Poor Richard

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Jun 18, 2012, 10:14:27 AM6/18/12

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Welcome to the PeerPoint Discussion Thread

PeerPoint Design Specifications

PeerPoint is an evolving crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc. This specification overlaps with several existing p2p infrastructure and social networking projects but also goes substantially beyond anything yet existing.

Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the open PeerPoint specs and to adopt any part of the specs they can use in their own work. To participate, please read the PeerPoint Design Specifications. If you then wish to edit the PeerPoint document you will need to join this Next Net Group.

In the near future we will have a PeerPoint repository and wiki at GitHub.

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

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Jun 18, 2012, 10:19:55 AM6/18/12

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I encourage Next Net group members to discuss and to mention in your blogs, presentations, training, etc. the difference between real p2p application software (still fairly uncommon and under-developed) and the useful but corporate-controlled client-server applications like Google Docs and Google Groups. Most open source/free software also still uses a client-server architecture. Until end-users learn the difference between client-server and p2p software architecture it will be hard to pull the software designers and developers further in the p2p direction.

"Peer-to-peer (abbreviated to P2P) refers to a computer network in which each computer in the network can act as a client or server for the other computers in the network, allowing shared access to files and peripherals without the need for a central server [emphasis added]." (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

What is less often understood is that the individual applications (such as email or shared document editing) must also have the p2p architecture built into each one. So far that is seldom the case. Somehow we must create greater awareness to drive greater demand for these kinds of p2p software products.

BTW as far as I can tell, there is no online forum dedicated to the general topic of p2p application software design for free/open source software designers, developers, engineers, etc. Discussions of p2p architecture tend to be found mostly in the discussions of specific p2p networking projects like freenet and FreedomBox and they tend to apply to the lower-level network routing and file-sharing issues instead of the higher application software level for real-time, interactive collaboration. If anyone knows of a general p2p application architecture group or forum, please let me know.

Thanks, PR

Message has been deleted

Poor Richard

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Jun 18, 2012, 10:22:44 AM6/18/12

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96 words on the future of the internet

by Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, June 6, 2012

I was asked by an Italian newspaper to submit 96 words on the future of internet. Here they are:

Instead of further going down the corporate lane of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, I propose to go back to the original architecture of Internet as public infrastructure with decentralized nodes. It may be romantic to insist on the distributed nature of networks but it is a necessary political demand. Net criticism is a toothless project without a utopian dimension. Even if internet itself had a military origin in the Cold War, and is now dominated by equally destructive force of greedy venture capitalists, backed up by libertarian gurus. Let’s rethink the public sphere: another internet is possible!

Poor Richard

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Jun 18, 2012, 10:25:26 AM6/18/12

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On 5/13/11 Curtis Faith wrote:

Efficiency is going to dictate that some peers are going to serve different distribution roles in the network. How and why they do this is critical to acceptance of any system.

Several people agreed with Curtis then and I may have come to agree with him, too. The whole thread BitTorrent as distributed social network is worth reading, if you have the time, as context for what follows:

A network consisting entirely of equal and identically configured peers is not suitable for a number of the applications in the social networking and collaboration suite that I describe in the PeerPoint specification. Some peers need to have special characteristics and special distribution roles as Curtis suggested. For example, some peers need to have high-availability (always on, at least) and high-capacity (lots of storage and processing capacity), and these special peers must be widely trusted by other peers to provide various services--table look-ups, data replication, etc.

I suggest (just to get the discussion started) three general categories or classes of peers:

Peer Classes (one machine might serve any combination, but typically the classes require different levels of hardware capacity and availability)

personal peers
community peers (serving special roles for a defined group of personal peers)
public or global peers (providing global services available to all peers)

Each peer class might have several sub-classifications:

trust class

explicit: classified by personal/community/public blacklists, whitelists, etc.
implicit: automatically determined by community and/or public poling or reputation metrics

replication class: manually rated by owner as open, public, community, closed, private, by invitation, limited, unlimited, etc.

availability class: configurable options might include 1) manually owner-rated as high, medium, low, average, etc. or 2) statistically measured/benchmarked

On another topic, I suggest that all the PeerPoint applications (email, social chat, project spaces, wiki pages, etc.) need to have common elements in the user interfaces to set and override default privacy and security settings at a fine level of granularity (e.g. individual emails, files, documents, comments, links, etc.).

User-configured Security settings (by content categories and by individual data items) might include:

encryption on/off
anonymity level (strong, weak, none, etc.)
data auto-purge conditions (under what conditions should a personal peer wipe some or all of its own data clean, or should other peers wipe all replicas of some or all content types belonging to a particular peer)

Finally, the extreme nature of some of the privacy and security options mentioned above raises the danger of 1) provoking government reaction against otherwise legal and benign private network activity and 2) potentially attracting the use/exploitation of PeerPoint technology by anti-social actors, which would exacerbate danger #1. For these reasons PeerPoint networks would need mechanisms for policing themselves against anti-social uses, perhaps including methods for segregating high and low risk activity on separate networks, and perhaps some way of trying to satisfy the minimum national security requirements of liberal democratic states as far as possible.

PR

On Wednesday, June 6, 2012 9:33:24 PM UTC-5, Poor Richard wrote:

I've shared PeerPoint
Next Net group members: I've shared a Google Doc called "PeerPoint" with the group. Members have edit permission but please follow the two simple procedures mentioned at the top of the document.

Click to open:
PeerPoint

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Poor Richard

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Jun 18, 2012, 11:06:02 AM6/18/12

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Setting up and using the PeerPoint GitHub site

In order to use these you need to

Be a member of this Next Net Google Group so you can post here
Get a free GitHub user account if you don't already have one
Post your GitHub user name in a message here so I can add you as a user of the PeerPoint GitHub project

The PeerPoint repository currently has just a readme file and the wiki has just a text version of the PeerPoint Specifications with most of the links stripped out of it.

The objective is to get all the PeerPoint documents and activity shifted over there as soon as possible. But I am new at GitHub and no wiki-master either, so I can use all the help I can get.

I assume it will generally be best to put code in the repository and docs in the wiki. We don't have any code and might not for a while, although there is plenty of relevant open source code we can copy to our repository as needed. The actual PeerPoint design specification should probably go in the repository so we can easily fork it and make use of the version control features.

The wiki can hold all the design specifications and documentation gathered from similar or related open p2p projects. There is an Open Design project on GitHub that may contain material relevant to the PeerPoint Open Design process.

If there is enough interest I'll set up a dedicated PeerPoint Google Group and/or mailing list.

If anyone is willing to help set up the GitHub site please let me know.

Cheers,

PR

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 18, 2012, 11:15:46 PM6/18/12

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On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 9:19 AM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

BTW as far as I can tell, there is no online forum dedicated to the general topic of p2p application software design for free/open source software designers, developers, engineers, etc. Discussions of p2p architecture tend to be found mostly in the discussions of specific p2p networking projects like freenet and FreedomBox and they tend to apply to the lower-level network routing and file-sharing issues instead of the higher application software level for real-time, interactive collaboration. If anyone knows of a general p2p application architecture group or forum, please let me know.

Aslo, from the PeerPoint wiki: "As far as we can determine, no such suite exits or is even on the drawing board. "

Richard, there is very little such application suites on the "drawing board" because we're way ahead of you. These conversations have been going on for over a decade. You're excited to get started, so you start afresh, but many of us have heard it all before. That there isn't something more by now is a difficult fact to explain. But probably the biggest reason is that after the litigation over p2p file-sharing and such, no one (with financial resources or political clout) has taken the "leap of faith" to "get it done". Such a comprehensive and radical project isn't that far from the process that created the protocols of the whole Internet to begin with... and you know how many years and millions that took....

So, if you want this to happen, I suggest you solve the political and/or financing problem.... don't go rei-inventing the wheel.

mark j

Paul Hughes

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Jun 18, 2012, 11:35:15 PM6/18/12

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Mark,

Wikipedia and Linux are two prime examples of substantive creations greater than Poor Richard's proposal that were done almost entirely by volunteers with no desire for compensation other than the joy of creating something awesome.

I believe the time is ripe for PeerPoint or something equivalent. In fact it's long overdue. Because of the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, and efforts to control and censor the net, there are more people wanting, and willing to build something like this than ever before.

Paul

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 19, 2012, 12:34:20 AM6/19/12

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Actually, I think both comments are partially on the mark, and partially
off the mark.

We HAVE had peer-to-peer applications, of various sorts, for years.
USENET comes to mind (I can't think of very much that any centralized
social networks do that USENET news wasn't doing years ago. And at one
point, someone did a very nice implementation of USENET on top of a
distributed hash table). The failure of USENET has a lot more do to
with not finding a viable solution to spam than anything else.
Currently, distributed CVS systems (notably GIT) are a peer-to-peer
application that's very successful. And then there's torrent.

