distributed hash tables, CouchDB and/or Freenet or better)
  10. asynchronous coms (email, microblogging, chat, voicemail, etc.) (Syndie or better)
  11. real-time communication (IM, voice, videoconference, etc.)

Second tier services & apps

  1. social networking: socialswarm.net: list of distributed projects, Wikipedia: distributed social network apps,
  2. crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (semantic wiki engine, wiki farm platform, Etherpad, Google Docs,, LibreOffice, or better)
  3. project management/workflow or integrated collaboration environment (ICE), Bettermeans, ChiliProject
  4. enterprise resource planning
  5. user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better, Bitcoin or better)
  6. crowdfunding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform, Selfstarter)
  7. accounting & financial reporting
  8. voting (LiquidFeedback or better)
  9. universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content (YaCy or better)

Third tier services & apps

  1. thinktank farming

Digital Commons

One contribution the PeerPoint can make to the digital commons and the ethics of sharing is to incorporate a computing resource- sharing capability into its system design. Every personal computer, tablet, smart phone, etc. is idle or operating far below its capacity most of the time.

Added up, this unused capacity is equivalent to many supercomputers sitting idle. Those idle virtual supercomputers could be used in the public interest if the personal computing devices connected to the internet were designed to share their idle capacity for public purposes. Users might also be given the option to designate various percentages of their idle capacity to different uses, causes, groups, etc.

BOINC: Open-source software for volunteer computing and grid computing. Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy:

Peer Publica

Once PeerPoint is up and running with the first tier applications we may be able to organize the 99% well enough to begin rapid development of the more complex second-tier applications and to start building or buying alternative network infrastructure.

Our new public internet won’t be owned by corporations or by the state. It will be owned by the people, an instrument of the people to invoke the people’s will and help bring both government and corporations under civic control.

Obstacles

“We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is happening…. Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist….Free, open systems, that neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit….we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it’s not clear where such capacity will come from. …Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one.” (emphasis added) Dmytri Kleiner

I partly agree, but I think we have both a political struggle and a technical struggle rolled into one.

The integral organizing and collaboration tools described in PeerPoint are tools (maybe I should even call them weapons) that we need now to conduct our political struggle, not later. The community that brought us Linux, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and LibreOffice (the integrated suite of open source applications that replaces Microsoft Office), is capable of bringing us a PeerPoint or something equivalent if it understands the imperative nature of the need.

If anyone doubts this, look at Wikipedia’s impressive List of Open Source Software.

But free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) and hacker development community is largely self-motivated and idiosyncratic, with many islands of genius and inspiration separated by vast seas of  minutia and trivia. Or to put it another way, the FLOSS & hacker community is like an orchestra tuning up or playing without a score. It is a cacophony of individual efforts most with relatively narrow scope compared with that of PeerPoint. The bulk of the community does not yet seem to perceive its enlightened self-interest in our existential struggle for open source, p2p society and open source p2p government. The digital space for activism lags far behind the social space that it should mirror. Maybe the “digital libertarians” in the software development community feel they can outwit Big Brother better on their own terms as individuals. Perhaps we need to help open their “Doors of Perception” wider.

The PeerPoint Design Specification is not intended to replace or supercede existing software and technology development efforts. It is a complementary program designed to help coordinate the work of the floss/hacker/p2p community towards a future point of convergence and interoperability. It is essentially a statement of what the progressive user community desperately needs from the technical community in order to prevail in the social, political, economic, and environmental struggles that confront us. It is intended to be a description of needs and potential solutions collectively designed by all the participants stakeholders in a free, democratic future for the internet environment.

Criticisms of PeerPoint

(see Next Net Google Group > PeerPoint Discussion topic)

Some have accused the PeerPoint project of being too ambitious and naive--they've seen & done it all before and have a smug, superior attitude. They argue that the correct approach is more of the same process they are accustomed to--don’t make a “master plan”, just put your head down and code, code, code.

 

But it is exactly the laissez-faire technocratic approach that produced the present state of affairs in which the internet is now colonized and dominated by huge corporate predators. Digital anarchists, libertarians, cynics and other self-interested technocrats may be the naive, unwitting pawns of the powerful actors they intended to defy or hold in contempt. They almost seem to hold social justice and participatory democracy in contempt as well, or at least to view it with apathy.

We need to admit that the world got a whole lot closer to going down the tubes on our watch. Despite the best of intentions, we all get a really big-assed #FAIL.

 

Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition anybody who thinks that old-style FLOSS and independent, freelance, DIY, ad hoc, iterative development is going to pull us through the crises and the threats we now face is not just naive--they are buried inside a mystery wrapped in a conundrum, locked within an enigma. They are lost in space.

 

The threats to privacy, liberty, democracy, and equality have steadily grown worse despite all our BRILLIANT efforts up till now, so only a different strategy can be expected to reverse that trend.

 

That strategy is not a continued, exclusive reliance on autonomous, self-organizing, emergent systems. That's all well and good but not, by itself, enough. We need to try something else as well. That something else might even be something that was tried in the past and discredited because it was ineffective then. It might be large-scale collective organization and design.

 

Critics of PeerPoint have suggested that on its best day it would be a vain effort to imitate the W3C (perhaps as PeerPoint can be see as a standardization effort). On its worst day it would be no more than an over-ambitious pipe dream. But they aren't the only ones who don't want another W3C. What we want is more like a combination of the Linux Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation. Not that I'm knocking the W3C (peace be with them) but I am proposing something fresher and more agile--more like an on-going re-mix+mashup+hackathon...

 

The critics also say [Strawman phrase w/o reference] that nothing good was ever designed by a "committee" implying that I have proposed some kind of bureaucratic nightmare. They point to giant, government-sponsored boondoggles they were part of in the past. My friend Fabio had a better rebuttal than I could have given:

 

"Design by committee may not work, but design (and build, review, adjust, adapt, discover, unfold, involving everyone during the whole thing) by community does work and is proven to produce life-affirming architecture, in contrast to deadening architecture produced by the default "efficient", commercial endeavor. A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob, or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?"

Complex structures may emerge from simple social actions which do not intend to create the complex structures, but we don’t need to depend on fortunate cases of emergence and serendipity alone. Design and planning are useful, too.

In the past, large-scale, collective design often stalled, bogged down, or failed because it was forced to adopt centralized, top-down planning and organization methods. Now we can do things in a much more distributed, horizontal, and agile manner. (Its called peer to peer culture, or as Fabio put it--community.)

 

Grand designs also failed due to organizational structures and designs that were monolithic (and hierarchical with geographic + political boundaries). Now we can create organizations and designs that are modular and composable, and which obey subsidiarity.

 

Finally, many parties to conflict have won or lost based on their access to technology. The famous metaphor is “bringing a knife to a gun-fight.” It reminds me of the scene where Indiana Jones faces the menacing swordsman. (does anybody know how to embed a video in a Google Doc?) Somehow ignoring the thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel, some PeerPoint critics argue that revolutions are not about tools or technology, they are just about people and social relations. The politically correct position in some circles is that technology doesn't make revolutions, people make revolutions. Tell that to an Afghan tribesman and see if he will discard his AK-47 or his satellite phone.[???]

 [The war example is good, not the ingeniuity of leaders but technological progress often shifts the weights. There is a phrase by Ernst Jünger that a machine gun outweights the patriotic heroism of a 1914 volunteer battalion]

As Elinor Ostrom wrote in her last words to the world before her death on June 12, 2012,

 

“The goal now must be to build sustainability into the DNA of our globally interconnected society. Time is the natural resource in shortest supply...We have a decade to act before the economic cost of current viable solutions becomes too high. Without action, we risk catastrophic and perhaps irreversible changes to our life-support system. Our primary goal must be to take planetary responsibility for this risk, rather than placing in jeopardy the welfare of future generations.”

 

The bottom line is that the PeerPoint Open Design Specification project is meant to promote a more rapid and coherent development of our next generation of non-violent weapons of social revolution.

 

Let those who don't think we need a non-violent social revolution shut the hell up and get out of the way.

We have lots of programmers, but not lots of time.

 

At the very least we need to offer something like an X-Prize (or an X-P2P Prize) and we need to be ready and willing to fund and provision projects that fall within PeerPoint’s conceptual design scope. That could begin right now with FreedomBox, a base on which a PeerPoint might be constructed.

So pony up, folks. Like the old auctioneer says, “What’s it worth? You tell me.”

Poor Richard

“All right, now, folks–what’s it worth? Com’on–you tell me!”

PeerPoint Requirements Definition

PeerPoint Requirements will be divided into the following (frequently overlapping) topics:

Tier 1

  1. integrated development tools
  2. identity management
  3. semantic web ontology
  4. security & anonymity
  5. system library 
  6. library of p2p middleware and APIs
  7. distributed data store 
  8. trust/reputation metrics
  9. asynchronous communication
  10. real-time communication

Tier 2

  1. social networking
  2. crowdsourcing: content collaboration
  3. project management/workflow
  4. enterprise resource planning
  5. complementary currency and exchange systems
  6. crowdfunding
  7. accounting and financial reporting
  8. voting
  9. search

Tier 3

  1. thinktank farming
  2. computing resource sharing (cpu, graphics card, storage, bandwidth, etc.) (Parallella)
  3. 3D hypergrid browsing
  4. 3D game engines
  5. computer-aided design (CAD) tools
  6. data analysis and visualization
  7. Personal Health Record (PHR) system
  8. Disaster Preparedness & recovery

I. PeerPoint Requirements: Integrated Development Tools

II. PeerPoint Requirements: Identity Management (IM)

The first step in defining the problem space of identity management is to define identity. What is it?  From The Free Dictionary (tfd.com):

identity: 1. The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known

Wikipedia defines Digital identity as “a set of data that uniquely describes a person or a thing (sometimes referred to as subject or entity) and contains information about the subject's relationships to other entities.The social identity that an internet user establishes through digital identities in cyberspace is referred to as online identity. A critical problem in cyberspace is knowing with whom you are interacting. In essence, the problem is that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

According to Wikiperdia, “an online identity, internet identity, or internet persona, is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. It can also be considered as an actively constructed presentation of oneself. Although some people prefer to use their real names online, some internet users prefer to be anonymous, identifying themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information. An online identity may even be determined by a user's relationship to a certain social group they are a part of online. Some can even be deceptive about their identity. In some online contexts, including Internet forums, MUDs, instant messaging, and massively multiplayer online games, users can represent themselves visually by choosing an avatar, an icon-sized graphic image. Avatars, digital representations of oneself or proxy that stands in for a person in virtual worlds, are how users express their online identity. As other users interact with an established online identity, it acquires a reputation, which enables them to decide whether the identity is worthy of trust. Some websites also use the user's IP address to track their online identities using methods such as tracking cookies.”

PeerPoint IM Terms and Definitions

Identity conceptual view (credit: Wikipedia)

Rdf-graph3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Identity management problem space

The PeerPoint requirements will explore various parts of the Identity Management problem space, all of which overlap or interpenetrate each other:

  1. description
  2. classification
  3. identity provisioning and discovery (directory services, including identity & directory linking, mapping, and federation)
  4. authentication (validation/verification of ID, security certificates, security tokens, security token service)
  5. authorization (access control, role-based access control, single sign on)
  6. security (anonymity, vulnerabilities, risk management)

1. Identity Description

Description is meant here in its most general sense as the entire set of attributes and values that describe an entity, and not simply a "description" box or field in a record. This is the aspect of identity management which establishes the attributes and values by which an entity is typically recognizable or known in a particular context. A description can attempt to be exhaustive, but in most cases it is only as complete as required for its intended purpose in a given application.

