Lorea and N-1.cc

[Alejandro]

Hi,

First of all, I think this is a great idea, and I wish I could go or
send someone from this project!

I'd like to invite you all to join one of the various Lorea seeds you
can find at http://lorea.cc/

To explain this cryptic language, Lorea means "Flower" in Basque, and
it is a set of plugins for the php based open source social network
Elgg. They extend it alongside, and beyond the aims of Diaspora,
following the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari.

It's main use is currently as the N-1 network ( https://n-1.cc/ ) -
one of the coordination tools that is currently being used (besides
regular online tools like twitter and facebook), by the assemblarian
#15m movement based in Spain and beyond. It had been active for around
a year, and many of the organisations that sprang to help out when
word spread that the camps had started, were already using Lorea based
networks as a shared non commercial space.

It provides, as a basic set of services, chat, piratepads, a task
system forums, wikis, groups, and ways to upload and link to different
media, sharing it all on an internal microblogging wire which is now
Ostatus enabled.

https://bitbucket.org/rhizomatik

There are various different lorea "seeds" - as in, implemented social
network "confederates". Each one is a fully functional social network
in many ways. The project comes from Sevilla mostly, but also now is
being developed across the rest of Spain, and beyond. Together all
these things provide ways to federate information between different
social networks.

There is now a moving "Hackaton" - a hacking marathon centred on
improving N-1 - which saw an increase of about 10000 members in a
week, and is growing rapidly. The hackaton just left Madrid, and has
reached Barcelona, where it's taking place at the Barcelona
Hackerspace, next stop Valencia later this week. The hackaton is based
around creating a participative democracy toolkit, so that the various
assembly acts being posted online can be shared in more intelligent
ways, perhaps allowing different ways to show who voted for each
proposal in any one assembly, or showing what different opinions are
from one area to another.

The participative democracy assemblies of all the city camps, which
have now spread to the local neighbourhoods or "barrios" are run
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Hand_signals

For each proposal brought to an assembly, there is twinkling of hands
from the people who approve, followed by barred hands from those who
disapprove, and to keep things moving when the chatter gets going,
hands turn in a revolving to politely move things along.

I think this all provides a rich experimental ground for development -
there are many things we could be using or are in development, like
geolocation, an RDF mapping for the democracy data, scalable high
performance location awareness, there's room for everyone! :)

Personally I would love to do something to do with mapping resource
transactions - towards participative aspects to an economy as well.
The 15m movement is to me a mass movement to reconsider democracy and
see if we can get closer to a more direct, participative version of
it. In doing it, there are lots of different ideas, that sometimes
even disagree with each other. I think this is healthy, and I hope
there will be interest from people here in starting new seeds, and
working with us both in activism towards figuring out what "post
capitalism" is and in making Lorea networks all the more open,
positive ways to coordinate spontaneous social movements.

Here is an interview with one of the developers on the Ostatus aspect:
http://ostatus.org/2010/08/05/ostatus-interview-pablo-martin

Thanks to all who are helping with this conference!

Ale Fernandez