Re. Wikipedia and Linux: Both build on rather rich ecosystems of prior
art, and development communities. Wikis came first, in various flavors,
wikipedia. The world wide web virtual library predated wikipedia by
decades. It took a lot of experimentation, plus vision and drive before
wikipedia coalesced. Linux builds on the legacy of Unix and lets not
forget all the stuff done by Stallman and the FSF (e.g, all the gnu
tools and gnu userspace without which Linux would be useless).

The problem with Poor Richard's proposal is severalfold:

1. lack of specificity - "let's build a P2P application suite" is a
pretty content free statement - the PeerPoint "specification" really
isn't anything resembling much of a specification

2. lack of vision - Ted Nelson's "Dream Machine's" book and Xanadu
concept never really led to any widely used code, but they sure inspired
a lot of people - precisely because Nelson laid out a vision of new
capabilities -- other people went on to implement some of those ideas

3. lack of understanding about how technology evolves - open source or
not - it involves an ecosystem and a process of incremental development,
punctuated by flashes of insight

4. lack of anything motivating - is there really that much
dissatisfaction with FaceBook? I mean, an awful lot of people use it,
and there are alternatives for old reprobates like me who find FaceBook
pretty insipid and useless (except for keeping track of my kid). For
real work, email lists have been around an awfully long time, and don't
seem to be going away anytime soon. The folks who REALLY worry about
privacy/secrecy are using VPNs, encryption, darknets, etc.

"Let's build an application suite" is a mantra that leads to things like
MS Office. "Let's build an open source application suite" leads to
OpenOffice and LibreOffice - which are essentially not-as-good
imitations of MS Office. I simply don't see anything in the PeerPoint
proposal that goes beyond "let's do x, y, and z, but let's do it
peer-to-peer."

Now if Poor Richard were to start developing stuff, that actually did
useful and interesting things, I expect it would attract a community.
But just saying "I think people should do <this>," where <this> is
generally uninspired and uninteresting, is not a recipe for anything.

</end rant>

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

Sepp Hasslberger

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Jun 19, 2012, 7:56:35 AM6/19/12

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I respectfully disagree with Mark, Paul and Miles.

Clearly, p2p needs a tech infrastructure that isn't available today. You can point to all the bits and pieces and to usenet as long as you want, you still don't have a workable system.

What Poor Richard is advocating is to take those pieces and sew them together into a useful, workable, user-friendly suite of applications that can run on a real decentralized network, one where the edge is king, where our own computers are the powerhouse. I wonder why none of you three can see and appreciate that vision. Perhaps a case of having worked on bits and pieces for so long that it seems there is nothing else to do but continue doing those bits and pieces and hoping that somehow, by some miracle, they meld into something useful.

Perhaps, instead of criticizing Poor Richard's vision of an integrated software stack for a user owned internet, and pointing as the real solution to what's already there, it would be more constructive if you could come up with a really inspiring, awesome vision that is better.

Sepp

Eugen Leitl

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Jun 19, 2012, 8:11:12 AM6/19/12

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On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 11:56:35AM +0000, Sepp Hasslberger wrote:

> Perhaps, instead of criticizing Poor Richard's vision of an integrated
> software stack for a user owned internet, and pointing as the real solution
> to what's already there, it would be more constructive if you could come up
> with a really inspiring, awesome vision that is better.

You'll need a zero administration system that derives the address from
local connectivity and does own route discovery.

The simplest way to do so would be to use IPv6, and use the local /64
as scratch space, using WGS 84 position fixes to encode a 3d node position.
Think of it as a hyperbolic/small world network mapped on top of the
current Internet, using only the last few hops over user owned
mesh infrastructure, if available. Otherwise, it's a virtual overlay
over the existing Internet.

The important part is to not use a global routing table, but a local
routing table for every node, and limit memory size and admin chatter
to the local loop (+a few more hops).

Above you'll need a way to identify nodes -- a position is not an identity,
and use a p2p alternative to DNS name resolution, basically a bit like
.onion. In practice the names need not to be human-readable, as long as
they're sufficiently short and you have distributed crawlers with search.

Everything on top of that is user-level, and does not need to be changed
much, if at all.

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 19, 2012, 12:00:47 PM6/19/12

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You could implement a barebones P2P system where each node's unique
address is a public cryptographic key generated locally, and topology
is discovered periodically by each node individually by flooding the
network. You can use this while you test the rest of your system, and
when you have more than 100 nodes participating or somesuch then you
implement something good as you have described. Instead of focusing on
how to do addressing and routing right from the start, you focus on
what wasn't done yet.

What's the center, the heart, the core of the "revolutionary" P2P
technology that's being sought? Is it how it addresses? Is it how it
routes? Is it how it executes remote code? Is it administration-free?
Is it replicated, resilient? Is it administratively-decentralized? Is
the network decentralized? Is it low latency? Is it dependable? Can we
have secrecy, authenticity and all that? Does it scale? Is it "cheap"
to produce? Can it be produced in a decentralized fashion with 3D
printers? Does it protect against free-riding? Is it anonymous? Etc.

I think all of these questions are secondary. They are all part of the
final answer, but what's the central question? I don't think any of
these is illustrative of the central question, the central issue.

What is the idea that will resonate with people's hearts, what's going
to bypassing all of our indoctrination and end up getting our support
because we just have to see it happen? What is it that everyone would
like to defeat, to free themselves from, if only were there an
alternative, a hope, but alas, we all know _that_ can't be changed
because it is "human nature"? Is it authoritarianism, censorship as
Eben Moglen so eloquently speaks of? That stuff is vital, but
censorship and authoritarianism are emergent phenomena, not root
causes. They happen because of something else. They are a consequence
of something else. That something else has a wider appeal, not because
it is something that will sell better, but because most or all of our
hearts already see it, but sadly not our minds, yet.

It is something all of us in this list want, it is a common ground,
and given the right space, it would show. I do not buy the idea that
discussion groups are people with "diverse interests" that come
together because of a "small common technical overlap of temporary
relevance". No group worth their salt operates that way. Instead, the
real interest is the same, the hearts are aligned, but with a vast
array of technical interests that sometimes have overlaps, but often
do not, but that's actually a feature because it adds to the diversity
of what the group can achieve, being joined by the heart. Our hearts
drive us to groups, and they know what's best long before our minds
are able to see why.

Why are we bothering with all this P2P machinery? How is it possible
that I don't know any of you yet I know that all of you watched the
Occupy thing very closely... that your heart lit up with hope, that
maybe something different was going to happen, as did I?

I really recommend this --> http://www.co-intelligence.org
This will transform your vision of what a group of people is and what
it can achieve together.

Fabio

Paul Hughes

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Jun 19, 2012, 12:25:19 PM6/19/12

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Sepp!

Whoa there. I made only one post, and that post was 100% in defense of Poor Richards project. I am 100% supportive. I'm not sure how you read it otherwise.

Sincerely,
Paul

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 10:08:10 PM6/19/12

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> we're way ahead of you

> don't go re-inventing the wheel

Mark, If you'll point me to the place where PeerPoint-equivalent or better open design specs are located I'll breathe a big sigh of relief. This isn't something I started out of boredom, and I'll be glad to get behind an existing open design specification.

> You're excited to get started, so you start afresh

The PeerPoint doc already links to just about everything that exists (in most cases via other existing lists like http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Infrastructure). Adding links to stuff I'm unaware of and which isn't on any of the lists I reference is something I hope others will pitch in and help with.

What I'm more concerned about is the lack of structure and organization of the PeerPoint spec and the limitations of the method for collaboration so far.

The general structure of the PeerPoint project as well as the pros and cons of existing projects that might fill any of the PeerPoint design categories are open to discussion. When the PeerPoint draft specs are a little better organized I will make an effort to see that everyone in the tech community is invited to comment and participate.

PR

On Monday, June 18, 2012 10:15:46 PM UTC-5, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth wrote:

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 10:22:53 PM6/19/12

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Hi, Paul.

Good points, man. Thanks for chiming in! What I've been saying is that the p2p/floss/hacker community has plenty of chops. The resource in shortest supply is time.

Do you think the PeerPoint Open Design Specification effort is redundant?

Are you interested collaborating?

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 11:09:32 PM6/19/12

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lreadOn Monday, June 18, 2012 11:34:20 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Currently, distributed CVS systems (notably GIT) are a peer-to-peer
application that's very successful. And then there's torrent.

Obvious candidates for the PeerPoint constellation.