PeerPoint requirements:

One of the most basic entities in social networking systems is the person, member, or user account. The identity description for such an entity is commonly called a "user profile." User profiles are also found in most applications that involve online collaboration. The most primitive form of user account consists of a user ID (or UID) and a password, where both the ID and password are simple alphanumeric strings. But increasingly, user accounts for social and collaborative applications include elaborate user profiles. Facebook is a good example, having one of the most extensive user profiles of any internet application.

Below is a partial screenshot of Poor Richard's Facebook Profile:

The information in a Facebook User Profile is organized into numerous logical categories. Some not shown include the user's friends, Facebook groups to which the user belongs, and a personal library of documents and images. Other profile sections include free-form text.

Many of the profile data categories such as "Arts and Entertainment" may include unlimited numbers of "likes" or tags. These are added via an intuitive interface in which the user begins typing something such as a-r-e-t-h-a- -f-r-a-n-k... and as the user types, a list of matching tags is displayed and  continuously updated with each keystroke, showing possible matches from the Facebook database. If no match is found by the end of typing, the entered tag label is displayed as-is with a generic icon. Facebook's database of entities in the various categories is created and maintained primarily by Facebook users who create Facebook "pages" for people, groups, companies, products, movies, authors, artists, etc.

Other social network sites have profile features not found in the Facebook User Profile. Google + adds a feature to the "friends" data category called "circles" and a homepage feature called "hangouts". Google + users can organize friends into user-defined categories called circles that inter-operate with other Google apps, and can create live audio-video chat groups with user-defined membership.

LinkedIn has additional profile data categories for resumes, cvs, and employment references, recommendations or testimonials.

In addition to users, on various social networks accounts may be created for special-interest groups, fan clubs, companies, organizations, and topic pages of all kinds. The structures of the profiles for different types of accounts on different networks vary widely.

Very limited, generic profiles are also hosted by services such as Gravatar and About.me.

Sample Gravatar profile:

OpenID Simple Registation is an extension to the OpenID Authentication protocol that allows for very light-weight profile exchange. It is designed to pass eight commonly requested pieces of information when an End User goes to register a new account with a web service.

A Personal Data Service (PDS) is “a personal, digital identity management service controlled by an individual. It gives the user a central point of control for their personal information (e.g. interests, contact information, affiliations, preferences, friends). The user's data attributes being managed by the service may be stored in a co-located repository, or they may be stored multiple external distributed repositories, or a combination of both. Attributes from a PDS may be accessed via an API. Users of the same PDS instance may be allowed to selectively share sets of attributes with other users.” (Wikipedia)

Gravatar and OpenID SR are simple examples of what PeerPoint will call a meta-profile. More elaborate meta-profile systems are evolving, such as:

PeerPoint requirements:

2. Identity Classification: "people, places and things"

Different kinds of entities have different kinds of descriptions, so an important part of the identity management problem is the problem of sorting things into various categories. Sorting things into categories or classes is often called categorization or  classification. Classification systems are often called taxonomies. Examples might include the index of an encyclopedia, a library card catalog, or a glossary of internet terms.

In the case of information systems, the term ontology means "a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations." (tfd.com)  Wikipedia says  "An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and their properties and relations. Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework.

Another related term in information systems is namespace, often used in relation to wiki structures and directory services.

Semantic ontologies are often implemented as systems of structured metadata that can be added to web pages, embedded in HTML or XML,  or embeded in scripts or other code that runs in browsers or other clients servers, or peer nodes..

In identity management, two of the main systems of categories, or taxonomies, would be categories of entities and categories of attributes. Attributes are themselves categories of values (the attribute "color" is a category of colors: red, blue, green, etc.).

Examples of high-level categories of entities might include:

Examples of very high-level categories of attributes could include:

These taxonomies become semantic web ontologies when they are defined in machine-readable protocols such as:

Linked Data

One great advantage of machine-readable ontologies is the ability to semantically link data across the web.

Linked Data Platform Use Cases And Requirements (W3C)

Linking open-data community project

The goal of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach group's Linking Open Data community project is to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. In October 2007, datasets consisted of over two billion RDF triples, which were interlinked by over two million RDF links. By September 2011 this had grown to 31 billion RDF triples, interlinked by around 504 million RDF links. There is also an interactive visualization of the linked data sets to browse through the cloud.

Dataset instance and class relationships

Clickable diagrams that show the individual datasets and their relationships within the DBpedia-spawned LOD cloud, as shown by the figures above, are:

3. Identity provisioning and discovery (directory services, including identity & directory linking, mapping, and federation)

(PeerPoint requirements to be determined)

“A directory service is the software system that stores, organizes and provides access to information in a directory. In software engineering, a directory is a map between names and values. It allows the lookup of values given a name, similar to a dictionary. As a word in a dictionary may have multiple definitions, in a directory, a name may be associated with multiple, different pieces of information. Likewise, as a word may have different parts of speech and different definitions, a name in a directory may have many different types of data.” (Wikipedia)

4. Authentication (validation/verification of ID, security certificates, security tokens, security token services))

(PeerPoint requirements to be determined)

In an article on Digital identity Wikipedia observes, “Currently there are no ways to precisely determine the identity of a person in digital space. Even though there are attributes associated to a person's digital identity, these attributes or even identities can be changed, masked or dumped and new ones created. Despite the fact that there are many authentication systems and digital identifiers that try to address these problems, there is still a need for a unified and verified identification system in cyberspace.”

5. Authorization (access control, role-based access control, single sign-on)

(PeerPoint requirements to be determined)

6. Security (privacy, anonymity, vulnerabilities, risk management)

(PeerPoint requirements to be determined)

Security can never be 100%.  It is often based on trust and reputation, which we need for a web without gatekeepers.

Privacy and anonymity can be thought of as a forms of security.

Security by obscurity is an important principle.  

Many writers take the view that there is no such thing as anonymity on the internet (search “no such thing as anonymity on the internet” for sources) due to data mining and pattern analysis technologies. Kat Orphanides writes: “Even if you disable cookies, your browser could easily share enough information to give you a unique signature on the web. I've been testing the computers I use on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Panopticlick website, which reports the identifying information your browser is sharing and compares it against data it has already collected from other users. So far, every system I've tested has been uniquely identifiable.”

Perhaps if identity can be discovered heuristically, that’s the way PeerPoint should go, rather than using certificates, tokens, etc. On the other hand, perhaps part of Peerpoint’s requirements should be methods for obfuscating such identifying patterns to preserve anonymity when that is a user’s desire. Is it possible to distinguish between legitimate (e.g. political) and illegitimate (e.g. criminal) reasons for anonymity?

Freedom not Fear (freedomnotfear.org and eff.com)

                                                         

Connect.me Connect.Me is the first P2P reputation and discovery network that works across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other providers. As you build your reputation, you can use it to curate the social web by vouching for the people, content and businesses you trust. Connect.Me is not just a new app, it’s the beginning of a larger movement to put people back in control of the social web.

Identity Management Resources

The xID system is concerned solely with identity, and does not store any other data than the xID records. Related data, such as medical records or legal records, are stored separately, and include xID certificate references.

LAWS OF IDENTITY IN BRIEF

1. User Control and Consent:

Digital identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent. (Starts here…)

2. Limited Disclosure for Limited Use

The solution which discloses the least identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable, long-term solution. (Starts here…)

3. The Law of Fewest Parties

Digital identity systems must limit disclosure of identifying information to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship. (Starts here…)

4. Directed Identity

A universal identity metasystem must support both “omnidirectional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles. (Starts here…)

5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies:

A universal identity metasystem must channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers. (Starts here…)

6. Human Integration:

A unifying identity metasystem must define the human user as a component integrated through protected and unambiguous human-machine communications. (Starts here…)

7. Consistent Experience Across Contexts:

A unifying identity metasystem must provide a simple consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies. (Starts here…)

III. PeerPoint Requirements: Security and Anonymity

Security can never be 100%.  It is often based on trust and reputation, which we need for a web without gatekeepers.

Privacy and anonymity can be thought of as a forms of security.

Security by obscurity is an important principle.  

Many writers take the view that there is no such thing as anonymity on the internet (search “no such thing as anonymity on the internet” for sources) due to data mining and pattern analysis technologies. Kat Orphanides writes: “Even if you disable cookies, your browser could easily share enough information to give you a unique signature on the web. I've been testing the computers I use on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Panopticlick website, which reports the identifying information your browser is sharing and compares it against data it has already collected from other users. So far, every system I've tested has been uniquely identifiable.”

Perhaps if identity can be discovered heuristically, that’s the way PeerPoint should go, rather than using certificates, tokens, etc. On the other hand, perhaps part of Peerpoint’s requirements should be methods for obfuscating such identifying patterns to preserve anonymity when that is a user’s desire. Is it possible to distinguish between legitimate (e.g. political) and illegitimate (e.g. criminal) reasons for anonymity?

Freedom not Fear (freedomnotfear.org and eff.com)

                                                         

TrustCloud: A Framework for Accountability and Trust in Cloud Computing (hp.com)

CryptoParty Handbook This 392 page, Creative Commons licensed handbook is designed to help those with no prior experience to protect their basic human right to Privacy in networked, digital domains. By covering a broad array of topics and use contexts it is written to help anyone wishing to understand and then quickly mitigate many kinds of vulnerability using free, open-source tools.

IV. PeerPoint Requirements: semantic web ontology

V. PeerPoint Requirements: system library 

VI. Library of P2P Middleware and APIs

VII. PeerPoint Requirements: distributed data store

misc: Storage Quota Management API (W3C)

VIII. Trust/reputation Metrics

PeerPoint Requirements:

- user ratings/reports of peer nodes

- white/black lists of peers (by individuals, groups, communities, institutions, etc)

- hierarchical ID/trust certificate authorities (groups, communities, trusted institutions, states, etc.)

xID In accordance with The Standards of LIFE for Information, the xID specification uses a distributed storage model that allows data to be held in separated silos that are as close to the people they serve as is practical, given the security requirements. It also specifies the nature of a transaction between trusted and untrusted systems that returns verification results without exposing or compromising the contents of the identity record.

The xID system is concerned solely with identity, and does not store any other data than the xID records. Related data, such as medical records or legal records, are stored separately, and include xID certificate references.

- A heuristic method for predicting trustworthiness of a potential peer (“You may like these peer nodes...”)

“What we want is peers that are trusted by entities like ourselves, and/or have engaged in transactions that are beneficial to entities like ourselves, not those that allegedly trust entities that we trust and have allegedly engaged in transactions like those that we have engaged in.” (James        <p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com> p2p-hackers Digest, Vol 69, Issue 12)

“The dataset I wish to collect and make public doesn't say anything about what the transactions actually are. The optimizing factors are success rate and transfer rate. [The Slope One and Singular Value Decomposition] algorithms are typically employed for "recommendation systems" such as the one seen on Amazon, i.e. "based on your behavior we think you'll like products X, Y, and Z", where recommendations are driven by a large corpus of user data. I am attempting to perform a similar calculation, except in this case it's "based on my behavior I think I'll like peers X, Y, and Z", and the calculation is driven by a large corpus of peer interaction metadata the

system collects and distributes by design.” (Tony <p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com> p2p-hackers Digest, Vol 69, Issue 12)

Resources:

PeerTrust: In an open peer-to-peer information system, peers often have to interact with unfamiliar peers and need to manage the risk that is involved with the interactions. PeerTrust aims to develop a trust mechanism for such system so peers can quantify and compare the trustworthiness of other peers and perform trusted interactions based on their past interaction histories without trusted third parties.

