Raising the bar to supporting a Social Semantic Desktop
Paul D. Fernhout
Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even
more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it.
Please consider this document under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license (same as
Wikipedia or content on the joindiaspora.com site) -- except for quoted
material which is assumed to be under fair use in this context.
=== Overview with a semantic example
What I propose is that Diaspora emphasize either supporting or directly
integrating semantic technologies based mostly around exchanging collections
of ad-hoc semantic "triples" like RDF (the Resource Description Framework)
is built around. Such triples define essentially a database of ad-hoc
objects with field names and values (although triples can be used in other
ways, too).
(There might actually be more than three components in a "triple" in
practice, like a context, namespaces, a timestamp, a reified uuid, and an
author, and triples themselves might be embedded in transactions.)
Here is an example of using triples to define two different objects that are
related at the end:
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE represents-user "Daniel Grippi"
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE has-role DiasporaDeveloper
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE has-role DiasporaFounder
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE routed-by joindiaspora.com
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 type DesignDocument
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 title "Disapora Roadmap"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 content "Disapora is..."
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 author "Maxwell Salzberg"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 reviewed-by "Raphael Sofaer"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 reviewed-by "Ilya Zhitomirskiy"
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 license CC-BY-SA
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 checksum 57AB28F91028
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 signature C39E5ADE93E4
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 encryption None
uuid:DD776C2F-E795-453E-A343-B823AF989C01 sent-to
uuid:746A0205-E758-4BB2-B1FE-5D48B688A1CE
And, in case it was not obvious, the above defines two objects (each with a
different uuid), one representing a user with a routing method and the other
representing a design document that has been sent to that first user.
In practice there would probably be higher levels of abstraction used
eventually rather than embedding people's names in there like that, or to
support timestamped encrypted versions of documents, or to represent the act
of transmitting as an object, and so on... This was just to illustrate the
basic idea of ad hoc objects.
One could imagine that Dispora would have some general support for moving
such triples around (maybe in transactions or some other kind of packages).
I have a FOSS system I've been working on (called the Pointrel System) that
does that, but RDF can support this as well, is less bleeding edge in
implementations, and is a well-defined standard.
In practice, good tools could hide a lot of the complexity and support
internationalization in displaying low level data (as tags could be viewed
in a native language). In general, this is a low level of semantic plumbing
I am giving an example of, and what the typical user sees might usually just
look and feel like composing an email in something that looks a lot like,
say, Mozilla Thunderbird or some server-based webmail application (with some
obvious differences, like if there was a workflow involving reviewers and so
on used in that situation, that might have parts that more like Plone or
some other CMS).
There is always a tension between whether such an ad hoc approach is
"flexible" or "floppy" -- so that is an ongoing set of issues and technical
risks, and certainly the RDF folks have a lot to say about that (and related
tools and such).
Some related Diaspora code, just to compare/contrast:
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/app/models/person.rb
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/app/models/comment.rb
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/master/db/seeds/dev.rb
(And there is probably more where the database objects are defined.)
The rest of this discusses why, in the long term, Diaspora might want to use
a semantic approach like that in some form (or at least support it well so
that others could build modules that did that on top of Diaspora).
=== The problem
I posted to the diaspora-discuss list some design issues based on work by my
wife (which interrelate to my comments below) and can be found here:
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss/browse_thread/thread/b8ee0039199ad024
I wasn't sure which group to post which of these two emails. That is an
illustration of the general issue I am going to talk about below as it
relates to the limits of existing communication technologies -- that we need
better ways to make sense of all the information we have, and that a broader
semantic approach could help, coupled with technologies that support it well.
For example, it might be nice to tag emails to groups after the fact and
after people start to reply to them (like, which ones were important to what
people or subprojects), but email provides no direct way to do that.
And more comments by me on the general semantic tagging issue are here:
"The need for better communication tools & a semantic web"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f
Why could not Diaspora support something like that?
Then, it might be nice to highlight key sections from those emails in some
structured way, and maybe even have a structured argument about the ideas in
these two emails. See also in regards to structured arguments:
"The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
Why could not Diaspora support something like that?