Re. Wikipedia and Linux: Both build on rather rich ecosystems of prior
art, and development communities. Wikis came first, in various flavors,
wikipedia. The world wide web virtual library predated wikipedia by
decades. It took a lot of experimentation, plus vision and drive before
wikipedia coalesced. Linux builds on the legacy of Unix and lets not
forget all the stuff done by Stallman and the FSF (e.g, all the gnu
tools and gnu userspace without which Linux would be useless).

Those are all 1) examples of the tech community's capability and 2) possible components of the PeerPoint ecosystem.

The problem with Poor Richard's proposal is severalfold:

1. lack of specificity - "let's build a P2P application suite" is a
pretty content free statement - the PeerPoint "specification" really
isn't anything resembling much of a specification

I've also heard that it's too technical. Obviously it needs to be extended in both directions, and its a long way from being a spec that anything can be built to. I want to get the high-level organization of functions, features, categories, etc. right, and the collaboration process workable, before drilling much deeper in any area.

2. lack of vision - Ted Nelson's "Dream Machine's" book and Xanadu
concept never really led to any widely used code, but they sure inspired
a lot of people - precisely because Nelson laid out a vision of new
capabilities -- other people went on to implement some of those ideas

I'm only trying to preach to he choir at this point--people already aware of the needs.

3. lack of understanding about how technology evolves - open source or
not - it involves an ecosystem and a process of incremental development,
punctuated by flashes of insight

I've heard you pontificate on this and the glories of emergence before. The ecosystem already exists. I'm trying to add a high-level, open design specification and collaboration process that spans more of the whole ecosystem than current models. The alt-tech community is like an orchestra warming up, playing notes without a score. Not so the corporate community which has colonized the entire internet and imposed its central control and surveillance model. The die-hard digital libertarians are, as usual, the unwitting servants of the corporations.

4. lack of anything motivating - is there really that much
dissatisfaction with FaceBook? I mean, an awful lot of people use it,
and there are alternatives for old reprobates like me who find FaceBook
pretty insipid and useless (except for keeping track of my kid). For
real work, email lists have been around an awfully long time, and don't
seem to be going away anytime soon. The folks who REALLY worry about
privacy/secrecy are using VPNs, encryption, darknets, etc.

The PeerPoint doc, bad as it may be, already addresses those issues. VPN and overlay networks don't solve the problems at the application level.

"Let's build an application suite" is a mantra that leads to things like
MS Office. "Let's build an open source application suite" leads to
OpenOffice and LibreOffice - which are essentially not-as-good
imitations of MS Office. I simply don't see anything in the PeerPoint
proposal that goes beyond "let's do x, y, and z, but let's do it
peer-to-peer."

If we had a p2p version of Open Office I would be thrilled. Are you unconvinced of a need for p2p application architecture and application interoperability? Do you think GIT and email solve the average user's content management and collaboration needs? (I can already hear you thinking "If It was good enough for my generation....")

Now if Poor Richard were to start developing stuff, that actually did
useful and interesting things, I expect it would attract a community.
But just saying "I think people should do <this>," where <this> is
generally uninspired and uninteresting, is not a recipe for anything.

</end rant>

If you were to start participating in a open, collaborative design process to address some of the most compelling needs of our generation (i.e. something beyond your personal technical interests) I would applaud.

PR

Paul Hughes wrote:
> Mark,
>
> Wikipedia and Linux are two prime examples of substantive creations greater than Poor Richard's proposal that were done almost entirely by volunteers with no desire for compensation other than the joy of creating something awesome.
>
> I believe the time is ripe for PeerPoint or something equivalent. In fact it's long overdue. Because of the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, and efforts to control and censor the net, there are more people wanting, and willing to build something like this than ever before.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> On Jun 18, 2012, at 20:15, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth <dreamin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Richard, there is very little such application suites on the "drawing board" because we're way ahead of you. These conversations have been going on for over a decade. You're excited to get started, so you start afresh, but many of us have heard it all before. That there isn't something more by now is a difficult fact to explain. But probably the biggest reason is that after the litigation over p2p file-sharing and such, no one (with financial resources or political clout) has taken the "leap of faith" to "get it done". Such a comprehensive and radical project isn't that far from the process that created the protocols of the whole Internet to begin with... and you know how many years and millions that took....
>>
>> So, if you want this to happen, I suggest you solve the political and/or financing problem.... don't go rei-inventing the wheel.
>>
>> mark j

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 11:15:37 PM6/19/12

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Hi, Sepp.

Man did you hit the nail on the head. I appreciate it, buddy. I couldn't have said it better. Can I put part of your comment into the PeerPoint doc?

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 11:37:04 PM6/19/12

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Eugen,

Thanks for the constructive suggestions.

I agree that there should be a zero-administration default option for many functions, but part of the p2p philosophy is that in order to really own and control your own identity and data you have to have choices, and those choices have to be easy enough to implement or you don't really have those choices.

I like your idea about how to use IPv6. I'm not sure where to fit it into the PeerPoint doc because it hasn't evolved to that level of detail yet. I think I'll just start a comment section at the end of the doc for right now. Can I copy your suggestion to there? If so, is it OK to include your name?

I may disagree that node names don't need to be human-readable, but I'm still studying about that. Users need the ability to make decisions (if they choose to) about what traffic to route or block.

> Everything on top of that is user-level, and does not need to be changed
much, if at all.

I don't think I agree with that. No matter what we do at the network com and routing level, there is still a whole lot that needs to be changed/invented at the application level, IMO. Most of the world-class, user-friendly, open-source collaboration tools still require central servers.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 19, 2012, 11:41:56 PM6/19/12

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Hi Paul,

I definitely got that your comment was positive, but I zoned out on your name being included in Sepp's reply. I don't know why he included you. He may have mixed your name up with somebody else's. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 20, 2012, 12:15:02 AM6/20/12

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Fabio,

I think your post was inspiring and well said.

I added the Collective Intelligence link to the PeerPoint doc. I'd also like to append your whole post there too, if I may.

But I don't agree on one technicality: I don't see that P2P per se advances co-intelligence that much. Some of the issues you demoted to lesser status may be the more directly correlated with P2P architecture--authoritarian corporate control (including censorship and terms of service) and surveillance, not to mention the great, big OFF switch.

That said, however, I am not above selling P2P with something more positive and inspiring than ownership and security.

Thanks very much for your input and I hope you'll continue to participate.

PR

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 20, 2012, 11:46:17 AM6/20/12

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On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fabio,
>
> I think your post was inspiring and well said.

Really?
So perhaps I'm not getting crazy after all... maybe just hurrying to
sloppy logic, but not crazy per se then... :-)

> I added the Collective Intelligence link to the PeerPoint doc. I'd also like
> to append your whole post there too, if I may.

Wow, sure, go ahead.

> But I don't agree on one technicality: I don't see that P2P per se advances
> co-intelligence that much.

Right, you mean, just throwing in "the ultimate P2P tools" into a
group doesn't necessarily turn them into a
coherent-whole-organism-thingy?

Co-intelligence -- as far as I know, from reading and interpreting Tom
Atlee's stuff and from joining that to some stuff I've seen -- seems
to depend heavily on something "genuine" that we carry "inside". It is
not autopilot, yes-sir, skeptical, cynical or distant participation,
but a kind of "I care enough to show how much I really know nothing as
an individual" being-there that jumps out of you and interacts. One
that bypasses a large chunk of the fears of the mind and puts itself
"out there". It is as if the part of your mind that individually
regulates everything you say is instead hooked up to other people's,
in such a way that you let a pretty "inner" voice out first, and then
the collective "brain" (a distributed process) "judges" it in the same
silent and compassionate way that your brain judges (filters) most of
the nonsense we generate internally and that never leaves our selves.
And with that, collective discussion is more grounded and aware of
what's in everyone's hearts, as patterns are identified in the
individual pieces of "nonsense" that we'd otherwise silently discard
as individuals. We "see" each other much more directly, with less
interference from the several layers of cultural worries (which you
can never fully escape, it seems). This seems to be related with
"trust": I "trust" this group, so I'll show more of my imperfect human
self. This allows both for the group to identify what are the common,
real, deep and imperfect human longings that we all share, and for
people to heal whatever wounds they might be carrying...

That may or may not happen any better if you have better means of
electronic information exchange. I would think that the above process
would instead identify the core human longings, which in turn would be
served by a (very) different set of communication tools and
technologies than the ones we have today.

But of course we all know that. We all carry our fragments of why
these P2P tools and decentralized communication are absolutely vital.
They seem to be enough to carry the work forward. It's happening. Some
are working on it, others... I don't really know what I'm doing :-)

> Some of the issues you demoted to lesser status
> may be the more directly correlated with P2P architecture--authoritarian
> corporate control (including censorship and terms of service) and
> surveillance, not to mention the great, big OFF switch.

Yes, exactly.

What I'm reaching for is that P2P architecture is a solution to
something which is a greater "sum" of all the individual P2P
motivations you can find. If that makes any sense at all, then, in
addition I suspect that that something is a deeper, more basic issue;
it is at a different, deeper level than all of the individual P2P
motivations, and that discussing at that level is much, much harder
and painful than discussing at the individual motivation level, which
in turn is harder than discussing technicalities (which are completely
external to us and that we can all easily perceive whether they either
work or don't work, so it's easier to separate what's false from
what's true).

> That said, however, I am not above selling P2P with something more positive
> and inspiring than ownership and security.

That stuff is closer to the "discussion" I want to have, but, I'm
starting to suspect mailing lists (asynchronous, group, written
communication) won't be of any help. And I don't have the skill to
handle a complex, inevitably "combative" discussion on these topics.
Me fail.

> Thanks very much for your input and I hope you'll continue to participate.

Thank you.

Fabio

Poor Richard

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Jun 20, 2012, 8:10:59 PM6/20/12

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On Wednesday, June 20, 2012 10:46:17 AM UTC-5, Fabio Cecin wrote:

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Poor Richard wrote:

<skip>

> But I don't agree on one technicality: I don't see that P2P per se advances
> co-intelligence that much.

Right, you mean, just throwing in "the ultimate P2P tools" into a
group doesn't necessarily turn them into a
coherent-whole-organism-thingy?

No, I only meant that proprietary client-server applications might be able to serve collective intelligence as well as open source p2p apps. Google's app suite is pretty strong. The unique aspect of p2p apps applies more to the individual sovereignty issues than the collaboration issues.

Co-intelligence -- as far as I know, from reading and interpreting Tom
Atlee's stuff and from joining that to some stuff I've seen -- seems

to depend heavily on something "genuine" that we carry "inside"...

... This seems to be related with

"trust": I "trust" this group, so I'll show more of my imperfect human
self. This allows both for the group to identify what are the common,
real, deep and imperfect human longings that we all share, and for
people to heal whatever wounds they might be carrying...

I really appreciate your openness and collaborative spirit.

That may or may not happen any better if you have better means of
electronic information exchange. I would think that the above process
would instead identify the core human longings, which in turn would be
served by a (very) different set of communication tools and
technologies than the ones we have today.

As long as we are so widely separated (and that seems to be the nature of the beast for better or worse), then the communication tools are very important. But as your next paragraph says (and I agree) the tools are not sufficient. Successful collaboration depends on the deeper human issues you are pointing to. Its not my strong suit at all, and your remarks are very helpful.

What I'm reaching for is that P2P architecture is a solution to
something which is a greater "sum" of all the individual P2P
motivations you can find. If that makes any sense at all, then, in
addition I suspect that that something is a deeper, more basic issue;
it is at a different, deeper level than all of the individual P2P
motivations, and that discussing at that level is much, much harder
and painful than discussing at the individual motivation level, which
in turn is harder than discussing technicalities (which are completely
external to us and that we can all easily perceive whether they either
work or don't work, so it's easier to separate what's false from
what's true).

> That said, however, I am not above selling P2P with something more positive
> and inspiring than ownership and security.

That stuff is closer to the "discussion" I want to have, but, I'm
starting to suspect mailing lists (asynchronous, group, written
communication) won't be of any help. And I don't have the skill to
handle a complex, inevitably "combative" discussion on these topics.
Me fail.

No fail in my opinion, Fabio. I like the angle you brought into the discussion. The process of open collaboration may be as important as the end product.

Anyway, fail or no fail, IMO a key thing is to show up.

Thanks,

Richard

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 20, 2012, 8:56:35 PM6/20/12

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On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Fabio Cecin <fce...@gmail.com> wrote:

What I'm reaching for is that P2P architecture is a solution to
something which is a greater "sum" of all the individual P2P
motivations you can find. If that makes any sense at all, then, in
addition I suspect that that something is a deeper, more basic issue;
it is at a different, deeper level than all of the individual P2P
motivations, and that discussing at that level is much, much harder
and painful than discussing at the individual motivation level, which
in turn is harder than discussing technicalities (which are completely
external to us and that we can all easily perceive whether they either
work or don't work, so it's easier to separate what's false from
what's true).

If you're genuine, then I urge you to evaluate the pangaia project. It is a comprehensive project *designed* to unify all the p2p individual desires into a unified theoretical framework as well as new currency model. Because of this, it goes beyond the concept of disparate applications quasi-unified in an "application suite", in the same way the various networking modalities prior to the Internet (compuserve, AOL, tymenet, etc) all got unified under TCP/iP. Check it out: <pangaia.sf.net>

Best of luck in any case....

mark j

gothenburg, nebr

Poor Richard

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Jun 21, 2012, 12:38:53 AM6/21/12

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On Wednesday, June 20, 2012 7:56:35 PM UTC-5, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth wrote:

If you're genuine, then I urge you to evaluate the pangaia project. It is a comprehensive project *designed* to unify all the p2p individual desires into a unified theoretical framework as well as new currency model. Because of this, it goes beyond the concept of disparate applications quasi-unified in an "application suite", in the same way the various networking modalities prior to the Internet (compuserve, AOL, tymenet, etc) all got unified under TCP/iP. Check it out: <pangaia.sf.net>

I looked and I still don't know what I saw.

PR

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 21, 2012, 12:49:33 AM6/21/12

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sorry, I shouldn't have cc'd this to the list...

mark

Sepp Hasslberger

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Jun 21, 2012, 4:39:58 PM6/21/12

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My fault for lack of proper reading Paul,

I'm on very reduced internet activity these days and I'm sure I skimped on the reading.

I think my comment was mostly on Mark's remark to "don't go re-inventing the wheel."

No offense intended

Sepp

Sepp Hasslberger

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Jun 21, 2012, 6:01:31 PM6/21/12

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Certainly PR, no problem at all to quote.

Public domain.

Sepp

Sepp Hasslberger

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Jun 21, 2012, 6:15:17 PM6/21/12

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"I am not above selling P2P with something more positive and inspiring than ownership and security."

I believe the positive point to sell this could be that we're able, with PeerPoint, to make our own space in which to talk, make plans, tell friends about what's happening. No longer do we have to do these things in the presence and under the watchful eyes of the corporations and the government. It is like having a house. We'll have our own space where we can work, communicate, entertain friends and interact with family - all on line.

That freedom does not exist today. We're always going through a provider, or a social networking site, or a search engine, all of them seeking to profit from our transit or our stay in their territory and of course any email and phone call is open to being collected and analyzed by government and other intelligence agencies.

PeerPoint can be OUR space on line.

Sepp

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 4:23:14 PM6/22/12

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Thanks, Sepp. I've been scolded before for not asking before sharing or quoting "out of network". In some cases I don't care, but I value your good will.

PR

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:01:31 PM UTC-5, Sepp wrote:

Certainly PR, no problem at all to quote.

Public domain.

Sepp

[snip]

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 4:37:44 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
>
> If you were to start participating in a open, collaborative design
> process to address some of the most compelling needs of our generation
> (i.e. something beyond your personal technical interests) I would applaud.
>

Just for the record... I spent 12 years of my life doing this (started a
non-profit, put Internet capabilities in libraries, worked with local
governments, helped rural microentrepreneurs and artists develop online
presences), put a lot of my time and money into doing so. My record is
available for all to see
(http://www.linkedin.com/pub/miles-fidelman/2/980/516).

On the other hand, I'd sure like to have some idea of who "Poor Richard"
is - name, c.v., and so forth.

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 4:56:55 PM6/22/12

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Sepp Hasslberger wrote:
> I respectfully disagree with Mark, Paul and Miles.
>
> Clearly, p2p needs a tech infrastructure that isn't available today. You can point to all the bits and pieces and to usenet as long as you want, you still don't have a workable system.
>
> What Poor Richard is advocating is to take those pieces and sew them together into a useful, workable, user-friendly suite of applications that can run on a real decentralized network, one where the edge is king, where our own computers are the powerhouse. I wonder why none of you three can see and appreciate that vision. Perhaps a case of having worked on bits and pieces for so long that it seems there is nothing else to do but continue doing those bits and pieces and hoping that somehow, by some miracle, they meld into something useful.
>
> Perhaps, instead of criticizing Poor Richard's vision of an integrated software stack for a user owned internet, and pointing as the real solution to what's already there, it would be more constructive if you could come up with a really inspiring, awesome vision that is better.

I'm trying to figure out what the big vision is, and what's the
motivation for folks to use it, much less develop it (there are lots of
people who've developed and use peer-to-peer applications and underlying
peer-to-peer technology infrastructure - but the stuff hasn't caught on
the way facebook or twitter have - something is missing).

Fabio Cecin framed the question nicely, when he wrote (excerpts):

> I think all of these questions are secondary. They are all part of the
> final answer, but what's the central question? I don't think any of
> these is illustrative of the central question, the central issue.
>
> What is the idea that will resonate with people's hearts, what's going
> to bypassing all of our indoctrination and end up getting our support
> because we just have to see it happen?

> <snip>

> Why are we bothering with all this P2P machinery?

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 22, 2012, 7:29:42 PM6/22/12

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On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Miles Fidelman
<mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out what the big vision is, and what's the motivation
> for folks to use it, much less develop it (there are lots of people who've
> developed and use peer-to-peer applications and underlying peer-to-peer
> technology infrastructure - but the stuff hasn't caught on the way facebook
> or twitter have - something is missing).

As far as I seem to know my own human self, which is the thing trying
to do something to help "the world", while barely being able to see
what exactly it is that it needs let alone help itself help "the
world"...

I am an Onion. On the outside, there's all the boring stuff that lets
me navigate the world and have a job and a family and whatnot. On the
inside, there's all the stuff that's tossed to the side because it
doesn't fit with the least-common-denominator approach to building a
society.

My core self's longing, which has manipulated my outer shell into
getting into all this world of P2P, is that it wanted to live in a
world that wasn't this BORING and STUPID. In that world, it's not the
stupidity that's everywhere else that has to go, but my own stupidity
as well, which I don't even know, because I don't know myself, because
the only way to know yourself is live your life, meaning, you can't
spend 8 hours a day "working", doing shit you don't care about, being
someone you don't even like, which is why people like myself are
pissed and don't know why.

Or, as Umair Haque puts it in a "tweet":

"Dear all. I'm not suggesting everyone devotes their lives to
global poverty. I'm suggesting this shit is getting boring."

How do we make the world a place where people can be themselves
without carrying a thick coat of hacky overhead and, at the same time,
not wanting to kill each other due to the lack of said coat?

Fabio

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 7:31:54 PM6/22/12

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Miles,

unlike you I'm a nobody. Anything I write has to stand on its own merits.

I apologize for my unnecessarily snarky comment, which was based only on your recent participation here.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 7:41:04 PM6/22/12

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On Friday, June 22, 2012 3:56:55 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

I'm trying to figure out what the big vision is, and what's the
motivation for folks to use it, much less develop it (there are lots of
people who've developed and use peer-to-peer applications and underlying
peer-to-peer technology infrastructure - but the stuff hasn't caught on
the way facebook or twitter have - something is missing).

I obviously tried to address these questions in the PeerPoint doc. Would it be possible for you to criticize the doc more directly and specifically? You are welcome to annotate directly on the doc as much as you like if you follow the protocol described.

If I could tie your objections to specific parts of the doc they might be much more constructive.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 7:54:21 PM6/22/12

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Does anyone know of an existing open semantic ontology/taxonomy that might be adapted to categorize the players/projects/products in the p2p ecosystem?

PR

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 8:36:07 PM6/22/12

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Fabio Cecin wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Miles Fidelman
> <mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>> I'm trying to figure out what the big vision is, and what's the motivation
>> for folks to use it, much less develop it (there are lots of people who've
>> developed and use peer-to-peer applications and underlying peer-to-peer
>> technology infrastructure - but the stuff hasn't caught on the way facebook
>> or twitter have - something is missing).
> As far as I seem to know my own human self, which is the thing trying
> to do something to help "the world", while barely being able to see
> what exactly it is that it needs let alone help itself help "the
> world"...

<snip>

> How do we make the world a place where people can be themselves
> without carrying a thick coat of hacky overhead and, at the same time,
> not wanting to kill each other due to the lack of said coat?

Fabio... Maybe I'm confused, but this sounds like motivations for being
a writer (or writing a book), or creating a social movement, not for
pushing P2P technology.

Sure the printing press changed the world, and maybe the xerox machine
and fax machine made it a little easier to get one's thoughts out - but
it really seems like what we need is a new ecosystem for ideas, rather
than more technology. (There's a pretty good argument to be made that
editors, publishers, content aggregators, and other centralizing
approaches make it easier to get a message out - by concentrating an
audience.)

Miles

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 8:40:39 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> Miles,
>
> unlike you I'm a nobody. Anything I write has to stand on its own merits.
>
> I apologize for my unnecessarily snarky comment, which was based only
> on your recent participation here.

Fair enough, however.... nobody is just a "nobody" - you're hiding
behind Ben Franklin's pseudonym. Do you have a name, a job, an
education, life experience, context, professional skills? Where are your
ideas coming from? What research lies behind them? .....

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 8:43:30 PM6/22/12

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I'd be really careful of ontologies/taxonomies. There are those who
swear by them, but by and large it's pretty hard to get anybody to
actually conform to one (except, perhaps for librarians, archivists, and
others who have to catalog stuff). In practice, I see a lot more
success for systems that use folksonomies (e.g., tagging systems) than
those that force people to work within someone else's pre-defined structure.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 9:22:28 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> On Friday, June 22, 2012 3:56:55 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> I'm trying to figure out what the big vision is, and what's the
> motivation for folks to use it, much less develop it (there are
> lots of
> people who've developed and use peer-to-peer applications and
> underlying
> peer-to-peer technology infrastructure - but the stuff hasn't
> caught on
> the way facebook or twitter have - something is missing).
>
>
> I obviously tried to address these questions in the PeerPoint doc.
> Would it be possible for you to criticize the doc more directly and
> specifically?

Sure.. it's general, lacks a compelling use case or statement of need,
and the whole notion of being the “Next Net P2P Master Plan” is
incredibly grandiose.

It reads like someone writing a "master plan for a new economic system"
that starts "capitalism sucks, we need a new system, and it needs to
roll in everything under the sun from communism, socialism, syndicalism,
etc., etc., etc." We don't have any idea what it's going to really look
like, but we're going to co-develop a master plan for getting there.
(Mind you, I think that our current economic system does suck, and have
some ideas about what would be better, but the track record for massive,
imposed, models and master plans is pretty poor.)

Sorry... I'm too much of an engineer to have much time for such
vagaries. And I don't have a lot of faith in "master plans" -
cooperatively developed or not. Vision, maybe, followed by tons of
different people moving in the same general direction, along different
paths, with some approaches succeeding, others failing. Master plans get
us 10,000 pages of paper, and no useful tools (can you say "W3C Web
Services?"). General principles, refined over time, and incremental
approaches, generate progress (can you say "RESTful APIs" and "millions
of mashups?").

For something that's a bit more concrete about P2P infrastructure, I
commend you to:
https://gnunet.org/about
https://gnunet.org/philosophy
https://gnunet.org/goals
https://gnunet.org/concepts

For something more at the application level, I'd sure want to see some
general principles and a detailed discussion of a single application,
before a discussion of solving all problems for all people. As
examples, I point to:
git (http://git-scm.com/)
fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

They're both distributed source control systems, with very similar
features, addressing the same application - with some key differences.
And the world is (in my opinion) better for having both of them (and
subversion, and bazaar, and arch, and a dozen others). One or two will
probably dominate - but by a process of evolution, not master planning
by committee.

----
At the infrastructure level, there are a lot of ideas floating around
about how to build better infrastructure - but we're hampered by a huge
investment in installed base - from our laptops and phones all the way
to backbone routers and operations staff. It's hard enough trying to
move from IPv4 to IPv6, and keep the bits flowing. Restarting from
scratch just ain't going to happen. (In my opinion).

At the application level, again, in my opinion, we simply don't know
enough about what problems we're trying to solve, and what works and
doesn't work in solving them, to come to any agreement on "the one true
application suite." Heck... people have been putting words on "paper"
for 10,000 years - but we don't have any agreement on the best pen, or
typewriter, or wordprocessor, or what have you (not to mention having
about 3000 different languages around the world). At best, we might be
able to identify a list of things that work better than others, for some
applications.
----

Now, if you have a clear vision and approach to the contrary, let's hear
it - but with specifics more like those in the gnunet or git
documentation - or for that matter, something that lays out something
distinct from the freenet project (https://freenetproject.org/) - which
has been around a long time, and DELIVERS what it promises:
"Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse
and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and
chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to
make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where
users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect."

It might help to have some discussion of why Freenet, and other things
like it, have not caught on. It's certainly not a technical issue -
it's something else, but what? (By the way, I think Freenet is pretty
cool - but not very useful for interacting with the vast majority of
people I deal with daily - they're all using email, Facebook, and
twitter, and preparing documents in Word an PowerPoint. Such is life.)

----
So no, I can't address the document section-by-section, because my
general reaction is that you need to rethink your problem statement,
goals, and approach, and then go back to the drawing board.

Miles

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 9:24:02 PM6/22/12

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Miles,

thanks for the suggestion. I may be able to use a tagging system in some way, at some point.

In the present instance, I notice that Google Groups doesn't offer a real tagging system, unfortunately. It would be nice if we could tag any post with our own tags. Gmail and several other email clients do allow that. Google docs don't (doesn't?).

The reason I'm asking about an ontology or taxonomy is to help with organizing the PeerPoint specs and creating a comparison matrix for the p2p players, projects products, and ideas out there. Designing the categories and comparison criteria is pretty daunting (for me anyway). One category that I got stuck on very early on, for example, is what is the difference, if anything, between an overlay network, a VPN, and a specialized router? Drawing the category lines isn't easy, and I need all the help I can get.

http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Infrastructure breaks things down this way:

This is a pretty good high-level p2p ecosystem taxonomy, but I'm looking for something that goes two or three levels deeper, at least, and ideally something with a formal, machine-readable semantic framework that can be employed at a later stage.

PR

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 9:37:53 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> Miles,
>
> thanks for the suggestion. I may be able to use a tagging system in
> some way, at some point.
>
> In the present instance, I notice that Google Groups doesn't offer a
> real tagging system, unfortunately. It would be nice if we could tag
> any post with our own tags. Gmail and several other email clients do
> allow that. Google docs don't (doesn't?).
>
> The reason I'm asking about an ontology or taxonomy is to help with
> organizing the PeerPoint specs and creating a comparison matrix for
> the p2p players, projects products, and ideas out there. Designing the
> categories and comparison criteria is pretty daunting (for me anyway).
> One category that I got stuck on very early on, for example, is what
> is the difference, if anything, between an overlay network, a VPN, and
> a specialized router? Drawing the category lines isn't easy, and I
> need all the help I can get.
>
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Infrastructure breaks things
> down this way:
>

>
>
> This is a pretty good high-level p2p ecosystem taxonomy, but I'm
> looking for something that goes two or three levels deeper, at least,
> and ideally something with a formal, machine-readable semantic
> framework that can be employed at a later stage.

That's probably more than enough. Any deeper and you creating noise.

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 9:42:28 PM6/22/12

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Miles,

Thanks for the links and comments.

OK, maybe "Master Plan" is a bad phrase. Thanks for calling attention to it.

Is there anything wrong with this:

The PeerPoint Open Design Specification is not meant to replace or supersede existing software and technology development efforts. It is intended to help coordinate the work of the floss/hacker/p2p community towards a future point of convergence and interoperability. It is essentially a statement of user requirements and guidance on preferred technical solution sets. It describes what the progressive user community needs from the technical community in order to prevail in the social, political, and economic struggles that lie ahead.

The Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Los Indignados, and similar uprisings around the world demonstrate that a new, open society and open democracy is struggling to rise from the bottom up. But the internet has been colonized by giant corporations whose business models are based on central servers, proprietary technology, surveillance and censorship, and unilateral terms of service.

Did anything that far turn you off or on? Please rip into it.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 10:12:28 PM6/22/12

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eful to On Friday, June 22, 2012 8:22:28 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

[snip]

At best, we might be
able to identify a list of things that work better than others, for some
applications.

That's one of the objectives.

Now, if you have a clear vision and approach to the contrary, let's hear
it - but with specifics more like those in the gnunet or git
documentation

Those are informally appended by reference, but I confess I haven't digested all the content at all the links in the PeerPoint doc and figured out how they compare, contrast, and interdigitate with each other. If anyone has, and has written a report on it, please point me there.

- or for that matter, something that lays out something
distinct from the freenet project (https://freenetproject.org/) - which
has been around a long time, and DELIVERS what it promises:
"Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse
and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and
chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to
make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where
users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect."

My initial notes on freenet for my comparison matrix were: "Category: intranet/VPN. Closed intranet--no www access. Distributed cache, every node allocates space for anonymous encrypted content. No manual purge."

From their own site, the ecosystem of applications available to run atop freenet consists of:

Freemail
How to setup Freenets own anonymous email service.
Frost
Frost is the oldest and most used messaging and file sharing tool in the Freenet suite. This describes how to set it up and use it for the first time.
jSite
jSite is a Freenet website (a.k.a. Freesite) insertion tool.
Thaw
Thaw is a filesharing utility and upload/download manager. It is used as a graphical interface for Freenet filesharing.

One of these things is not like the other: 1) freenet 2) PeerPoint.

Which is it?

It might help to have some discussion of why Freenet, and other things
like it, have not caught on. It's certainly not a technical issue -
it's something else, but what? (By the way, I think Freenet is pretty
cool - but not very useful for interacting with the vast majority of
people I deal with daily - they're all using email, Facebook, and
twitter, and preparing documents in Word an PowerPoint. Such is life.)

The PeePoint doc specifies interoperability with major market-share incumbents like Facebook, Twitter, Word, etc.

I agree it would be useful to discuss obstacles to the adoption of freenet and other existing projects. What are your thought about it?

PR

----
So no, I can't address the document section-by-section, because my
general reaction is that you need to rethink your problem statement,
goals, and approach, and then go back to the drawing board.

Miles

Can you give me an example of a problem statement more compelling than the one in PeerPoint?

A better approach?

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 10:15:21 PM6/22/12

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Miles, sorry for the discontinuities in my reply. Google Groups keeps yanking the effing screen out from under me while I'm typing!

PR

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 10:24:31 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> Miles,
>
> Thanks for the links and comments.
>
> OK, maybe "Master Plan" is a bad phrase. Thanks for calling attention
> to it.
>
> Is there anything wrong with this:
>
> The PeerPoint Open Design Specification is not meant to replace or
> supersede existing software and technology development efforts. It
> is intended to help coordinate the work of the floss

> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software>/hacker <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28programmer_subculture%29>/p2p
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_peer-to-peer_processes>community

> towards a future point of convergence and interoperability. It is
> essentially a statement of user requirements and guidance on
> preferred technical solution sets. It describes what the
> progressive user community needs from the technical community in
> order to prevail in the social, political, and economic struggles
> that lie ahead.
>

Well.... I guess I don't see a lot of practicality in "coordinating the
work of the floss/hacker/p2p community" - it's a community that
flourishes from diversity. To the extent that there's coordinating
going on, it's through personal interactions - in person, on mailing
lists, through software re-use, to an extent through the IETF and the
RFC process.

Now maybe, just maybe, there's some value in a compelling long range
vision - a manifesto if you will - certainly Vannevar Bush's "As We May
Think" piece inspired a lot of people who ultimately built the early
Internet, and Ted Nelson's "Dream Machine's" likewise inspired a lot of
folks, and may have influenced the development of hypertext - but both
presented broad visions, not detailed plans (and in Nelson's case, he's
yet to have a success at reducing his ideas to code).

>
> The Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, Los Indignados, and similar
> uprisings around the world demonstrate that a new, open society
> and open democracy is struggling to rise from the bottom up. But
> the internet has been colonized by giant corporations whose
> business models are based on central servers, proprietary
> technology, surveillance and censorship, and unilateral terms of
> service.
>

With the exception of telecom. infrastructure, it seems to be an
occupation that is totally dependent on the voluntary participation of
users - and where there is a need to bypass central control, people seem
to find ways. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that any
convergence of technology only helps those who wish to censor (if
twitter is the only tool, then it's pretty easy for a government to
block twitter; if there are dozens, or hundreds of tools, then
revolutionaries are able to change tools as necessary -- as history has
demonstrated over the past few decades).

>
> Did anything that far turn you off or on? Please rip into it.

See above.

Suggestion: Publish a vision, blog about it, or write a science fiction
novel that fleshes out a future world - if it goes viral, maybe you'll
influence some people. But vague generalities, and attempts to get other
people to flesh it out for you, are a waste of everyone's time.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 22, 2012, 10:49:41 PM6/22/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> On Friday, June 22, 2012 8:22:28 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
>
> Now, if you have a clear vision and approach to the contrary,
> let's hear
> it - but with specifics more like those in the gnunet or git
> documentation
>
>
> Those are informally appended by reference, but I confess I haven't
> digested all the content at all the links in the PeerPoint doc and
> figured out how they compare, contrast, and interdigitate with each
> other. If anyone has, and has written a report on it, please point me
> there.

Let me be more precise. If YOU, PERSONALLY, have a clear vision and
approach, let's hear it. If you don't, what's your value add to the
process?

>
> - or for that matter, something that lays out something
> distinct from the freenet project (https://freenetproject.org/) -
> which
> has been around a long time, and DELIVERS what it promises:
> "Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files,
> browse
> and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through
> Freenet) and
> chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is
> decentralised to
> make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode,
> where
> users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect."
>
>
> My initial notes on freenet for my comparison matrix were: "Category:
> intranet/VPN. Closed intranet--no www access. Distributed cache, every
> node allocates space for anonymous encrypted content. No manual purge."
>

> One of these things is not like the other: 1) freenet 2) PeerPoint.
>

Well yeah - FreeNet is a peer-to-peer application suite, well defined,
operational, with a user and developer community. PeerPoint is undefined
and vapor.

> I agree it would be useful to discuss obstacles to the adoption of
> freenet and other existing projects. What are your thought about it?
>

Sure.. people go with what's easy and free and cool (for some
definitions of cool). Only those who have a compelling need (folks
looking for free media and/or porn, military, revolutionaries,
criminals) or are driven by philosophical biases (cyberpunks) do
anything else.

>
> Can you give me an example of a problem statement more compelling than
> the one in PeerPoint?

Well, I kind of like Freenet's:

"free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse
and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and
chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to
make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where
users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect."

Or this one:

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness."

Or perhaps this one:

/It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a
'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day
libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and
retrieval./

/The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers,
connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to
individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of
the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories
and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users./

- J.C.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis
<http://memex.org/licklider.html>, 1960.

Note that Licklider went on to be the original program manager for
DARPA/ISTO - i.e., he made the money happen that led to the ARPANET and
from there the Internet.

Or perhaps the goals that Bob Kahn (co-author of TCP/IP w/ Vint Cert)
set for what became TCP:

* _Network connectivity_. Any network could connect to another network
through a gateway.

* _Distribution_. There would be no central network administration or
control.

* _Error recovery_. Lost packets would be retransmitted.

* _Black box design_. No internal changes would have to be made to a
network to connect it to other networks.

But then, whether a problem statement is compelling or not is a matter
of circumstance and audience.

>
> A better approach?

Well I said it already, but I guess I'll repeat it:

Publish a vision, blog about it, or write a science fiction novel that
fleshes out a future world - if it goes viral, maybe you'll influence
some people.

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 10:52:34 PM6/22/12

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Miles,

I'm sorry you don't want to offer anything more constructive than "write a science fiction novel" and "where there is a need to bypass central control, people seem
to find ways."

I'd give an arm for your technical expertise.

As for vision, if you're interested: http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/xtopia/

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 11:27:13 PM6/22/12

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On Friday, June 22, 2012 9:49:41 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

[skip]

Let me be more precise. If YOU, PERSONALLY, have a clear vision and
approach, let's hear it. If you don't, what's your value add to the
process?

So far my value added isn't that much, but if you know of another document equal to or better than PeerPoint at defining the scope of the problems and requirements of the 99% user community, and the range of solution sets available, please point me to it and I'll move my participation there. So far the things you suggest as being equivalent or better give me the impression you just aren't paying attention.

My next goal is a comparison of existing projects and products in the p2p network ecosystem. There are some fragmentary efforts out there already but they are woefully inadequate. This will be difficult for me to do without help from persons more technically qualified than I to evaluate projects. But if my solitary effort is all that goes into it, I will still produce a better and broader comparison than anyone has done so far.

>
> - or for that matter, something that lays out something
> distinct from the freenet project (https://freenetproject.org/) -
> which
> has been around a long time, and DELIVERS what it promises:
> "Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files,
> browse
> and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through
> Freenet) and
> chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is
> decentralised to
> make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode,
> where
> users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect."
>
>
> My initial notes on freenet for my comparison matrix were: "Category:
> intranet/VPN. Closed intranet--no www access. Distributed cache, every
> node allocates space for anonymous encrypted content. No manual purge."

No comment?

>
> One of these things is not like the other: 1) freenet 2) PeerPoint.
>

Well yeah - FreeNet is a peer-to-peer application suite, well defined,
operational, with a user and developer community.

Why did you edit out the list of freenet apps that I got from their website? Didn't jibe with your characterization of an impressive "app suite"?

PeerPoint is undefined
and vapor.

I don't know how something that bills itself as an open design spec, in its initial draft state and making its initial call for participation, can be attacked on that basis. It seems to me you show an utter lack of good faith and good will in your approach to criticism.

> I agree it would be useful to discuss obstacles to the adoption of
> freenet and other existing projects. What are your thought about it?
>
Sure.. people go with what's easy and free and cool (for some
definitions of cool). Only those who have a compelling need (folks
looking for free media and/or porn, military, revolutionaries,
criminals) or are driven by philosophical biases (cyberpunks) do
anything else.

I'm not as alone in seeing a compelling need (described --well or not-- in the doc) as you seem to think. There are hundreds if not thousands of people working on censorship and surveillance circumvention tools. The US government is funding some of it, for chrissake. The unaddressed problem is that most users are not able to evaluate, select, and stitch together the number of disconnected apps and services necessary to really meet all their needs. And many of the required apps still don't exist.

But I'm sure you already know this.

Nevertheless, all the "problem statement" examples you offered below are far less to the point and more nebulous than PeerPoint.

I must say you just don't seem rational about this.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 22, 2012, 11:59:49 PM6/22/12

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On Friday, June 22, 2012 7:40:39 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:
<snip>

Fair enough, however.... nobody is just a "nobody" - you're hiding
behind Ben Franklin's pseudonym. Do you have a name, a job, an
education, life experience, context, professional skills? Where are your
ideas coming from? What research lies behind them? .....

For whatever its worth, I dropped out of school in grade 10 and got a GED high-school equivalence diploma and a few subsequent college credits despite having a number of National Merit Scholarship offers. I attended an advanced summer symposium in physics and got an award from NASA for research on "pyrosonics" which was presented by Werner Von Braun. But otherwise I'm entirely self-taught. I was in IT on and off since 1967 when I was one of three students invited to work at a new county school data center in Shreveport, LA. My last gig was Corporate LAN Administrator at a Fortune 100 corporation, SCI, Inc., with $25 billion in annual revenues, 35,000 employees and about 30 locations worldwide. I created their first intranet, first web site, set up all their Oracle and IBM websphere servers, and managed all their desktops and LANs worldwide. The last resume I posted on Monster was probably 15 years ago. My last government resume was 15 pages long, but no resumes exist any more as far as I know. I haven't been in that business since 2002 and I've never intended to go back. I have discarded all my electronics and files several times since then.

A very spotty autobio of me is at https://www.facebook.com/notes/poor-richard/poor-richards-odyssey/372333076153516

PR

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 23, 2012, 12:16:02 AM6/23/12

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On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Miles,

I'm sorry you don't want to offer anything more constructive than "write a science fiction novel" and "where there is a need to bypass central control, people seem
to find ways."

Believe it or not, that is more constructive than I think you understand. If you don't want to write, than try reading: "Earth" by David Brin (about how an evolving network could develop its own consciousness), or "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card (how anonymity and networks can create vast narratives of political import). There have been many books that have helped develop the zeitgeist of the p2p movement. The real issue to explore is not another grand p2p sceme just under a different name, but the reason *why so little has happened* even _with_ the many grand proposals.

I could answer that question but it's really too sad and too unbelievable.

mark

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 12:26:30 AM6/23/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> Miles,
>
> I'm sorry you don't want to offer anything more constructive than
> "write a science fiction novel" and "where there is a need to bypass
> central control, people seem to find ways."
>

Well, those are both serious suggestions:
- William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, and Bruce Sterling have pretty much
defined Cyberspace and Cyberpunk
- Ecotopia presented a pretty good vision of an eco-friendly world, and
how to get there

As to "where there is a need to bypass central control, people seem to
find ways" - that's also a serious historical observation
- during the end years of the USSR, some of the only communications in
or out was via USENET
- during the Tianannmen Square protests, fax was used extensively to
relay information in and out of China
- during the Arab Spring, there was an arms race going on - governments
would block one tool, protestors would move to another
- my guess is that anything that's in common use before a
protest/revolution will be blocked very quickly, and there'd better be
something around that's relatively unknown to move

> I'd give an arm for your technical expertise.
>

Frankly, if you had it, then you'd be reacting the way I am. It's
pretty hard to apply technical expertise to an ill defined problem - as
the saying goes "a problem clearly stated is a problem half solved"
(though that exact statement comes from a fortune cookie I got the other
day - which I saved because it applies to some of my current work).