TrustCloud: A Framework for Accountability and Trust in Cloud Computing (hp.com)

Building Trust in P2P Marketplaces  (p2pfoundation.net) Transparency is key

On the Web, vast amounts of data are created every day. Most of the companies I examined in my thesis are looking for ways to make this data available and useful to users, for instance by calculating so-called “trust scores” with the help of algorithms. These scores, which are based on data from social networks and other sources (that provide things like damage reports, peer reviews and transaction history) are supposed to help strangers judge each other’s trustworthiness. This information facilitates and accelerates the process of building trust between strangers on the Web. Since you take your trust score with you whatever platform you are on, it encourages good behavior. A person who has worked hard to build up an online reputation will not want to jeopardize that. My research also showed that it is crucial for companies offering these systems to remain as transparent as possible about how their trust scores are derived. Since trust is complex and every platform requires different dimensions of trust, every person should be able to understand the score and decide themselves whether they want to trust a person or not. Being a good driver is very different, for example, from being a friendly and reliable CouchSurfing host.

Another issue with creating trust and identity systems in general is data privacy. The functioning of these trust systems heavily depends on the users’ willingness to give a third party their data in return for building their online reputation, and not everyone is willing to do that. Especially in countries outside the U.S. people seem to be reluctant to reveal their personal data to third parties. It’s thus crucial for companies working on trust systems to gain the trust of users and P2P platforms. As Simon Baumann, PR Spokesperson at the German ride-sharing company Carpooling.com noted, “the question is always, how trustworthy the trust system is.”

Breiifly, Breiifly Blog

Legit aims to be the Credit System of the Sharing Economy. We correlate data across marketplaces, creating a holistic picture of a user's reputation. Legit measures real, transaction-based accountability without relying on social network data. Overall behavior improves when everyone is held accountable. Real-time alerts keep you up to date so you can act before damage is caused. Plus, the good reputation that users build on other marketplaces empowers them on yours.

Slope One is a family of algorithms used for collaborative filtering, introduced in a 2005 paper by Daniel Lemire and Anna Maclachlan. Arguably, it is the simplest form of non-trivial item-based collaborative filtering based on ratings. Their simplicity makes it especially easy to implement them efficiently while their accuracy is often on par with more complicated and computationally expensive algorithms. (Wikipedia)

VIIII. Asynchronous Communication

X.  Real-time Communication

-------------------------

PeerPoint Comment/Discussion

Excerpts from PeerPoint discussions:

bunch of interconnected dots, nodes and arcs, then have a good ol' stare

at it, you'll quickly recognise every architecture you can conceive in

there: centralization, decentralization, neighbourhoods, client-server

relations, hubs, p2p networks - clients can only make requests, servers

can receive requests, peers can do both.

 

If you stick a uniform interface (e.g. HTTP) in front of anything (data

store, web service, data transformation service) and address those

things using uniform names (e.g. URIs), and have them communicate using

uniform media types (e.g. RDF, CSV, JSON w/ schemas) then the boundaries

are broken down, universality and generality prevail.

 

The web can be seen as a bunch of interconnected agents, communicating

for one reason or another - it exactly models the same connections we

have in the real world, it's a social system - the human world is just a

bunch of interconnected agents communicating for one reason or another.

 

IMHO, the PeerPoint document describes the web. Begins to capture what's

possible when you realise you can couple a server+client together, and

more importantly has the right social and ethical reasons behind it.

 

Turing discovered that if you standardize the input in to a machine, you

don't have to break it down and rebuild it every time you want to do a

new task. Perhaps now people are realizing that we don't have to break

down and rebuild our apps every time we want them to do a new task, all

we have to do is standardize the input and output.

 

Imagine what would be possible with a standardized web dav like protocol

for uniform data (rdf/linked data in various forms), and a standardized

API for using that data - pretty much everything. Especially when you

consider that 95%+ of what every web developer and programmer ever does

is just data transformation, take that out of the equation and you have

a world of developers with 95% of their time free to innovate, create

and discover. (more...)

data.fm is "the other project" which is truly way ahead of the field at the minute, it's a RESTful, multi-auth* enabled store which supports querying, CRUD, automatic media type transformation, data browsers and even tabulator panes to view data. It's also open source and you can run your own instances very easily. Highly highly recommended.

Tabulator is also worth mentioning here, it's one of TimBL’s long running code based projects and is simply wonderful too - very well designed, and extensible in every way - Tim of course also understands data inside out, and the webizing of systems.

The three projects above are very much complementary, all interlinked, Kingsley (openlink) knows TimBL (tabulator/wem/semweb) knows Joe (creator of data.fm, from Tim's team at MIT). It may be fair to say that each of the projects wouldn't be quite what they are today without the presence of the others.

IMHO, the most valuable thing anybody in this group can do is to take the time to fully understand:

1) Virtuoso+ODS and Kingsley's blog posts

2) Tabulator + TimBLs Design Issues

3) Data.fm and it's correlations to 1+2

Those three can be seen as the reference implementations of the next generation of the web, one which can easily be P2P too, and which continues to be built, standardized and innovated around. (more...)”

Resources

Facebook is eating the world, except for China and Russia: World map of social networks http://tnw.to/b06w

Organizations

           

Related software, projects, and technologies

Semantic Web Stack:

(Wikipedia) An application is a compilation of various functionalities all typically following the same pattern. Applications can be classified in various types depending on the Application Architecture Pattern they follow. A "pattern" has been defined as: "an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others”. To create patterns, one needs building blocks. Building blocks are components of software, mostly reusable, which can be utilised to create certain functions. Patterns are a way of putting building blocks into context and describe how to use the building blocks to address one or multiple architectural concerns. Applications typically follow one of the following industry-standard application architecture patterns: [Note: peer-to-peer can mean client-to-client or server-to-server, and within one node it can include client-server, too. Multiple clients and/or servers can reside on a node and act as a team. Stand-alone or conventional free/open (non-p2p) client-side applications can potentially be modified to communicate with remote peers as well.]

The client/server characteristic describes the relationship of cooperating programs in an application. The server component provides a function or service to one or many clients, which initiate requests for such services.

With the responsibilities of each component thus defined, MVC allows different views and controllers to be developed for the same model. It also allows the creation of general-purpose software frameworks to manage the interactions

Comparison with the MVC architecture: At first glance, the three tiers may seem similar to the model-view-controller (MVC) concept; however, topologically they are different. A fundamental rule in a three tier architecture is the client tier never communicates directly with the data tier; in a three-tier model all communication must pass through the middle tier. Conceptually the three-tier architecture is linear. However, the MVC architecture is triangular: the view sends updates to the controller, the controller updates the model, and the view gets updated directly from the model

Three-tier application architecture

.

nathan writes: “ODS is layered on top of virtuoso. Each module is not only already packaged with existing UI's, but due to it's heritage, each module is also available via SOAP and REST, meaning you can build your own applications and UIs over the top of it - as browser apps, on client, server or on peers. IMHO ODS-Briefcase is one of the most wonderful modules available for it, it's basically a really nice RESTful WEBDAV enabled data store package, with full support for multiple auth* protocols right up to WebID, and which recognises different data types. For instance it allows RDF that's been PUT/POSTed to be sponged straight in to the very powerful SPARQL-enabled triple running behind the scenes. E.G. it understands your data and serves as both a CRUD store, and a more advanced store which you can query extremely fast, using v powerful query languages like SPARQL.”

melvincarvalho wrote: “One system I really like technically is RetroShare.  It's open source, has first class developers, who really know their stuff. and an active, working, community.  One team has already ported libretroshare into a browser.  Imagine reatlime, secure, encrypted, chat straight in your browser, plus a ton of other features.  There's even  little chess game you can plug in to the framework so you can challenge your friends.  Once you see this working it's a real paradigm shift, that makes you think 'why doesnt every browser do this?'.”

         

Kune Addendum via Samer @ unlike-us@listcultures.org, Wed, 31 Oct 2012:

“We thought you might be interested in the new release of the collaborative federated social network Kune, codename "Ostrom" http://kune.cc/ Kune is focused in real-time collaboration (not just communication), in building (not just in sharing). This new release is fully multi-lingual, supporting 12 languages, and with multiple improvements. It is coined "Ostrom" as a homage to the Nobel Prize of Economics Elinor Ostrom, who demonstrated how the Commons can be managed by their communities in a better and more successful way than how the State and the Market manage them.”

“Kune aims to be a free/libre decentralized social network, so you would stop using Facebook. It provides real-time simultaneous collaborative edition of documents so you can stop using Google Docs and wikis. It allows you to communicate in discussion lists, so you stop using mailing lists and Google/Yahoo/MSN Groups. It provides group calendars so you forget about Google Calendar. It provides chat compatible with Gmail/Jabber chat accounts of your friends. It allows galleries of images, videos, maps or any rich contents, so you can stop using Flickr/Youtube. It provides multiple other tools for collaboration such as polls, doodles, or add-ons (same way as the Firefox add-ons). It is an advanced mail inbox so you use less and less your classical e-mail. And eventually, it will allow publishing contents to the general public so you would be able to create your own customized group web-pages without needing any CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc).”

 

OS, we could just point "hello.nn" to an IP address  - in one step the

DNS system is circumvented and taken out of the equation.

Step 2 we make a quick app that updates the hosts file from a data source.

Step 3 we webize DNS records in a standard format (linked data) and have

app from step 2 read those records and update our hosts file.

It's small and doesn't scale out of the box, but we'd quickly have an

alternative to DNS and shared understanding, and free "domains".

 From there you just scale up, make a net mounted DHT for these records

and so forth - others more skilled in that area can do that.

The main takeaway is that it's possible, really easy to start doing, and

that HTTP and other protocols will all work out of the box thanks to the

abstractions built in to URIs as names.

... it's nice to consider a P2P web where DNS is replaced by open DHTs, and where each node on the network is both client and server (peer) serving and responding to HTTP requests. If you think about it, HTTP is a nigh on perfect async communication method for peers to communicate with each other, POSTing back replies when they are ready. Tip: the last section of the REST dissertation has a complimentary note on this, where Roy mentions that adding a simple message identifier header would allow async communication with messages being returned in whatever order was fastest, rather than whatever order they were requested in.

P2P Application Examples

Opera Unite (video) Opera Unite is not free/open software, but this is an example of functionality that belongs in PeerPpoint. Another Opera Unite demo. Opera Unite was dropped but Opera 12 also includes features for p2p peeps to die for.

Syndie 

This information about Syndie is included as an example of an application designed for a peer-to-peer world. PeerPoint applications, in addition to being integrated with one-another, would ideally be designed for use in many network environments by people with many different security and anonymity requirements.

Syndie is an open source system for operating distributed forums (Why would you use Syndie?), offering a secure and consistent interface to various anonymous and non-anonymous content networks.

On the whole, Syndie works at the *content layer* - individual posts are contained in encrypted zip files, and participating in the forum means simply sharing these files. There are no dependencies upon how the files are transferred (over I2P, Tor, Freenet, gnutella, bittorrent, RSS, usenet, email), but simple aggregation and distribution tools will be bundled with the standard Syndie release.

Syndie Technical features

While its structure leads to a large number of different configurations, most needs will be met by selecting one of the options from each of the following three criteria:

* reading is authorized by giving people the symmetric key or passphrase to decrypt the post. Alternately, the post may include a publicly visible prompt, where the correct answer serves to generate the correct decryption key.

** posting, updating, and/or commenting is authorized by providing those users with asymmetric private keys to sign the posts with, where the corresponding public key is included in the forum's metadata as authorized to post, manage, or comment on the forum. Alternately, the signing public keys of individual authorized users may be listed in the medtata.

Individual posts may contain many different elements:

Other specifications similar/related to PeerPoint

FreedomBox

Roadmap

  1. Requirements Specification
  2. Design Specification
  3. Implementation Phase
  4. Polishing, Testing, Verification, Validation Phase

User Requirements

  1. WishList
  2. Use Cases
  1. Sharing pictures with friends
  2. Social networker
  3. Political Activist
  4. Non-computer savvy person
  5. Making data backup
  6. Developer
  7. User's web site becomes visible after plugging device into network behind NAT router

Software Requirements

  1. Software requirements
  1. Physical layer requirements
  2. System features
  3. Interface requirements
  1. User interfaces
  2. Hardware interfaces
  3. Software interfaces
  4. Communications interfaces
  1. Other Non functional requirements
  1. Performance Requirements
  2. Safety Requirements
  3. Security Requirements
  4. Software Quality Attributes
  5. Communications protocols
  6. Error handling
  1. Other requirements
  1. Database requirements
  2. Internationalization requirements
  3. Legal requirements
  4. Reuse objectives for the project

Freedombox Mailing List Poll

Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 07:39:43 -0500
From: Nick Daly
To: freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org
Subject: [Freedombox-discuss] What You Want from a FreedomBox!

Hi folks, the votes are in (people have stopped replying to the original
thread), so here's how the votes have broken down.  

In tallying these votes, I do not claim to have perfectly interpreted
everyone's words, nor do I claim to have made no mistakes.  The emails
to this list themselves are the raw data, so my inaccuracies should be
self-evident.  I counted each vote in each email once (I did *not* count
one vote per email) and attempted to include all sub-threads and
side-threads of the "What do you want in a FreedomBox?" email chain.

The data are sorted by number of votes for each category, then by number
of votes per service, and finally alphabetically, when services share
votes.

Social Sharing/Connections/Network tool (20):

- Email: XXXXX
- Jabber: XXXXX
- Social Media Network: XXX
- Etherpad: XX
- VOIP/Video Chat: XX
- Plans: X
- Real-time messaging: X
- Social bookmarks: X

Privacy Device (20):

- Censorship Circumvention: XXXXXX
- Privacy Device: XXXXX
- Ad-free Internet: XXXX
- Anonymous Internet: XXX
- Anonymous Chat: XX

Self-publishing tool (13):

- Photo Sharing: XXXXX
- Wiki: XXXX
- Blog: XXX
- Website: X

Backup tool (12):

- Dropbox: XXXXXX
- Backup tool: XXXXX
- Crypto-key recovery: X

Personal Information Manager (6):

- Personal Information Manager: XXXXX
- Identity Provider: X

Connectivity Device (5):

- IPv6/IPsec Router: XXXX
- Mesh Network: X

Media Device (4):

- Media Device: XXX
- Podcast Downloader: X

The Other Category (uncounted):

- Ripple (??): X

- Data Gathering System: X

- PeerPoint (??): X

- WebBox: X

- Shell Account (??): X

- E-Currency Wallet: X

Just thought you'd like to know and comment on how this all turned out.
This will also help inform the direction of the next hackfest.  Please
pick up a project and coordinate with other interested members of the
list to start integrating the service into the FreedomBox.

As a side-note, I was *really* surprised by the results.  I didn't
expect to see the privacy category get as many votes as the social
category, nor did I expect email to be quite so popular.

Nick

- The Soveriegn Computing Manifesto The purpose of sovereign computing is to bring to the Internet the kinds of freedoms we have in real life, but have lost online.

                

- The Free Network Movement (Free Network Foundation) Free network definition: Our intention is to build communications systems that are owned by the people that use them, that allow participants to own their own data, and that use end-to-end encryption and cryptographic trust mechanisms to assure privacy. We call such systems 'free networks' and they are characterized by the following five freedoms:

Free Network Platform Components

Ends and Means of the Free Network Movement

- We The Data Is an extensive definition of the problem space. “We The Data asked a crowd of experts what is arguably this century’s most important questions: How can we make our data work for us and not against?  Where must we focus our know-how and creativity so the power in our data is democratized and made vibrant with meaning and value for every individual creating it? What emerged is a nexus of Core Challenges, that if solved together, we believe will catalyze the most positive change. Our goal is to spark synergy among people and organizations who are tackling a nexus of interdependent Core Challenges and collectively giving rise to the Gutenburg press of our era: flows of data that are at once more fluid and more trustworthy, new and more accessible tools for analysis and visualization, and vehicles of communication and collaboration that help communities come together to gain a voice, mobilize resources, coordinate action, and create the ventures of the future.”                

- The Global Square specs partially overlap with PeerPoint

- SecuShare currently only includes social networking, file sharing, and IM apps, but this link compares features of existing tools and should be useful for developing more detailed specs.

Video on design issues and existing projects in the social space: http://vimeo.com/39256857

- Social Swarm   Criteria for software evaluation  List of candidate software

- Safebook: a Privacy Preserving Online Social Network (pdf) This specification covers social networking only, but has a good discussion of p2p architecture. Additional documentation is available at http://www.safebook.us . Safebook beta code was apparently acquired by MatchUpBox, whose site appears to be under development. The MatchUpBox graphic below indicates content management functionality, but no further specs seem to be available yet.

- Value Network Infrastructure 

(Sensorica, Greener Acres) [Note: the user-facing, front-end functionality is similar to PeerPoint, but in the general features section below, a peer-to-peer back-end architecture is not specified. This is a major difference at the software engineering level.]

What is an infrastructure?

The Wikipedia definition

Our working definition: an infrastructure is a coherent set of tools used by an individual or a group to fulfill certain tasks in order to achieve certain goals.

Value networks need an infrastructure in order function. This infrastructure is intended to facilitate value creation, exchange, transformation and consumption.

Example: online collaborative communities need tools for communication, coordination, project management, data storage and sharing, etc. All these tools can be made interoperable, and can be integrated together into an infrastructure, offering a unified work environment, user-friendly interfaces, etc.

General features of the infrastructure

  1. Open source - access to the source code, so that everyone can trust the system and help to improve it.
  2. User-friendly - easy to use tools, reducing learning barriers, intuitive environment, transparent
  3. Organic - giving access to members to modify/improve it
  4. Scalable - able to support millions of users
  5. Fractal - allows easy exchange of data between different value networks and allows their coalescence into super-networks
  6. Easy to maintain - being open source, development and maintenance is delegated to an open community, modular
  7. Free - or very low cost, allowing everyone in the world to use it, reducing economical barriers
  8. Portable - interface with all imaginable digital devices, with mobile and location-based applications  

Some other considerations

The value network is also a social “animal”, something that gives members feedback, asks members for involvement, etc. There must be some Artificial Intelligence in there, to analyse data about activity, social data, about value and how it flows, about what’s needed, what’s urgent, etc. Have active systems, automated agents send out alerts to the right members, according to their roles and their reputation. This thing must also be able to interact with those who come in contact with it for the first time. Value networks have a social skin! [tibi]

Important systems/modules

  1. Individual Profile
  2. Self-organization
  1. The value accounting and exchange system 
  2. The reputation system 
  3. The role system 
  4. Decision making 
  5. Normative system
  6. Feedback system 
  1. Metrics 
  2. Visualization
  1. Mapping
  1. geographical mapping
  2. process mapping
  1. Others
  1. Incentive system
  2. Education system
  1. Value production
  1. Inventory/materials management system 
  2. Project management
  1. alert system - take info from project management and send our emails + general posts, alerts.
  1. Shared database
  2. Communications
  1. In-network communications
  2. External communications
  1. Coordination
  2. Collaboration
  1. SENSORICA labonline and open labonline networks
  2. Virtual working space
  1. Value Distribution
  1. Service system
  2. External communication

Use Case Examples

- Use Case: The Indignados Movement, Lorea, N-1

- Use Case: ALEC envy we need to copy, hack, and re-mix parts of the ALEC model into a new model that is a venue for creating public interest open source legislation.  The right-wing ALEC is run like a criminal conspiracy. An open Citizen’s Legislative Exchange Council (CLEC) can be run like a democratic cooperative. The old ALEC is sick in the original sense of the word but a new public-interest CLEC could be sick in a street way, yo.

                        

                

- Use Case: Next Net Infrastructure & Roadmap A Roadmap for transition to a distributed, decentralized infrastructure that would exist under a commons based co-ownership model instead of corporate or government control. The Free Network Movement, presented their manifesto for the big picture 5 stage process of transition. (lightly edited):

Stage 1: The Co-op

Stage one consists of the emergence of network access cooperatives. [A mesh network] allows us to share a single internet connection amongst many physically disparate locations. We and many others are able to purchase Internet access cooperatively, thus driving down the amount that each of us pays. This struggle for collective purchasing will happen in many towns and cities, in city blocks and subdivisions, in residential towers and intentional communities. The obvious economic advantage to the end user (reduced cost) makes this an easy sell to the people

.

Stage 2: The Digital Village

The unseen benefit of the aforementioned co-ops is that they wrest the terminal nodes of the network away from the control of the telco/ISP hegemony. This provides for the opportunity of network applications that are truly peer-to-peer. At first, this will only happen within each isolated cooperative community. Imagine a town that makes shared use of a few pipes, whose flow of information is distributed accross the last mile via mesh. Now imagine each node of that mesh network is a Diaspora pod running a codebase that is specifically designed for use in mesh networks. There is still a reliance on the big pipes for access to the wider internet, but to pass each other messages and participate in social networking, at the town level, a truly peer-to-peer architecture will be in place. Thus arises the digital village. What used to be just a co-op for purchasing access has suddenly become a community that is able to share information directly with one another. It takes only a little more imagination to see that Diaspora is one of many applications that could run on this architecture.

Stage 3: Towards Unity

Using packet tunnelling (i.e. Freenet or TOR) in concert with the existing global network, we can simulate the contiguity of geographically disparate digital villages. Suddenly, people all over the world are able to share with one another directly. Specify a user@a_node@a_network and you’ve got a unique address for each network user. Of course, the corporate giants still own the backbone at this stage, which is why we can only say *towards* unity.

Stage 4: A Backbone of our Own

Stage 4 is when the dream of true co-ownership becomes a reality. In this stage, the corporate-owned fiber backbone is replaced with a community-owned backbone. This could be accomplished via a constellation of telecommunications satellites or the construction of HF or Whitespace radios. Satellite dishes or TV-Band towers would replace the pipes that used to come from the ISP, and their connectivity could be distributed throughout every digital village. The only cost that anyone would ever have to pay for network access would be the cost of a mesh node (could be integrated into a PC, or shareable stand alone). Not everyone will be able to afford a node, which is why the roadmap doesn’t end with Stage 4.

Stage 5: A Human Right

Once the Mesh Interface for Network Devices is global, energies can be focused towards providing a node to anyone who wants one. We believe that access to the network is a human right, and this is our vision for supplying it to all of humanity.

A Few Notes:

A common counter-argument to this proposal is that mesh technologies don’t scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Our rebuttal is that they won’t have to. The federation of digital villages means that no single mesh would have to grow larger than some optimal number. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that mesh routing protocols will improve rapidly in the near future. The wide release of B.A.T.M.A.N. will provide for a significant improvement in performance of O.L.S.R.

Resources:

- Use Case: Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform by Helene Finidori. This is a use case that demands a sophisticated technology platform like PeerPoint.

                                                           

 

 

In january 2011, The Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-moon, called for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival. A year later, the Global Sustainability Panel he created to this effect published its recommendations report for Rio+20: Resilient people, resilient Planet, a future worth choosing. The vision of the GSP as expressed in the report revolves around choice, influence, participation and action, and calls for a political process "able to summon both the arguments and the political will necessary to act for a sustainable future."…

Whether one agrees or not with the principles of political economics put forward by the UN, "activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.

This has been my research subject during the past year which led me to draft an action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation. Inspired by Elinor Estrom's "Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action", the objective is to turn around the tragedy of the commons by empowering individuals and communities, nurturing public wisdom and collective debate, helping push issues onto public agendas, and influencing policy and corporate behavior in a systemic and dynamic perspective.

A group of us is now working to pull together the best elements available or in the making on the web to create a global pull platform to engage for the commons  and enable a form of evolutionary activism as part as of an emergent collective response in the context of a citizen/actor network and peer to peer commons of knowledge.

The principles of the platform.

The platform is structured around commons, issues of social, environmental, economic nature, such as those included in this framework for reliable prosperity, treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.

People subscribe to individual issues then designate the actors who they think may have an influence -positive or negative-  on the status of an issue. This ‘appointment of actors’ by ‘citizen-followers’ creates a pull dynamic. Bringing together the parties susceptible of impacting progression on an issue and those to whom they are accountable will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation. The goal is to create a context favorable to collaboration, exchange of ideas and know-how. The pull dynamic is intended to stimulate political action and on-the-ground response, and ultimately advance the governance of the commons

 

The process consists in letting people/organizations:

The ecosystem is composed of:

Graph, space dashboards of various commons can be combined at various levels for bigger picture views.

The platform creates a context for the following:

 

The design map above gives an idea of the types of modules that would be integrated together. The platform requires the integration of the best existing networks, tools, process methodologies and user interfaces in terms of learning and action research, curation and issues framing, evaluation and moderation, trustnets, debate and deliberation, e-government/governance, collaboration, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, collective action planning, data collection, visualization; with a focus on wisdom and integrity stewardship...

Such an ecosystem would need to be open source and supported by legitimate institutions willing to forward civil participation.

From a Systemic and Dynamic Perspective

In systemic terms the dynamics at play are the following:

Power Dynamics: users -citizens > pull (designate) stakeholders -actors- > seek accountability/evaluate status > push activity > visualize progress > identify gaps / form expectations : a dynamic + feedback loop >> increase learning & informed action >> building engagement culture >> engagement to participate

Action Dynamics: stakeholders -actors > entrusted & challenged to act by users -citizens> acknowledge expectations & gaps > pull & pool resources & solutions to act > report action & progress: a dynamic + feedback loop >> increase access, community & capability >> building a mindful action culture >> empowerment & enablement to act

 

From a user perspective.

A Pull Network emerging from Connecting Citizens, Issues & Stakeholders

The Citizen

The Actor

The Social Graph - Visualizing & Navigating the Network

The Dashboard - Reporting, data collection and visualization

The Learning & Action Space

- Use Case: Creating Sustainable Societies: The Rebirth of Democracy and Local Economies by John Boik, Ph.D. outlines a “Framework of a Principled Society” (p2pfoundation.net). This is the kind of use case that would be well-served by the PeerPoint platform:

“A Principled Society is envisioned as a local entity, but its core elements would be designed to overcome several major weaknesses seen at the national level. In this way, Principled Societies would be extensible to wider implementation in the future. The proposed framework consists of three core elements:

1. A new type of local currency system, called a Token Exchange System. Tokens are an electronic form of currency that circulates within a Society, in conjunction with the dollar. They are used by businesses and individuals to purchase goods and services, as well as fund local development and community services.

2. A new type of socially responsible corporation, called a Principled Business. A Principled Business is a cross between a nonprofit and a for-profit corporation. Like a nonprofit, it fulfills a social mission. Like a for-profit, it is self-sustaining and does not rely on donations. Principled Businesses compete with one another for interest-free loans offered by a Society. They coexist alongside standard businesses.

3. A new type of governance system based on collaborative direct democracy, called a Collaborative Governance System. Members collaborate in the creative problem-solving process of developing new rules. In a Principled Society, members are the legislature. For efficiency, councils would execute day-to-day operations and make minor decisions. Major issues would be decided by the entire membership in a user-friendly, efficient, online process.

The Internet application that would act as the infrastructure for a Principled Society is both practical and technologically achievable. It could be developed as a no-frills initial version perhaps with three to ten years of effort, given adequate funding and community interest. Each year thereafter, further enhancements could follow. From the beginning, the effort will be organic, and hopefully involve many thousands as momentum grows. Each interested person can contribute in small or large ways to move the project forward.”

- Use Case: ThinkFree Cloud Office

This is not open or p2p but is included as a use-case--functionality desired in PeerPoint.

ThinkFree Office is an office program that enables you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Using ThinkFree Online (web office), you can enjoy the office program through a web browser without installing a separate office program in your PC. ThinkFree Mobile allows you to view and edit office documents using your smartphone.ThinkFree Server connects to your company's business system to provide a cloud environment in which you and your coworkers can work on the same document together.In short,ThinkFree Products provide a perfect 'cloud office' environment, the keyword of today's IT.

Wireless

How To Set up Small Campus / Small Enterprise Network - VillageTelco

A village telco consists of a mesh network made up of Wi-Fi mini-routers combined with an analogue telephone adaptor (aka 'Mesh Potato')

OpenBTS at Burning Man: Best Full Story « Public Intelligence Blog

Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man.

Open-Mesh creates ultra low-cost zero-config, plug & play wireless mesh network solutions that spread an Internet connection throughout a hotel, apartment, office, neighborhood, village, coffee shop, shopping mall, campground, marina and just about anywhere else you can imagine.

The Open Source Wireless Coalition (OSWC)

is a global partnership of open source wireless integrators, researchers, implementors and companies dedicated to the development of open source, interoperable, low-cost wireless technologies. OSWC member organizations have pioneered open source wireless research and development and are global leaders in the field. Charter organizations include: Acorn Active Media Foundation, Austin Wireless, BGWireless, CUWiN Foundation, FreeNetworks.org, Freifunk, FunkFeuer, HRFreeNet, Ile Sans Fil, Less Networks, Metrix Communication, NYCwireless, Seattle Wireless, and Wireless Lancaster.

Coalition members have extensive experience creating wireless solutions in municipalities worldwide -- from rural villages in Ghana to major metropolitan areas in Europe and the United States.

Essentials of wireless mesh networking (2009 book)

Aircrack-ng is a network software suite consisting of a detector, packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tool for 802.11 wireless LANs. It works with any wireless network interface controller whose driver supports raw monitoring mode (for a list, visit the website of the project or and can sniff 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g traffic. The program runs under Linux and Windows (wikipedia)

B.A.T.M.A.N. is a routing protocol which is ... intended to replace OLSR. B.A.T.M.A.N.'s crucial point is the decentralization of the knowledge about the best route through the network - no single node has all the data. Using this technique, the need for spreading information concerning network changes to every node in the network becomes superfluous. The individual node only saves information about the “direction” it received data from and sends its data accordingly. Hereby the data gets passed on from node to node and packets get individual, dynamically created routes. A network of collective intelligence is created.

Using an Android as a webserver

The Guardian Project aims to create easy to use apps, open-source firmware MODs, and customized, commercial mobile phones that can be used and deployed around the world, by any person looking to protect their communications and personal data from unjust intrusion and monitoring. While smartphones have been heralded as the coming of the next generation of communication and collaboration, they are a step backwards when it comes to personal

security, anonymity and privacy.

Austrian Programmers Build Free Bridge to Internet

(youtube) A group of computer programmers and hackers in Austria is creating a low-cost way of spreading Internet access across communities. "FunkFeuer" which means "network fire" in German, uses everyday technology to create a wireless network, called a "mesh," that can transmit data from person to person, without involving companies or governments. (up to 200km point-to-point)

2,4GHz-High-Power-WLAN-Outdoor-CPE Gigabit Router

Security/Privacy

From: freebirds

Subject: [Freedombox-discuss] PSN,  ARM's Trust Zone and TPM

On June 27, 2012, Ben the Pyrate asked:

I'm a little confused about all this concern I've been seeing

about UUIDs. Could someone explain this to me? How exactly does it

hurt your privacy/anonymity if your CPU has a UUID?

Or, asked another way, what is the attack vector? What would a

hacker or government or other adversary need to do in order to

track someone by their UUID? Please help me to understand this

threat.

Best regards,

Ben the Pyrate

My answer:

In 1999, Intel announced that its Pentium III processors have a

processor serial number (PSN). Whereas, Intel had concealed that

its  earlier processor, the Pentium II had a PSN. See:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BNO/is_2000_June/ai_62263364

/ and http://bigbrotherinside.org/ and

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/03/16/finding_your_pentium_ii_psn/

.

Intel installed a PSN for digital rights management. I will discuss

digital rights management under my paragraph on Trusted Platform

Module (TPM).

"It (PSN) allows software manufacturers and websites to identify

individuals more precisely." From:

http://www.geek.com/glossary/P/psn-processor-serial-number/

"But what I thought was the most interesting was that the processor

serial number still gets reported to the Windows operating system."

From: http://discussions.virtualdr.com/archive/index.php/t-

100736.html

"Pentium III's serial number could be read by external programs."

http://www.hardwarecentral.com/archive/index.php/t-52051.html

Privacy groups protested against the PSN's invasion of privacy. The

EU and China intended to ban Pentium III. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III

Therefore, Intel developed software that would disable the PSN for

users who's BIOS did not give an option to disable PSN. Disabling

means that the PSN would not be visible online. Whereas, the BIOS

option and Intel's software did not work. The PSN leaked and was

visible online. See: http://articles.cnn.com/keyword/pentium-iii

and http://bigbrotherinside.org/.

The PSN also leaked because malware hacked Intel's disabling. Intel

asked Symantec for a patch. The patch did not work.

Intel's misrepresented that it would discontinue inserting PSN and

in its place use TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Whereas, Intel

continued to insert PSN in its next processor, the Pentium 4. See

http://www.hardwarecentral.com/archive/index.php/t-49252.html

TPM's invasion of privacy is discussed at

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html and see section on

How can TC be abused? at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-

faq.html

TPM is a 1 GB microchip on the motherboard. TPM is not in the

processor. TPM has an universally unique identifier (UUID). In

addition to its own visible UUID, TPM creates a composite UUID

containing the serial numbers of other hardware such as the

internal hard drive. Websites, government, IT administrators and

hackers can see these UUIDs.