From the technology advocacy side, it's been observed experience that,
absent massive amounts of marketing, new technology platforms have to be a
whole lot better in some way (features, price, ease-of-use, availability),
etc.) than old systems to supplant them, usually by incorporating new ideas
or some new approach. Otherwise, it's not worth people's bother to switch
from, say, Facebook unless Diaspora offers a whole lot more (or something
really different to use in addition to Facebook for a time until more and
more people move more and more things to the new network and Facebook goes
the way of, say, Geocities).
For many people, privacy is not enough of a compelling reason to shift
platforms (even though some people -- like anyone on this list probably --
think it should be even just from supporting democracy and accountability).
Diaspora may have a lot of good momentum, especially with significant
monetary donations, but it will still take a lot to really displace Facebook
with its half-a-billion users or whatever (along with a lot of other
proprietary services ranging from Google Groups through Ning). It's in the
nature of social network technology that a network persists just because it
is already persisting because everyone is using it and has already learned
how to use it and is set up to easily use it (otherwise, say, we would have
replaced email a long time ago with something much better and not so prone
to spam or forgery and so on).
A key point made by Ilya Zhitomirskiy in "Introduction to diaspora" at
0:39:40 (in relation to voice calls) is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU
"... in order to have people to migrate, it has to be really awesome ..."
So, how does one ensure that Diaspora is going to be "really awesome" enough
to get everyone to migrate to it, given how entrenched Facebook and other
more centralized solutions already are?
Just being more or less the same as Facebook (but distributed and more
private) may not be enough (even if some few might think that was really
important). Certainly the larger Diaspora ambition to aggregate all a users
content and interoperate with existing services is pretty compelling, it's
true, but, how can one implement that in a general way? How can one begin to
think about all that different content, images, messages, documents, audio
files, tags, discussions, and so on (for endless potential new modules and
new content types) somehow making sense together?
=== A semantic solution?
A big general emerging technology now is the Semantic Web (or Social
Semantic Desktop). But how much is Diaspora designed at the heart of it
about being a Social Semantic Desktop (or Web)?
I search the archives for both the dev and discuss list on Google Groups and
"semantic" does not seem to be in them:
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/search?group=diaspora-dev&q=semantic&qt_g=Search+this+group
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss/search?group=diaspora-discuss&q=semantic&qt_g=Search+this+group
So, while I know it can be hard to get anything developed (I've been working
on one piece of software for almost 30 years, and it still isn't done :-), I
can still ask, is Diaspora setting the bar too low?
These are nice goals (again from the Introduction to Diaspora video):
* decentralization
* encryption
* works with everything you already have
Especially that last one.
More goals are here (and no mention of "semantic", but a mention of
"tagging" for photos being medium priority, which is just the tip of the
semantic iceberg):
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Roadmap
And I might say the a similar thing about something like, say, RetroShare
(that someone else pointed out on a Diaspora list), that it's good, but it
is not directly about building the Semantic Web:
http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
"RetroShare is a Open Source cross-platform, private and secure
decentralised communication platform. It lets you to securely chat and share
files with your friends and family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate
peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides
filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels."
I could say the same thing about Groove (a decade ago) or Google Wave (now).
Could a new system like Diaspora about social networking be much more
compelling (than Facebook or whatever else) if it embraced some of these
semantic web ideas? And then how does one integrate the semantic information
into a concept of permissions? I don't know for sure, but I wanted to raise
the possibility that the Semantic Web (or Semantic Desktop) could be an
important issue for Diaspora.
See for example the issues raised here, and quoted at length:
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we
communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major
technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more
connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload
caused by insufficient support for information organization and
collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list
multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this
file times the number of recipients -- leading to more and more of peoples'
time going into information filtering and information management activities.
There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for
personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between
personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and
establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds
promises for information organization and selective access, providing
standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies.
Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal
computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web
protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop
applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated
personal information management as well as focused information distribution
and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the
Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has
been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug
Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for
the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the
foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were
not yet invented -- these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of
the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle. However, recently
the computer science community has developed the means to make this vision a
reality:
* The Semantic Web effort ( http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ ) provides
standards and technologies for the definition and exchange of metadata and
ontologies.
* Open-source software (like OpenOffice) and the especially the Linux
operating system make it possible to reuse and build on top of existing
sophisticated systems and create an open personal information management
system and collaborative infrastructure based on Semantic Web build into the
operating system of current machines.
