The KDE Education Project Programmatic Statement About This page shall become the draft of a programmatic statement for the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network based on a distributed architecture. The goal is a statement which can outline the benefits of distributed (communications) systems, increase awareness and co-operation between related projects and serve as a guideline on the development and implementation on distributed systems. ...producing some kind of summary programmatic statement, like the Franklin Street Statement, that determines exactly what are the minimum requirements to be recognized as truly distributed infrastructure, to avoid ulterior perversions like Meraki and a clear visual mapping that lets everyone see what is being done, what the current preferred leverage points are, what needs to be done, and how it all fits together. Since I compiled the Project Starfish Concept and came into contact with the P2P Foundation, it was considered appropriate for me to start this task. Ideas/Mission Resources Goals
Wired 11.11: Open Source Everywhere Open Source Everywhere Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation. By Thomas Goetz Cholera is one of those 19th-century ills that, like consumption or gout, at first seems almost quaint, a malady from an age when people suffered from maladies. Since cholera kills by driving fluids from the body, the treatment is to pump liquid back in, as fast as possible. "It's a health problem, but it's also a design problem," says Timothy Prestero, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer who cofounded a group called Design That Matters. But the team needed more medical expertise. ThinkCycle's collaborative approach is modeled on a method that for more than a decade has been closely associated with software development: open source. Open source, of course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming the software industry. In the Beginning Linus
Four Design Principles for True P2P Networks Excerpted from a mini-essay by Mark Pesce URL = Design Principle One: Distribute Everything The recording industry used the courts to shut down Napster because they could. Break everything up. This is an extension of the essential UNIX idea of simple programs which can be piped together to do useful things. Design Principle Two: Transport Independence The inundation of Brisbane and its surrounding suburbs brought a sudden death to all of its networks: mobile, wired, optic. We have created a centralized communications infrastructure. There is another way. A hierarchy is efficient, but the price of that efficiency is vulnerability. Design Principle Three: Secure Everything Why would any message traverse a public network in plaintext? As a baseline, everything we do, everywhere, must be transmitted with strong encryption. We need a security approach that is more comprehensive than this. Design Principle Four: Open Everything
Government Are we on the cusp of seeing dramatic changes in the way governments operate by publishing and consuming open data? Mark Headd, Developer Evangelism at Accela seems to think so. Earlier this year, Croatian political party ORaH published a new policy that relies heavily on open source solutions, addresses the dangers off vendor lock-in, and insists on open document standards. Best of all, they did it the open source way. The Open Election Data Initiative wants to give access to election data for a true picture of an election process, including how candidates are certified, how and which voters are registered, what happens on election day, whether results are accurate, and how complaints are resolved. The Government of India (GOI) has adopted a comprehensive and supportive open source policy. The impact of technology on society and the economy continues to excite and challenge government. The history of creativity and how the rise of it has propelled open data forward today.
Defining True P2P Infrastructures Proposed by Michel Bauwens: What is a p2p infrastructure: 1) A P2P communications and cooperation infrastructure is a technological and social infrastructure which allows any individual to voluntarily aggregate with others for purposes of communication or the creation of common value 2 )A P2P technological infrastructure allows any agent to initiate actions from any point within the network, on the basis of equality of communication (network neutrality) and without any censorship impeding free speech and the freedom of association and cooperation. It is a distributed infrastructure in which elements of decentralisation and centralisation can only serve the efficiency of the network, and not issues of control or profit. 3) A P2P ownership infrastructure is preferentially owned by the users and producers of value over the network. 4) A P2P governance infrastructure is based on the full rights by communities and participating individuals to govern their own infrastructures and actiivities.
Open Source Life: How the open movement will change everything Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete — both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind. Goodbye World Book and Brittanica. Sure, these companies still exist, but their customer base is rapidly shrinking as more and more people would rather go with Wikipedia — it’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s much, much more up-to-date. This is but one example of how the concept of open source has changed our lives already. Over the next 10 years or so, we’ll be seeing many more examples, and the effects could change just about every aspect of our lives. The open-source concept was popularized through GNU and the GPL, and it has spread ever since, in an increasingly rapid manner. Now consider this: the open-source concept doesn’t have to just apply to software. Schools.
What Digital Commoners Need To Do The following is a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world By Michel Bauwens, originally published at What have we been doing in the last few years, and what should we be doing next? Here is a list of major undertakings, some well under way, some barely begun. All need to be done, are interdependent on each other, but need to be done ‘at the same time’, though there is a certain maturation effect which may need to take place to move from one phase or priority to another. * use the existing infrastructures for immaterial exchange for personal and social autonomy We started by creating an infrastructure that allowed for peer to peer communication. The creation of this infrastructure was a combination of efforts of civil society forces, governments and public funding, and private R&D and commercial deployments.
Open-source governance Open-source governance is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.[1] Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this participation vary however as much as any other political philosophy or ideology. Accordingly there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. Applications of the principles[edit] In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by actual democratic institutions in the developed world:[3] Common and simultaneous policy[edit] These goals for instance were cited often during the Green Party of Canada's experiments with open political platform development.