For example, if a consumer purchases an e-book or software and

changes his or her internal hard drive or copies it onto another

computer, the e-book will not play.

Government, hackers and information brokers can track the activity

and geolocation of computers by their UUIDs. Websites that read the

UUIDs can sell this tracking information along with other tracking

information to information brokers who resell it to investigators

who resell it to abusers.

There is more than version of TPM. "Meanwhile, there are spin-offs

and enhancements whose security characteristics were embedded even

more strictly. Examples are Intel's LaGrande Technology, ARM's

TrustZone, and starting in 2006, AMD's Presidio is expected to hit

the market."

Besides being tracked by use of a credit card, consumers can be

tracked by the UUID when they do online banking.

ARM's TrustZone

Secured PIN entry for enhanced user authentication in mobile

payments & banking

? Anti-malware that is protected from software attack

? Digital Right Management

? Software license management

? Loyalty-based applications

? Access control of cloud-based documents

? e-Ticketing Mobile TV

http://mobile.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone.php

?tab=Why+TrustZone?

Marvell uses ARM processors. ARM processors supporting TrustZone

include: ARM Cortex-A15, ARM Cortex-A9, ARM Cortex-A8, ARM Cortex-

A7, ARM Cortex-A5 and ARM1176. I could not tell by reviewing

Marvell's website which ARM the Kirkwood 88F6281 or the Sheva

processor in DreamPlug has. Could you please ask Marvell?

Hackers had it easy when one OS dominated the world. One article

discussed that hackers are performing less software attacks and

instead attacking processors. Hacking the processor at the kernel

level gives complete remote control of the computer. A PSN makes

the processor visible online. A PSN makes the processor vulnerable

to hacks.

Firmware rootkits that infect the BIOS are not always erased by

flashing the BIOS. See articles on the mebromi firmware rootkit.

A mesh network and OpenVPN and proxies, such as TOR, do not fully

grant privacy. The PSN and/or TPM's UUID are visible offline. I

cannot cite references on this. I have been hacked offline, first

by my wifi card and after I removed my wifi card and bluetooth

card, by my PSN.  Yes, computers can be hacked via their wifi cards

even though the computers are offline. See

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/hacking/2006-08-

02-wireless-hackable_x.htm

There are plenty of articles on hacking bluetooth due to

bluetooth's MAC address being visible.

The old methods of tracking computers were IP address and MAC

address of the wifi card. If this were completely sufficient, there

would be no reason for PSN and TPM. The fact that they exist means

that they enable tracking of computers via hardware.

Don't give a false sense of security by promising privacy unless

you are also offering hardware privacy. Except for MAC address on

wifi cards, we had hardware privacy prior to Pentium II's PSN.

FreedomBox can ask Marvell and/or other manufacturer to "down

grade" to the early 1990s and give us back our hardware privacy.

Unorganized addenda

88+ Projects & Standards for Data Ownership, Identity, & A Federated Social Web « emergent by design (venessa)

Next Net Infrastructure & Roadmap for Municipal Broadband Networks « emergent by design (venessa)

GNU social - ProjectCom parison - Open wiki - Gitorious

New Social Web Project , wiki home , Links , Information Center , Distributed Social Network Projects

Choke Point Project- towards a distributed internet infrastructure

- create an interactive data visualization to identify choke points, showing vulnerabilities

- document the related open projects and point to articles with analysis and strategy

- release datasets and tools used to track down Internet choke points.

Netention - Netention Semantic Editor Feature Requirements

#wethedata WE ARE DATA. The Arab Spring and Zipcar are part of the same data revolution. How? Right now, data may be what we intentionally share, or what is gathered about us – the product of surveillance and tracking. We are the customer, but our data are the product. How do we balance our anxiety around data with its incredible potential? How do we regain more control over what happens to our data and what is targeted at us as a result? We The Data have the power to topple dictators, or empower them. We The Data can broaden economic opportunity to new, as yet unimagined kinds of entrepreneurs, or further consolidate economic power in the hands of a few large corporations. We The Data can create new forms of social cooperation and exchange, or give us more of the same corporate obsession with better targeted advertising.  It’s up to us: #wethedata

Automenta Software that works with us, instead of for us. A future that promises accelerated automation, personal and group empowerment, open knowledge, and the evolving ergonomics of human-computer interaction. We openly disclose the designs of our innovations in order to encourage community participation with world-class corporations, engineers, and scholars in peer-reviewable development processes.

Projects

Towards an Interlinked Semantic Wiki Farm Abstract. (pdf) This paper details the main concepts and the architecture of UfoWiki, a semantic wiki farm { i.e. a server of wikis { that uses form-based templates to produce ontology-based knowledge. Moreover, the system allows diferent wikis to share and interlink ontology instance between each other, so that knowledge can be produced by dierent and distinct communities in a distributed but collaborative way. Key words: semantic wikis, wiki farm, linked data, ontology population, named graphs, SIOC

OntoWiki  is “a free, open-source semantic wiki application, meant to serve as an ontology editor and a knowledge acquisition system. It is a web-based application written in PHP and using either a MySQL database or a Virtuoso triple store. OntoWiki is form-based rather than syntax-based, and thus tries to hide as much of the complexity of knowledge representation formalisms from users as possible. OntoWiki is mainly being developed by the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) research group at the University of Leipzig, a group also known for the DBpedia project among others, in collaboration with volunteers around the world. In 2009 the AKSW research group got a budget of 425,000€ from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany for the development of the OntoWiki. In 2010 OntoWiki became part of the technology stack supporting the LOD2 (Linked Open Data) project. Leipzig University is one of the consortium members of the project, which is funded by a €6.5m EU grant.” (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OntoWiki)

cjdns is “a networking protocol and reference implementation, founded on the ideology that networks should be easy to set up, protocols should scale up smoothly, and security should be ubiquitous. The belief that security should be ubiquitous and unintrusive like air is part of cjdns' core. The routing engine runs in user space and is compiled by default with stack-smashing protection, position-independent code, non-executable stack, and remapping of the global offset table as read-only (relro). The code also relies on an ad-hoc sandboxing feature based on setting the resource limit for open files to zero, on many systems this serves block access to any new file descriptors, severely limiting the code's ability to interact with the system around it.” (Wikipedia)

partial list of services:

6 mechanisms that will help create the global brain

Ross Dawson, July 10, 2012 at 12:46 am

                                                                                         

One of the many reasons humanity is at an inflection point is that the age-old dream of the “global brain” is finally becoming a reality.

I explored the idea in my book Living Networks, and at more length in my piece Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

Today, my work on crowdsourcing is largely focused on the emerging mechanisms that allow us to create better results from mass participation.

Some of the best work being done in the space is at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. A few of their researchers (including founder Thomas Malone) have just written a short paper Programming the Global Brain.

Ryan Merkley: Online video -- annotated, remixed and popped

Videos on the web should work like the web itself: Dynamic, full of links, maps and information that can be edited and updated live, says Mozilla Foundation COO Ryan Merkley. On the TED stage he demos Popcorn Maker, a new web-based tool for easy video remixing. (Watch a remixed TEDTalk using Popcorn Maker -- and remix it yourself.)

Quantellia

What if you could see the future, and then change it? Quantellia allows you to understand how today’s decisions affect tomorrow.  The company’s award-winning World Modeler™ software platform allows users to rapidly create an interactive decision simulation that illustrates how decisions flow through a cause-and-effect model to impact outcomes.  With the ability to draw from a variety of enterprise and / or web-based data sources in real time, World Modeler™ is the next evolutionary step in decision support software, going beyond presentation of the current situation to an integrated prediction of the future impact of today’s decisions. Quantellia offers its platform to a network of professional decision modelers, and also offers line-of-business applications like its new Decision Engineering for Enterprise Program Management (DEEPM™) solution. www.quantellia.com.  (NOTE: interesting technolgy, but not open source ~PR)

Guifi Net

an attempt to create an alternative autonomous internet infrastructure, mostly based in the Catalan region of Spain

Roger Baig Viñas:

How is Guifi related to the internet: is it complementary or alternative, and if the latter, why do we need it?

guifi.net can be seen as both things at the same time. On one hand it can be considered as a complement to the Internet because guifi.net network can be used to extend the "network of networks" coverage, and on the other hand it is an alternative to it: guifi.net users don't need to connect to the Internet, i. e. to use an ISP, any more for their digital communications among them, therefore, the so common and artificial picture of to neighbors connecting both of them to their ISP to exchange a file will not take place again among them.

Ramon Roca adds:

Guifi "is absolutely complementary. Actually we do see as an extension of it up to the end user by enabling a self-service access. Regarding to the commercial ISP, wants to become an alternative, although because of how is currently regulated, there might be a neet to setup gateways to the internet. We do need it if we want the internet to reach the end users but without the need of having to do through a commercial ISP as an alternative."

To date, November 2008, guifi.net has about 5500 working nodes, most of them linked each other. Geographically the main activity is centered in Catalonia, escencially because the project was born there, but everyone is encouraged to expand the network coverage contributing with his link.

MOAT: Meaning Of A Tag

MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-enriched content from free-tagging one.

While tags are widely used in Web 2.0 services, their lack of machine-understandable meaning can be a problem for information retrieval. Especially people can use tags that have different meanings depending on the context (e.g.: "apple"), but can also use different tags to express the same thing (e.g.: "semweb", "semantic_web"). Moreover, as tags as not related to each other, finding content might be an issue, especially to browse the long tail.

MOAT aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tag(s) using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from DBpedia, geonames ... or any knowledge base). Thanks to those relationships between tags and URIs of existing concepts, they can annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags, leveraging content into Semantic Web, by linking data together. This means modeling facts such as "In this blog post, I use the tag "apple" and I refer to <http://dbpedia.com/resource/Apple_Records>, not the fruit nor the computer brand". Moreover, these tag meanings can be shared between people, providing an architecture of participation to define and exchange meanings of tags (as URIs) within a community of users.

To achieve this goal, MOAT relies on an architecture that can be deployed for any organisation or community and that involves a lightweight ontology, a MOAT server, and some third-party clients. The ontology can also be used stand-alone, as a model to define meaning for your tags in blog posts, tagged pictures ... In case you're looking for a practical implementation of MOAT and do not want to browse technical details, have a look at LODr.

Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonmy

www.slideshare.net

PLURALITY

A 14 minute film

Directed by: Dennis Liu

Written by: Ryan Condal

Produced by: Jonathan Hsu, Dennis Liu

Rick Falkvinge writes:

"This short film ...had me absorbed from the get-go. When it was over, it felt like 30 seconds had passed. That in itself is remarkable – but the short film also communicates a very chilling insight into where we’re going. The movie is about ever-increasing surveillance, and how it always ends up where we don’t want it – with quite a few surprises baked in.

In the movie, DNA scanners are everywhere, and links your DNA with centralized access control lists to everything. Predictably, it started out as a convenience, until legislation stipulated that law enforcement can and shall have access to all of it. The plot twists towards the end are gripping."

IEML, Information Economy MetaLanguage A symbolic system able to exploit the computational power, the capacity of memory and the ubiquity of the digital medium. This symbolic system is called IEML, for Information Economy MetaLanguage. It is :

(1) an artificial language that translates itself automatically into natural languages,

(2) a metadata language for the collaborative semantic tagging of digital data,

(3) a new addressing layer of the digital medium (conceptual addressing) solving the semantic interoperability problem,

(4) a programming language specialized in the design of semantic networks,

(5) a semantic coordinate system of the mind (the semantic sphere), allowing the computational modeling of human cognition and the self-observation of collective intelligences.

Fabio Cecin @ Next Net

I agree with @tawnuac who would "enrich or publish data to RDF"

as I think that centralized taxonomies will always fall short for some

segment of the population. But we all belong to multiple communities, each

of which may have it's own "language" for describing elements of the world

they are most interested in. As such, we choose to place more attention on

car care from our automotive club and child care from our family and school

moms we trust. Therein lies the key: the trust we place in different

people and communities is domain specific, and as mentioned above, the very

definition of "domain" may vary from person to person. In the above

examples, "car care" communities will vary depending upon whether I drive a

'70 VW microbus or a '12 Lexus RX Hybrid, and "child care" communities will

vary if I have a toddler or a tween. And of course, the levels of trust we

assign even to similar communities is a very personal matter.

 

So my thinking is that at the (decentralized) core of a decentralized

community will be a collection of personalized and community-centric trust

metrics. Switching point of view, I believe what we need to design are

secure, open source "Reputation Calculation Engines" (RCE) that operate on

collections of digitally signed RDF triples (or "reputes"). Note that the

digital signatures can come from anonymous or pseudonymous sources, but

they are essential in calculating reputation to prevent spoofs, floods,

etc. An RCE will in general ignore - or provide less weight to - reputes

that come from short-lived anonymous sources, and apply greater reputation

strength to sources signed from reputable sources.

 

Note that any addressible object in this reputation-based economy - from

signatures to care repair companies to RCEs - can have their own

domain-specific reputes attached to them. I expect there will be some very

well-known RCEs, and Google-like search engines that can point you to those

most trusted, but as we are all different, we can each have our private

RCEs that assign X reputation to RCE1 and Y reputation to RCE2 within any

domain, and further increase reputation for some signatures and decrease

others. IMO, only when each of us is in charge of who we trust - and we

don't have trust dictated to us - can a decentralized, privacy-enhanced

system work.

 

Fabio Cecin

Namecoin is a an alternative Domain Name System that is based on Bitcoin technology (the Namecoin network reaches consensus every few minutes as to which names/values have been reserved or updated). Each user has its own copy of the full database, which attempts to reduce censorship on the DNS level. The use of public-key cryptography also means that only the owner is allowed to modify a name in the distributed database. The first and most popular Namecoin project is Dot-bit.

Namecoin is a peer-to-peer generic name/value datastore system based on Bitcoin technology (a decentralized cryptocurrency). It allows you to:

There are plenty of possible use cases. Read more about Namecoin.

What is Dot-BIT

Dot-BIT, the first project using namecoin, is building a domain name system (DNS) using the .bit TLD. Our goal is to spread .bit domains by providing resources and tools to the community, from developers to end users.

Mozilla Persona is a completely decentralized and secure authentication system for the web based on the open BrowserID protocol. To ensure that Persona works everywhere and for everyone, Mozilla currently operates a small suite of optional, centralized services related to Persona.

Why should you and your site use Persona?

  1. Persona completely eliminates site-specific passwords, freeing users and websites from the burden of creating, managing, and securely storing passwords.
  2. Persona is easy to use. With just two clicks a Persona user can sign into a new site like Voost or The Times Crossword, bypassing the friction associated with account creation.
  3. Persona is easy to implement. Developers can add Persona to a site in a single afternoon.
  4. Best of all, there's no lock-in. Developers get a verified email address for all of their users, and users can use any email address with Persona.
  5. Persona is built on the BrowserID protocol. Once popular browser vendors implement BrowserID, they will no longer need to rely on Mozilla to log in.

http://www.w3.org/2012/10/31-identity-minutes.html

Talk about WebRTC Identity work, WebID, OpenID, and experimental API from Mozilla to hide deliver encrypted text to DOM without letting cleartext be under control of WebApp.

Signed RDF

(W3C Spec) Assertions may be signed to facilitate decisions that require trust. Simple signatures include checksums or other assertions about independently verifiable characteristics of a resource. The simplest example of a signature is a statement that the associated assertions apply only to the version of the resource labeled with a given creation date. Stronger signatures will include cryptographic measures to increase the likelihood of detection of falsification of or inadvertent changes to the signed assertions or the resource(s) to which they apply.

Fen Labalme > Next Net: On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Fabio Barone wrote:

that's why I think the proposal of RDF enriched folksonomies

have merit and may address these issues.

It's not a platform.

It's not a unified language / ontology.

It's not trying to change/save the world.

And yes, it wouldn't be perfect and solve all problems.

It's leaving to folks to make new meaning out of data - changing perceptions, making new links, and maybe changing the world...

Totally agree.  Just add a digital sig (or any unique hash) to each RDF triple <http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax-971002/#signing> and you start to enable trust and reputation.

The OpenPrivacy initiative (OpenPrivacy.org) is an Open Source collection of software frameworks, protocols and services providing a cryptographically secure and distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing user profile information.

In effect, OpenPrivacy is the first open platform that enables user control over personal data while simultaneously - and at user discretion - providing marketers with access to higher quality profile segments. The resulting marketplace for anonymous demographic profiles will create opportunities for a new breed of personalized services that provide people and businesses with timely and relevant information. Throughout the system, information may be shared with guaranteed personal privacy, creating at last a level playing field for the user, marketer and infomediaries.

Several projects are in the works, listed with the most-developed initiative first:

Sierra, a reference implementation of the Reputation Management Framework (RMF)

OpenPrivacy's core project is designed to ease the process of creating community with reputation enhanced pseudonymous entities. The RMF is primarily a set of four interfaces: Nym Manager, Communications Manager, Storage Manager and Reputation Calculation Engine (RCE). Sierra is a reference implementation that meets these interfaces.

Talon

A simple yet powerful component system for Java. Sierra is being developed using Talon and we expect that Talon will soon be able to use Sierra's reputation manager to drive component selection

Zero-knowledge proof of sibling nym relationships by parent

paper forthcoming

Reputation Capital Exchange

A secure mechanism for mapping between RCEs that use different trust metrics. This is accomplished by first attaching an OpenPrivacy-style Nym to the local namespace user name, and then by authenticating a match between these secure nyms.

Reptile

An open source/free software Syndicated Content Directory Server (SCDS) that provides a personalized news and information portal with privacy and reputation accumulation.

User Content License - Reversing the Privacy Policy Circle

Adding an HTTP header prior to the request being transferred from client to server that contains a user copyright notice for any data transferred from the client. (While not directly related to the concept of anonymous profile data, we think it's a cool hack!)

OpenPrivacy > Next Net

I agree with @tawnuac who would "enrich or publish data to RDF" as I think that centralized taxonomies will always fall short for some segment of the population.  But we all belong to multiple communities, each of which may have it's own "language" for describing elements of the world they are most interested in.  As such, we choose to place more attention on car care from our automotive club and child care from our family and school moms we trust.  Therein lies the key: the trust we place in different people and communities is domain specific, and as mentioned above, the very definition of "domain" may vary from person to person.  In the above examples, "car care" communities will vary depending upon whether I drive a '70 VW microbus or a '12 Lexus RX Hybrid, and "child care" communities will vary if I have a toddler or a tween.  And of course, the levels of trust we assign even to similar communities is a very personal matter.

So my thinking is that at the (decentralized) core of a decentralized community will be a collection of personalized and community-centric trust metrics.  Switching point of view, I believe what we need to design are secure, open source "Reputation Calculation Engines" (RCE) that operate on collections of digitally signed RDF triples (or "reputes").  Note that the digital signatures can come from anonymous or pseudonymous sources, but they are essential in calculating reputation to prevent spoofs, floods, etc.  An RCE will in general ignore - or provide less weight to - reputes that come from short-lived anonymous sources, and apply greater reputation strength to sources signed from reputable sources.

Note that any addressible object in this reputation-based economy - from signatures to care repair companies to RCEs - can have their own domain-specific reputes attached to them.  I expect there will be some very well-known RCEs, and Google-like search engines that can point you to those most trusted, but as we are all different, we can each have our private RCEs that assign X reputation to RCE1 and Y reputation to RCE2 within any domain, and further increase reputation for some signatures and decrease others.  IMO, only when each of us is in charge of who we trust - and we don't have trust dictated to us - can a decentralized, privacy-enhanced system work.

Open Wireless Movement   (EFF) helps foster a world where the dozens of wireless networks that criss-cross any urban area are now open for us and our devices to use.

What is the Open Wireless Movement?

Imagine a future with ubiquitous open Internet.

We envision a world where, in any urban environment:

We're working with a coalition of volunteer engineers to build technologies that will let users open their wireless networks without compromising their security or sacrificing bandwidth. And we're working with advocates to help change the way people and businesses think about Internet service.

Hypothes.is is an open-source software project that aims to collect comments about statements made in any web-accessible content, and filter and rank those comments to assess each statement's credibility. It's been summarized as "a peer review layer for the entire Internet." The project is to write software and establish a system which will allow annotation of web pages, using comments contributed by individuals and a reputation system for rating the comments. The plan is that the comments will be stored in the Internet Archive. Normal use is planned to be with a browser plug-in, and the plan is that links to specific comments will also be viewable without needing a plug-in.

HyperThread An expermental way to view threads on App.net. A graphical visualization of social discussion threads.

App.net is an ad-free, subscription-based social feed and API. App.net aims to be the backbone of the social web through infrastructure that developers can use to build applications and that members can use for meaningful interactions. App.net launched in August of 2012. It’s owned and operated by Mixed Media Labs, founded by CEO Dalton Caldwell and CTO Bryan Berg.

App.net’s core values

Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3 is a reliable and scalable cloud storage back-end for use with the Tahoe-LAFS.org client software. Tahoe-LAFS is a Free Software, Open Source cloud storage system. It encrypts and cryptographically integrity-checks your files for provider-independent security. That means that the confidentiality and integrity of your files cannot be violated by anyone-not even employees of the storage service provider.

What is it good for?

Securely backing up your data off-site. The "tahoe backup" command inspects your local filesystem for files that have changed since the last time you ran it. It uploads each file that has changed and it creates a directory in Tahoe-LAFS to hold the current version of each of the files. You can browse or access old versions just by browsing the old snapshot directories.

Where is the data stored?

Your data, encrypted, is stored on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), which is a convenient, reliable, and widely understood platform for storage

Doodle is a free Internet calendar tool for time management, and coordinating meetings. It is based in Zurich, Switzerland and has been operational since 2007. Users are polled to determine the best time and date to meet. Meeting coordinators (administrators) receive e-mail alerts for votes and comments. Registration is required to have this function. Doodle interacts with various external calendaring systems, such as IBM Lotus Notes. Through the use of a widget for Lotus Notes, users are able to create and manage Doodle polls within a Lotus Notes client application. Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Apple iCal can be utilized with Doodle to track dates. Google Map may also be used to share the location of the event. Similar popular competing products include Dudle (Free Software maintained by the TU Dresden), ScheduleOnce, Tungle, TimeBridge and WhenIsGood. There's also a privacy enhanced version of Dudle.

Transmutable Work Work in public! Emerge from behind your intellectual firewall and share your work. The source code is public so feel free to find a nerd and a server and boot your own site.

                                                                                          

Captricity is the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective way to capture data trapped on paper—such as thousands of hand-completed survey forms—and convert it into digital data that can be searched, stored, shared, and studied.                 