* Collaboration, acquisition and dissemination infrastructures like
Wikis and Blogs are providing the foundation for joint collaborative
knowledge creation and are essentially simplified knowledge acquisition tools.
* Social Software maps the social connections between different people
into the technical infrastructure. Online Social Networking enables
collaboration relationships as first class citizens, and allows exploiting
these relationships for automated information distribution and classification.
* P2P and Grid computing, especially in combination with the Semantic
Web field, develops technology to interconnect large communities without
centralized infrastructures for data and computation sharing, which is
necessary to build heterogeneous, multi-organizational collaboration networks.
The application of the mentioned technologies, especially in combination
with the Semantic Web, to the desktop computer in order to improve personal
information management and collaboration is the main topic of this workshop.
Several systems have been created already to explore this field, e.g., the
Haystack system at MIT, the Gnowsis system at DFKI, D-BIN by SEMEDIA,
OpenIris by SRI, or the Chandler system by the OSA foundation.
Each of these systems only address some parts of the picture. Furthermore
we are in danger of resulting in many fragmented efforts, each of which will
not reach critical mass and thus will not be able to penetrate the user
space wide enough to result in mass adoption."
As I, and others, see it, that is a big challenge for this decade, the mass
adoption of such a system, in order to support a collective humanity trying
to make sense of its world and to create new joyful and healthy experiences
on top of an intrinsically/mutually secure infrastructure.
But those Semantic Desktop issues are not the issues mentioned on the
"infinity & beyond" slide of the Diaspora talk. Granted, Diaspora is still
just starting, so new things (I hope) could be added to that list. And it
may also take a while for people to go up the learning curve on some of this.
=== A possible quick and dirty implementation approach
As far as quick implementation of what I am talking about, and in terms of
technology and decoupling various architectural parts, my own latest musings
are about a system that uses something like git (or other DVCS) as a backend
(so, GitHub could be a server without any changes, or at most with only
minimal changes like for handling keys), where what is shared is primarily
files of semantic triples that define a semantic web (with an example being
at the start of this document) and perhaps some related resource files. I
have a project I've written called the Pointrel System that supports that
notion of incremental files defining a semantic web of triples (and resource
files), which could be used in conjunction with a variety of backends (not
git yet though, but it can work with any directory of files, so it could be
done by hand with git). It is here and under an LGPL license:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
The Pointrel System is the thing I've been working on for almost thirty
years mentioned above (and may have indirectly helped inspire WordNet a bit
as explained here: :-)
"On college and space habitats"
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en
But I'd be happy to agree that RDF is the mainstream technology that anyone
will have heard of and is probably going to choose to use over what I've
been working on. Of course, I think the Pointrel System has some interesting
advantages over RDF, like perhaps related to integrating transactions and
history and integrating resource files, but I'll readily admit that you can
certainly get them other ways like with RDF. So, RDF is a safer choice in
that sense (even as I'm probably going to keep plugging away with my
Pointrel approach as time permits, even as the world passes me by. :-) A
link to RDF ideas for convenience:
http://www.w3.org/RDF/
But, at least, I can pass on the general concept of triples and semantic
information processing to people here with this note.
Other background on the Semantic Web:
"Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM6XIICm_qo
"The Semantic Web of Data Tim Berners-Lee"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUrEh-nqtU
"Wikipedia: Semanic Web"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
"Welcome to Metaweb"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJfrNo3Z-DU
"Deeper understanding with Metaweb"
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html
"Metaweb CC Semantic Web and Google"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4875d41f1f50c7f6
Other background on bigger ideas and applications that Diaspora could
eventually support:
"Data and Reality Excerpts" by William Kent
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
"Doug Engelbart's Vision Highlights "
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
Such a system could have multiple frontends, both on the desktop and on a
server, similar to how people have both desktop email clients (whether in C,
Java, Python, or whatever) and use webmail (whether in Ruby, Python, PHP or
whatever).
However, layered on top of such a system would need to be information about
finding feeds and granting and revoking access to them (perhaps as some sort
of standard or service, similar to Dynamic IP services) and managing things
like ssh keys. It could be anything from a standard of people having URLs
that say where their Diaspora content feeds and public keys are currently
located using standard websites, for example (made up):
http://example.com/diaspora/DougEngelbart/diaspora.feeds
to some complicated DNS-like system with multiple companies with server
farms for IP information providing fancy GUIs to manage it and so on.
=== How Diaspora could move in that direction
I would think Diaspora could support all that above somehow, and maybe in a
much better way than I am imagining in terms of the underlying plumbing,
because it's clear the core team knows a lot about these infrastructure
things like encryption and so on.
So, what I'm thinking is really essential as a next step, given Diaspora
doing so much good plumbing about privacy and distribution, is a semantic
layer that uses that plumbing.
And we all know how essential plumbing and protocol can be. :-)
"Brazil - Have you got a 27B-6?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosrujtjJHA
Here is some related discussions in another context (about perhaps
supporting an open manufacturing platform using git and GitHub):
"GitHub for hosting open projects or a social semantic desktop? "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/a901eef6424702c8
I doubt anyone here might want to wade through that discussion, but the key
point is, these basic technologies can be useful in a variety of contexts.
The context there involves coordinating how large numbers of people design
new free and open products and how they talk about them and how people
exchange free and open designs that could be used with 3D printers, robotic
assembly systems, and so on. And, as linked at the top of this, I previously
posted an email to the discuss list by my wife in the context of how people
share stories on Facebook or in organizations. And Wikipedia, knols, and
blogs provide yet another context that could be supported.
For example, here is an overly long knol I wrote about our technological
future, derived from content mostly added by me to Wikipedia (but with some
significant additions and improvements by others):
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century
economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Diaspora could perhaps help answer the question of how can I ensure that
content is distributed to multiple places where it can be discussed and
improved in a structured way by people who care about it. It was too
controversial material for Wikipedia, so I can accept it was all deleted
from there by believers in mainstream economics (I'd certainly agree it
could be improved a lot, too, in various ways, and one can ask how good a
fit it was for a Wikipedia article). But there really isn't a great middle
ground between Wikipedia and a blog-ish knol for the independent researcher
who wants to work in collaboration with other independent researchers on
some themed composition. Google Knol is better in that regard, but then you
are back to having content centralized through a for-profit organization.
And even hosting your own MediaWiki has its limits both as a wiki (like no
semantic tagging, unless you use a Halo Semantic Mediawiki and that has its
own issues as an add-on) and also as a centralized social process limited by
what one server can handle. So, out of Diaspora, I can hope for an
easy-to-use semantic platform to support better collaborative work on long
documents, ones that involve lots of links and even lots of simulations and
so on. A related post by me:
"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and
Catton)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004130.html
So, whether it is pictures, stories, files for 3D printers, encyclopedia
articles, blog posts, complex databases of simulation results, structured
arguments, or something else, one could hope that a common infrastructure
could support it, and do so in a "fine grained" semantic way.
Still, moving in a Semantic Desktop or Semantic Web direction would mean
more technical risk for Diaspora, because that is all relatively new stuff
compared to putting up some webforms and having a database of some standard
objects. Is it worth it for Diaspora to move in that direction? It's a hard
choice.
As was said here (about the struggles of the Chandler Project):
"Software Is Hard"
http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
"But the nature of software is that the problems are always different. You
never have to solve the exact problem that someone's solved before, because
if software already existed that solved your need, you wouldn't have to
write it. Writing software is expensive. Copying software is cheap. Scott
Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except
when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software
that's worth making is software that does something new."
The further Diaspora gets into new territory moving beyond Facebook (like
the Semantic Web), the harder it might get to make obvious incremental
progress. Although, on the other hand, people have been talking about the
Semantic Web for some time, so maybe the time is finally right?
So while Diaspora is for sure going to get working all the distributed
ideas, the encryption ideas, and even the syncing ideas, at least some of
that has been done before (like with Groove a decade ago, even if the
syncing idea is new). I can suggest with a semantic aspect it would be
really compelling in a way that other solutions so far have not been -- and
then that might drive adoption of it by users for all sorts of purposes,
whether with stories, CAD files, photos, emails, chat, or essays.
Such a semantic focus may well have to be done as a different project, or
one that is built on top of a flexible Diaspora infrastructure given that
Diaspora is talking about plugins and modules (assuming Diaspora gave at
least a little thought to this semantic issue to support it, or has hooks in
any internet appliance virtual machine it distributes). Obviously, as far as
just momentum within the FOSS community, Diaspora has done something right
to get all this mindshare, so we don't want to mess with that. And it is
building momentum for a first version, and I don't want to derail that. I'm
just thinking that the opportunity exists to build that momentum into
something much more amazing than being the "Anti-Facebook". Diaspora could
be the easy-to-use Social Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop for everyone.
So, I wanted to make these ideas available here to think about, even if they
seem too hard now. Decentralized and more private is nice, but Diaspora may
need amazing new functionality beyond that to be something everyone wants to
use, and integrating with the Semantic Web somehow could be a way to get that.
Also, as with the problems of adoption with Google Wave, it seems that the
more integrated future p2p solutions are with p2p-ish email (including maybe
as a Thunderbird addon?), the more traction they might get sooner.
=== Linking this to ongoing socio-economic phase changes
Still, my problem with even someone like Eben Moglen, whose comments
inspired Diaspora, is that he is not radical *enough* for me, even with
radical ideas like "FreedomBox". :-)
"Why Eben Moglen is misguided... (Score:4, Interesting)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755090&cid=33260502
My argument there was that distributed social tools were not enough -- that
we need a paradigm shift in our society to reflect technological abundance
in our thinking about our economics. :-) I also think we need to work from
the safe assumption that the government can read everything, and go from
there in building a social movement that transforms society in a healthy
way. Similarly, I'm saying the same thing about Diaspora -- it is not
radical *enough* and also may have an underlying social assumption about
privacy that may not be valid (as suggested even in the Introduction to
Diaspora video with an aside that maybe the NSA could perhaps read whatever
was encrypted through some backdoor flaw, and I'd suggest could any
communication always be compromised by betrayal on one side by a paid
informer...) Example:
"Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/
So, you can take all of my technical comments with a grain of salt in the
sense of all that ambition (or whining or paranoia. :-) I acknowledge these
suggestions are pretty ambitious, as above, and such ambitions would ask
that the Diaspora team learn a lot about emerging ideas and do some really
difficult things involving some bleeding-edge semantic stuff beyond the new
(and good) stuff it is already doing -- and that it is possible such
ambitious and risky efforts might fail for all sorts of reasons. Still, I
contacted the Chandler/OSAF project about the Pointrel system semantic
approach and they went another more mainstream way and failed anyway (well,
it's still ongoing, but it lost its way and most of its funding somewhere
along the line). But, I learn more each time, so maybe the above might seem
more coherent and approachable than what I sent the Chandler/OSAF people
years ago, and that in private, not in public where at least others could
learn from it. :-)
It's quite reasonable for anyone to say that, for now, a Semantic Web is not
what Diaspora is about, as no one can do everything. But somehow, I feel,
the really big future for something like Diaspora is going to be integrating
semantic web concepts. So, at the very least, if Diaspora was built in such
a way as to support future modules in that semantic direction, it might be
an even more successful thing that totally and rapidly eclipses Facebook and
many other technology platforms as well.
Anyway, that's just my two cents on Diaspora's internal architecture, for
what that's worth anymore. :-) And that from someone who, like just about
everyone else in our society trying to do FOSS, is stuck with one foot still
in a culture based on widespread scarcity-based economic assumptions where
donations of "money" are still a big deal, and with one foot in a
post-scarcity culture (like Iain Banks' "Culture" series) where currency
exchange is becoming obsolete (as opposed to, say, social exchange via
Diaspora or just the currency of paying attention).
Anyway, all the best, and congratulations on getting to the point where some
real code is out there and runnable. I hope all you indoors-oriented
democratic-infrastructure developers out there are getting your vitamin D
and eating lots of veggies & fruits, getting good sleep, and getting
moderate exercise, so you can keep healthy while continuing to make
high-quality new Diaspora versions for a good long time. :-) See also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
From the last: "Emphasizing Social Networks - Research shows that your
social circle as a quiet, but powerful impact on your long-term health
behaviors. The project will focus on helping participants identify and spend
time with friends and family who have a positive impact on their health. In
addition, it aims to encourage participants to expand their social circles
to include more positive influences."
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.