[Freedombox-discuss] I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed

[Paul Gardner-Stephen]

Hi Tom,

It is indeed a concern that we are headed towards insurmountable
walled gardens with their disempowerment of people and concentration
of that power (wittingly or otherwise) in a very few places.

I am the guy behind ServalProject.org, and we have been beavering away
at a completely open, distributed, resilient mobile telephony platform
based on wireless mesh networking.  We already have our Serval
Distributed Numbering Architecture (Serval DNA) running on selected
Android phones and the VillageTelco.org Mesh Potato open-hardware and
open-software fixed-line telephony system, with support in the form of
a three year research fellowship from Flinders University and a team
of volunteers and students.

I am also working with Mark Pesce, NGOs and humanitarian organisations
to create open, distributed and resilient social networking tools.

Basically we have designed our protocols so that they can work without
access to the internet or any other infrastructure, but so that they
can take advantage of these things if they are available.

I am keen to help out with FreedomBox and the FreedomBox community to
help create globally scalable solutions that are interoperable so far
as is possible with the other open-source efforts that are underway in
this space.

To get an idea of what Serval is up to and willing to bring to the
table, check out:  http://blip.tv/file/4697375/

The VillageTelco.org people have already been down the design and
manufacturer open-hardware path, and would also be a great resource to
tap into.

Paul.

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Tom Marble <tmarble at info9.net> wrote:
> All:
>
> The provocative subject isn't mine, but rather the title
> of a very apropos essay [0] by Don Norman [1].
>
> Norman's writings have inspired my own work on software
> design. Here he speaks to a very important point:
> we are headed for a world of walled gardens.
> It is important to note he left the now current leader
> of walled garden commercialization long ago.
>
> My thinking has about FB changed since I first learned
> about it at Debconf. I have thought - but not yet verbalized -
> that Diaspora isn't really the goal. Well, to be fair,
> it's not my goal.  And that challenge of goal
> diversity was evident immediately.
>
> Sure it would be fun to support OpenBTS, FreeSWITCH,
> some Free alternative to Dropbox (Sparkleshare?),
> basic Mail and Web services and Diaspora/Tonido
> services, etc.  Hey, what about a Free URL shortener?
>
> But what really captured my thinking was a combination
> of Eben's point about the 'value in the server log files',
> the very cool work leveraging the Web-of-Trust (e.g.
> Monkeysphere [2]) and the possibilities with mesh networking.
>
> The recent events in Egypt have reinforced the thought
> that FB can be a software foundation (on top of Debian)
> on which to provide very fundamental (low level) services.
> Important parts of this are machine facilitation for
> getting more people involved in the Web-of-Trust,
> multi-path, reliable networking based on IPv6,
> reslient (and quorum/historically influenced) DNS,
> as well as Tor and friends.
>
> So I think I see FB as taking the early Internet collaboration
> in a direction it was headed with Usenet, based on open protocols
> and open implementations.  We ended up with one *de facto*
> client/server paradigm for Internet computing.  FB is going
> back to the future of 1993 and thinking of "another way".
>
> I Have Seen the Future and I Know We Can Debug It.
>
> --Tom
>
> [0] http://m.core77.com/blog/columns/i_have_seen_the_future_and_i_am_opposed_18532.asp
> [1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Don_Norman
> [2] http://web.monkeysphere.info/
>
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