When Open Data and Civic Hackers Meet for the First Time… I wouldn’t quite say it is romantic.  But when teams of software developers, designers, and data scientists get their hands on data sets they previously had no access to, the results are spectacular. That was the scene this past weekend at the hack-a-thon sponsored by two of the Code for America Accelerator companies (Captricity, of [...] Read full story                         

                                

                        

Occupy the Comms In occasion of Agora 99 we are launching ‘Occupy the Comms’, the ultimate toolkit for popular news reporting. Occupy the Comms has been developed over the past five months by a dozen people in New York, California, Brussels, France, Madrid and elsewhere. The beta version has been online for a few weeks. So what is Occupy the Comms?

For the last decade and a half, step by step, Internet has offered people all the necessary tools to report on the news themselves. First came weblogs, then came photo and video sharing, then social networking greatly enhanced the quick exchange of information. The latest development has been live stream, the opportunity to broadcast video directly from your mobile phone.

Occupy the Comms is the next step in this evolution. It brings everything together. It allows everyone to participate in a horizontal way. And there’s no catch. Money is not an issue.

In short OtC works on three different levels. The first level is real time news, the second is editing, the third is all-round broadcasting.

The site is structured around groups. You create a group for a certain event. Automated bots can scan the Internet for all content related to that event, like live streams. The users watching those streams can collaborate by creating a pad that indexes what happens at what time and what additional information like photos, tweets and blog posts is available.

On the second level, contributors from around the world can use the primary information to create videos or articles that capture the event from any perspective in word and image. The site features a chat which enables online editors to work together on a project, to divide the tasks, and to minimise the time necessary to finish it.

On the third level, streams and edited content can be broadcast and mixed on specific channels like GlobalRevolution.TV, or any other channel you want to create yourself. Aside from those, they can be distributed through regular outlets like YouTube and Vimeo.

These are the basics. There are even more interesting features which make OtC a formidable weapon of 21st century news reporting.

How to make a great Open API. 

Although APIs tend to hide data they can certainly be valuable bridges to both read and write to existing services. REST seems to be a very popular model with arguably HTTP POST the dominant write protocol on the web today

Financial and political microtransactions are a necessity.

Many think [politics] would be improved by banning all money. I believe this is the wrong approach and is, in fact, dangerous over the long term. (I'd also add that a ban is very unlikely to be accomplished). Transparency and limits yes... but a ban on citizen participation no.

A better approach addresses two essentials:

That's why I'm convinced the political microtransaction is a necessity.

This isn't out of some 'kumbayah' belief in the perfect wisdom of the masses. But rather arises out of a conviction that a better result will be achieved by allowing a more balanced input from those with "biases and self-interests" in conflict with those currently dominating the lobbying landscape.

This might seem paradoxical to many and is arguable. But I'll make this assertion: broadening monetary participation while drastically lowering costs will over time actually reduce the influence of money in politics... perhaps even to the point of irrelevancy.

Though I hold the patent... my goal is the broadest possible participation and to prevent any narrow control of these critical capacities. Give me back my little 500 square foot home so recently taken... and I'd just as soon get back to painting. But like others who feel they cannot stay quiet while the Enlightenment dies... I feel compelled to do what I can... while I can.

The Tool: The Patent (here) was issued January 11, 2011. To get specific...

Claim 1:

1. A donation method, comprising: establishing a first escrow account for a first donor with a first threshhold on a programmed electronic computer; removing funds from the first escrow account upon instructions from the first donor, the instructions having a transfer designation and the instructions being a contribution; comparing the funds to a second threshold donation level to determine if the funds are great enough for a donation to be made on a programmed electronic computer; aggregating the funds with the same transfer designation with the money from other donors to equal or surpass the threshold donation level; creating a sum of funds; transferring the sum of funds to the transfer designation, said transferring the sum of funds is depositing said sum of funds with a political candidate or cause; and reporting information about the first donor and the other donors upon transferring the sum of funds, said reporting information is done within the confines of jurisdictional requirements.

If you wade through that it is simply like a cash card... but the user's information and instructions are separated from the funds which go into Trust Account(s)... and 'micro' designations can be made, pooled with designations of others to the same recipient... and reaching a viable threshold (determined by a variety of cost related factors)... transferred to the recipient with any reporting requirements reported and tracked.

This systems allows transfers of ANY size... but what it can do that others can't... is a very simple micro-transaction.... and pass through incurred transaction costs.

So it CAN function, if desired, just like any other gift card or Internet wallet...

BUT... with a vital added capability... a simple micro-transaction.

While the utility of this transaction has sometimes been questioned...

The POLITICAL microtransaction, at least, escapes all those objections.  (Its not a physical good, not digital content with free alternatives available, and hassle is eliminated.)

I'd also contend that its a fundamental of speech... designed for people.

[Editors note: a microtransaction can pertain to speech and participation in forms other than campaign financing. Open government can include venues for microtransactions in lobbying, public comment, opinion polling, and even legislation drafting and voting. ~PR]

The MetaCurrency Project is definitely a part of the movement of emergent currency systems, whether you think of them complementary currencies, alternative currencies, local currencies, digital currencies, virtual currencies, reputation currencies or targeted currencies. We are building the tools to enable all them. We even defined our Open Data approach for distributed, digitally-signed transaction chains over a year before bitcoin was invented.

We're connected to the movement to enable a truly P2P, distributed internet without central points of control or failure. Our project embodies the goals of the movement of the 99% which seeks to reclaim the capacities for wealth generation from a privileged few. To fully meet our criteria, people need to be able to transact directly with each other with no segment of that interaction relying on a centrally controlled system.

Allevo is a software vendor and consultancy in financial transactions and payment processing, focusing on banks, micro-finance institutions and corporate treasury departments. Their core product is called qPayIntegrator.  The the open source version is available to anyone to use and adapt and is called FinTP.  A long journey starts with small steps – their first step was to find a name for the open source community – FINkers United. The second step is the launch event – on May 24th 2012 in Bucharest.

GNU MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing system for images, video, and audio. We're designing to support decentralization and tons of extensibility. You can think of it as a federated replacement for things like Flickr, YouTube or SoundCloud that you or anyone can run. MediaGoblin is building the world's most beautiful and user-responsive media publishing future.

ACTION PLAN FOR COPYRIGHT REFORM AND CULTURE IN THE XXIst CENTURY

This document is the first draft of a common platform of civil society for the reform of copyright and accompanying measures to ensure the sustainable development of culture in the XXIst century. It was drafted in and following the Free Culture Forum 2012 of Barcelona by a small group of individuals, having participated to and taking inspiration from the following existing proposals:

It is submitted for comments by interested citizens of all countries in view of subsequent revisions.

Anonymity vs Trust vs Cash (email thread p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com)

From: Changaco

Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks

If you don't care about anonymity you "can" build a Web of Trust, in

order to know who's who and base money on people. That's what the

OpenUDC project is trying to do.

If you want anonymity, the only known option is proof-of-work, but

that's just a nice way of naming a waste of time and energy on useless

computations. That's how Bitcoin works, but I doubt people will want to

waste that much CPU time just to share files.

From: "Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn"

Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2012

Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks

changaco@changaco.net's statements that "money has to be based on something", that Bitcoin is "based on" proof-of-work and that people would need to waste CPU cycles in order to trade files (under danimoth's proposal) are all incorrect. ?

Money, to be useful as money, only has to be acceptable and valuable to enough people. It doesn't have to be "based on something".

Bitcoin isn't really "based on" proof-of-work. It's mostly "based on" digital signatures. The proof-of-work part is really just to make it difficult (but not impossible) for attackers to perform a rewind attack. There are designs floating around which replace the proof-of-work with other mechanisms intended to deter rewind attack, and the properties of the resulting systems are almost the same as the properties of Bitcoin.

People would not have to burn CPU cycles in order to trade files in danimoth's proposal. Only the transaction-verification-servers (also called "miners" in Bitcoin) need to do any proof-of-work (in order to deter rewind attack). Normal users who want to send or receive Bitcoin do not need to do any proof-of-work.

From: ianG

Sent: Saturday, November 03, 2012

Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks

The essential solution to all trade imbalances relies on money.  So if

your problem is some form of asymmetric trading, you need a payment

system, of some form, and you need an exchange of some form.

Beyond this simple statement, however, is a sea of ideas, in which one

can easily drown.  E.g., you've identified a simple exchange process,

discovered a weakness, and then proposed a reputation system to cover

the weakness.  Adding a reputation system to solve issues is like a deux

ex machina in systems;  Rep systems are little understood and generally

or frequently crap, so chances are you'll end up building something that

won't work, and wasting a lot of time in doing it.

Better to avoid that and come up with a payment system that doesn't need

reputation - or at least one that doesn't lean so heavily on it.

As a field you can research it, but you have to be extremely skeptical

because much of what is written is unreliable at some level or other.

For one example, everything written about gold is tainted by Central

Bank marketing (for their own currency).  This makes it very confusing

if one just reads and assumes what is written is fact...

Alternatively, one can build it and try it.  But the cycle times are

long, it takes a year or so to write a decent money system and get it up

and rolling.

Alternatively, you cut the gordian knot and make everything free.  The

system has to work under this constraint.  That works for somethings

(open source software, songs sharing, etc) but not for all things.

> 2. There have been previous experiments similar to what I'm proposing?

Mojo Nation tried to be an economically informed p2p system, but seemed

to run out of grunt as a project.  It failed because it tried to solve

every problem, and drowned.

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000571.html

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000572.html

In contrast, the projects that spun out of it - BitTorrent? Tahoe? -

reduced their problem set dramatically.  Either way, you might find

Mojo's design to be well worth studying, people say the design wasn't wrong.

> [1] Enforcing Collaboration in Peer-to-Peer Routing Services

>      (by Tim Moreton and Andrew Twigg)

That's an unfortunate turn of phrase there, which rather strikes at the

heart of the problem you are trying to solve :)

Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2012

From: Changaco

Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks

On Sat, 3 Nov 2012 10:49:45 -0600 Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:

> Money, to be useful as money, only has to be acceptable and valuable

> to enough people.

I agree with that. What I meant by "money has to be based on

something" is that money creation has to be based on something you

can't fake. Otherwise one can create as much money as one wants, and

it's worth nothing.

Money creation is an important part of a monetary system, because when

money is created it devalues the one previously created.

Unless I'm mistaken, the Bitcoin creation process is based on

proof-of-work. The more processing power one has, the bigger the share

of the monetary creation one gets. But the Bitcoin monetary mass is

limited, just like the quantity of gold on Earth, so mining gets

harder and harder until there is nothing left to extract.

> People would not have to burn CPU cycles in order to trade files in

> danimoth's proposal. Only the transaction-verification-servers (also

> called "miners" in Bitcoin) need to do any proof-of-work (in order to

> deter rewind attack). Normal users who want to send or receive Bitcoin

> do not need to do any proof-of-work.

Before being able to send Bitcoins one must receive some. How would a

new user get Bitcoins ?

Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2012

From: danimoth

Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Bitcoin incentive on Kademlia networks

On 03/11/12 at 10:09pm, Changaco wrote:

> Before being able to send Bitcoins one must receive some. How would a

> new user get Bitcoins ?

Regarding my proposal, he has two options:

*) Share some resources (hdd space and bandwith), and receive payments

for these

*) Buy bitcoin from other people, exchanging other goods (dollars for

example)

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