PeerPoint (new name)

[Poor Richard]

PeerPoint

PeerPoint = Peer-to-Peer Everything

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

PeerPoint is intended to be much more than a user-owned social networking platform. It is imagined as a modular, peer-to-peer (p2p) application suite, developer’s tool kit, and security appliance in one plug-n-play box.

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.

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 wireless mesh networks like those used by Occupy Wall Street.

The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet.

The need:

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 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?

I have been hoping for somebody like the Linux community to create an appliance-like p2p node that provides all the apps needed for 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 and connects easily to your personal computer, home network, or mobile device.

For developers:

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.

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.

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.

The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are:

• world class, best-of-breed
• open source
• p2p architecture
• consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection
• integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture.
• consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces
• ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• GPS enabled

First tier applications:

1. distributed database
2. social networking  (comparison of distributed social network applications)
3. trust/reputation metrics
4. crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (wiki, Google Docs, or better)
5. project management/workflow
6. data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.)
7. user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better)
8. crowd funding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform)
9. voting (LiquidFeedback or better)
10. universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content

Once the PeerPoint is running with these 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.

Poor Richard

[Isaac Wilder]

Richard,

These ideas are exciting. You should come work with all of the folks that are trying to make this happen. There is very much to be done before we can accomplish these ideas (which we'd all like to accomplish). You say we could do this "if a freedombox were used as a starting point" - we need to make FreedomBox first. Let's focus on first things first.



imw

[Poor Richard]

PeerPoint Addendum:

Peer Public

Once the PeerPoint is running with these 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.

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.

[Poor Richard]

Isaac,

I'll try to plug into the FreedomBox work in some way if I can. Its mostly outside my competence, but I think its an important project with a very sound premise. I agree that first things are first, but my handicap is that I'm more an analyst and designer than a builder.

Any suggestions about how I could contribute to the FreedomBox project?

PR

[Poor Richard]

I won't keep posting revisions & addenda to PeerPoint here. I'll maintain the primary document on my blog, Poor Richard's Almanack 2010.

See primary document here: PeerPoint

This forum continues to influence the PeerPoint concepts and presentation (thank you!) but I doubt that members would like it if I kept posting revised versions here. If you want to question or comment on the PeerPoint ideas, you may want to look over the primary document first.

Thanks, PR

On Monday, May 28, 2012 4:50:01 PM UTC-5, Poor Richard wrote: