I'm not subscribed to the list right now, but I'm hoping this will still post. My reason for posting it is not to ask busy freedombox developers to take on more work at this time (first things first!) but to let those on the list know what I'm thinking as next step after freedombox is deployed. What I describe as "PeerPoint" could be an all-in-one application package to run on freedomboxes. Note that I included links to freedombox and made an appeal for readers to send you (not me) some money! For now any interest in PeerPoint can be directed as a comment to <a href="http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/peerpoint/">http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/peerpoint/</a> <br>
<br><h2><a href="http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/peerpoint/">PeerPoint</a></h2>
<span class="submitted">May 28, 2012 — Poor Richard<a class="post-edit-link" href="http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3589&action=edit" title="Edit Post"></a></span>
<h2><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P2P-network.svg"><img class=" wp-image-3734 alignright" title="P2P-network.svg" src="http://almanac2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/p2p-network-svg.png?w=249&h=258" alt="" height="258" width="249"></a>PeerPoint = Peer-to-Peer Everything</h2>
<p>[This is a back-of-the-envelope first draft of top-level design specifications.]</p>
<p>PeerPoint is intended to be much more than a user-owned social networking platform. It is imagined as a modular, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer" target="_blank">peer-to-peer</a> (p2p) application suite, developer’s tool kit, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedombox" target="_blank">security appliance</a> in one plug-n-play box.</p>
<p>Each PeerPoint is an autonomous node on a p2p network with no
centralized corporate infrastructure. PeerPoints communicate directly
with each other over secure, anonymous internet connections. PeerPoint
users may still connect to the internet via commercial internet service
providers (ISPs), but those ISP’s only act as blind, passive carriers of
PeerPoint encrypted data.</p>
<p>The PeerPoint will be connected between the user’s pc, home network,
or mobile device and the ISP connection. It will support phone lines,
mobile devices, wifi, ethernet, etc. for maximum flexibility. It may be
accessed by your remote mobile devices either over commercial cellular
networks or p2p <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network" target="_blank">wireless mesh networks</a> like those used by Occupy Wall Street.</p>
<p>The PeerPoint is designed to <strong>Occupy the Internet</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>The need:</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3745" title="facebook-skype-youtube poster" src="http://almanac2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/facebook-skype-youtube-poster1.jpg?w=780&h=350" alt="" height="350" width="780"></p>
<p style="text-align:left">The social tools provided by Facebook,
Twitter, etc. have been fun and fairly useful, but if we think about how
much serious collaborative work lies ahead of us over the next decade
in order to shift an entire civilization onto a more principled,
democratic, and sustainable footing, we are going to need better,
deeper, more collaborative, more functional work tools. Those tools need
to belong to us and they need to meet the needs of of our society and
our time, not the needs of a few self-serving billionaires. With the
PeerPoint approach, each user will own her own inexpensive internet
appliance and all the data and content she creates. Why leave the
usefulness of the internet and the custody of our data up to a few
companies whose business models depend on pimping us to advertisers, and
who can change their terms of service at any time?</p>
<p>The corporate business model is also 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? You decide.</p>
<p>I have been hoping for somebody like the Linux community to create an
appliance-like p2p node that provides all the apps needed for secure
(and when desired, anonymous) social networking, voting,
trust/reputation metrics, database, content collaboration and
management, workflow, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc. I’m
talking about 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.</p>
<p><strong>For developers:</strong></p>
<p>If a <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/faq/index.en.html" target="_blank">FreedomBox</a> were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the beginning it will be necessary to have interfaces/connectors
to various proprietary client-server applications like Google until they
can be re-engineered in open source p2p versions.</p>
<p>Initially the project would consist of a first tier of essential apps
that must be tightly integrated in their interfaces/connectors,
protocols, and data structures. After deploying the first tier,
development would continue on a second-tier of applications. Second tier
development efforts 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 developers.</p>
<p>The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are:</p>
<ul><li>world class, best-of-breed</li><li>open source</li><li>p2p architecture</li><li>consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection</li><li>integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture.</li>
<li>consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces</li><li>ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)</li><li>GPS enabled</li>
</ul>
<p>First tier applications:</p>
<ol><li>distributed database</li><li>social networking (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network#Comparison_of_projects" target="_blank">comparison of distributed social network applications</a>)</li>
<li>trust/reputation metrics</li><li>crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management (wiki, Google Docs, or better)</li><li>project management/workflow</li><li>data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.)</li>
<li>user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better)</li><li>crowd funding (<a href="http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform">http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform</a>)</li>
<li>voting (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback" target="_blank">LiquidFeedback</a> or better)</li><li>universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content</li></ol>
<p><strong>Digital Commons</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Peer Publica</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Our new public internet won’t be owned by corporations <em>or</em> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Obstacles</strong></p>
<blockquote><p>“We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, <em>the reverse is happening</em>….
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. …<em>Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one</em>.” (emphasis added) <a href="http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/" target="_blank">Dmytri Kliener</a></p></blockquote>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>The integral tools I describe in PeerPoint are tools (maybe I should even call them <em>weapons</em>) that we need <em>now</em> to conduct our political struggle, not afterwards. The community that brought us Linux and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Office" target="_blank">Open Office</a>
(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 need. If anyone doubts this, look at
Wikipedia’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_software" target="_blank">List of Open Source Software</a>.</p>
<p>Free/open software development is largely self-motivated and
idiosyncratic, with many islands of genius and inspiration separated by
vast seas of minutia and trivia. But the bulk of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28programmer_subculture%29" target="_blank">hacker</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS_community" target="_blank">FOSS community</a> does not yet appear to perceive its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest" target="_blank">enlightened self-interest</a>
in our existential struggle for open society and government. Maybe they
feel they can outwit Big Brother better on their own terms as
individuals.</p>
<p>Perhaps we need to help them open their “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doors_of_Perception" target="_blank">Doors of Perception</a>” wider, even if that takes a little mescaline.</p>
<p>At the very least we need to offer something like an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Prize" target="_blank">X-Prize</a>
and we need to be ready and willing to fund and provision projects that
fall within PeerPoint’s conceptual scope. That should begin right now
with <a href="http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/" target="_blank">FreedomBox</a>, the most likely base on which a PeerPoint might be constructed. So pony up, folks.</p>
<p>Like the old auctioneer says, “What’s it worth? <em>You tell me</em>.”</p>
<p><strong>Poor Richard</strong></p>
<h2 style="text-align:center">“All right, now, folks–what’s it worth? Common–you tell me.”</h2>
<p style="text-align:center"><img class="size-full wp-image-3770 aligncenter" title="auctioneer" src="http://almanac2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/auctioneer.jpg?w=780" alt=""></p><br><br><br><br><br>