> As for vision, if you're interested:
> http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/xtopia/
>

It's a start.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 1:03:38 AM6/23/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> On Friday, June 22, 2012 9:49:41 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> [skip]
>
> Let me be more precise. If YOU, PERSONALLY, have a clear vision and
> approach, let's hear it. If you don't, what's your value add to the
> process?
>
>
> So far my value added isn't that much, but if you know of another
> document equal to or better than PeerPoint at defining the scope of
> the problems and requirements of the 99% user community, and the range
> of solution sets available, please point me to it and I'll move my
> participation there. So far the things you suggest as being equivalent
> or better give me the impression you just aren't paying attention.

I just want to be clear as to what you're defining as the scope of the
problems and requirements of the 99% user community:

They have something to do with supporting: "participatory democracy,
non-violent social change, and sustainable economic systems" and
"evolving cooperative methods of creating, working, organizing,
negotiating, and decision-making together, in groups large and small,
regardless of the geographical distances between us" allowing
"self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums,
and movements" and "enable direct participation in the legislative
process to function at a large scale for the first time in human history."

And you attribute the lack of these capabilities to commercial companies
not being "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."

And you see the solution looking something like a massive amalgam of
peer-to-peer applications.

----
Well, then my personal opinion is that you're just plain wrong. I base
this on two observations:

1. Most of the problems you're stating are social problems -- how to
organize (or facilitate self-organization of) large groups of people
toward common aims. Technology has very little to do with solving those
problems. (Just as a data point: Here in Massachusetts, we have a long
history of Town Meeting government - 300 of 350 some odd communities are
still governed by open town meetings - i.e., any citizen of voting age
who shows up at Town Meeting has an equal say in everything from taxes,
to budgets, to hiring to whatever. Just about 2% of eligible people
actually show up. Participatory Democracy doesn't work if people don't
show up.)

2. The US Military spends more money than any organization on Earth to
build systems to support large numbers of people working on complex
activities (about the only activity I know of that's more complex than a
military operation is making a movie). But guess what you see when you
walk into an operations center.... PowerPoint slides and chat windows.
It turns out that life is simply too complicated, and too much of a
moving target to be crammed into pre-defined boxes. PowerPoint and chat
both have the characteristics of being malleable (or "agile" to use the
currently popular term of art):

- if you want to tell a story, PowerPoint is a pretty easy way to put
words, pictures, and numbers on "paper," tell a story, and put stuff in
front of other people for discussion

- if you want to link a group of people, on a moment's notice, to
coordinate an activity - chat rooms are as effective as it gets - you
can build an organization in a few minutes, by creating a bunch of chat
rooms (flash mobs and revolutionaries seem to prefer Twitter and SMS
messaging, but the same principle applies)

> My next goal is a comparison of existing projects and products in the
> p2p network ecosystem. There are some fragmentary efforts out there
> already but they are woefully inadequate. This will be difficult for
> me to do without help from persons more technically qualified than I
> to evaluate projects. But if my solitary effort is all that goes into
> it, I will still produce a better and broader comparison than anyone
> has done so far.
>

It's a fool's errand. Survey articles are the work of grad students
trying to get their first paper published, or the "prior art" section of
a paper. The reality is that all kinds of things go into what makes a
technology "work" - like marketing, user community, lots of things that
are external to the technology. People use MS Office because that's
what everyone else is already using, not because it's "better" in some
technical sense. People use FaceBook because their friends do (I don't
think anyone will ever figure out why FaceBook is prospering and MySpace
is comatose - it certainly isn't a matter of technology).

The conventional wisdom is that having the "better" solution is close to
irrelevant, it's all the ancillary things like marketing and operations
that determine whether something "wins" or "loses."

On the other hand, I heard the founder of "Evernote" talk the other
day. He made the excellent point that in today's environment, where one
can write software pretty quickly, and it can go viral overnight, it
might well be that the "best" software wins - where, in his view "best"
is something that embodies the passion of its developers. Given that
Evernote is propagating wildly, and they don't do any marketing, he
might well have a point.

Either way, the analytic approach of surveying everything that exists
and trying to meld the best of everything, doesn't seem (in my opinion)
the way to go.

>
> >
> > - or for that matter, something that lays out something
> > distinct from the freenet project
> (https://freenetproject.org/) -
> > which
> > has been around a long time, and DELIVERS what it promises:
> > "Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share
> files,
> > browse
> > and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through
> > Freenet) and
> > chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is
> > decentralised to
> > make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet"
> mode,
> > where
> > users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to
> detect."
> >
> >
> > My initial notes on freenet for my comparison matrix were:
> "Category:
> > intranet/VPN. Closed intranet--no www access. Distributed cache,
> every
> > node allocates space for anonymous encrypted content. No manual
> purge."
>
>
>
> No comment?

Only that privacy, anti-censorship, are not all that compatible with
interoperating with everything under the sun.

>
>
> >
> > One of these things is not like the other: 1) freenet 2) PeerPoint.
> >
>
> Well yeah - FreeNet is a peer-to-peer application suite, well
> defined,
> operational, with a user and developer community.
>
>
>
> Why did you edit out the list of freenet apps that I got from their
> website? Didn't jibe with your characterization of an impressive "app
> suite"?

No... just didn't have a comment, beyond: they have a platform, and a
suite of applications that runs on top of it. And, the platform allows
for more applications.

Matter of opinion I guess. You asked for "compelling." Each of the
ones I cited was manifestly successful in leading to significant bodies
of work, and in one case to the formation of a nation.

>
> I must say you just don't seem rational about this.

Again, matter of opinion.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 1:10:35 AM6/23/12

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Interesting, and certainly not the bio of a "nobody." Kind of doesn't
jive with the naivete - both technical and techno-political - that
you're bringing to this discussion.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 1:12:33 AM6/23/12

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Actually, I'd be interested in your take (I have my own).

Cheers,

Miles

Poor Richard

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Jun 23, 2012, 2:42:32 AM6/23/12

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Alright Miles, I reluctantly think we need to go our separate ways.

I am really disappointed not to get more constructive participation from you, but it looks to be loggerheads.

Peace and happy trails, bro.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 23, 2012, 2:48:15 AM6/23/12

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Mark,

Save your bs for a scifi novel. I've had enough of you and Miles for a while.

PR

On Friday, June 22, 2012 11:16:02 PM UTC-5, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth wrote:

Message has been deleted

Mark Roest

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Jun 23, 2012, 2:39:04 PM6/23/12

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Hello Miles and Poor Richard,

It depends on the nature of what is to be categorized. One of the earliest and most significant projects I know of, and still in use, is the Unified Medical Language System, developed by, yes the librarians at the National Library of Medicine, to enable physicians and researchers in different specialties to communicate accurately with each other. The NIH relies on it.

Another significant body of work is categorizing nature itself, which again is not purely subjective, like creative work by people may be. The California Academy of Sciences is deeply involved in both categorizing and tracking the status of habitats and species. The National Geographic Society and the World Wildlife Fund funded an effort that involved 1200 scientists, mostly ecologists, to identify the boundaries of 823 terrestrial eco-regions. National Geographic later dropped out of the maintenance of the work, but WWF uses it actively. I want to use their work as the basis for the nature axis of the knowledgebase I plan to develop. The other two main axes will be cultures, and challenges to supporting life and health.

It now looks like the knowledgebase will actually happen, as we are starting a company to sell powdered leaf of Moringa oleifera, a superfood, to raise the funds for Imagine Zambia, which will be the context for the initial development of the knowledgebase. That will make the terrestrial eco-regions map much more widely used than it is today.

Regards,

Mark

Melvin Carvalho

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Jun 23, 2012, 2:46:50 PM6/23/12

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On 23 June 2012 01:54, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone know of an existing open semantic ontology/taxonomy that might be adapted to categorize the players/projects/products in the p2p ecosystem?

DOAP (Description of a Project) may be helpful?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_a_Project

PR

Melvin Carvalho

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Jun 23, 2012, 2:47:52 PM6/23/12

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On 23 June 2012 01:54, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone know of an existing open semantic ontology/taxonomy that might be adapted to categorize the players/projects/products in the p2p ecosystem?

The Web itself, of course, was designed to be peer to peer.

PR

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 23, 2012, 4:18:01 PM6/23/12

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Hmm, although I would agree that it is "peer-to-peer" at the user-layer description, technically HTTP is a client-server protocol and it doesn't facilitate two-way conversations like p2p impllies.

mark

Melvin Carvalho

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Jun 23, 2012, 4:24:14 PM6/23/12

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Agreed. Although there are some newer techniques to facilitate such interactions, most notably websockets. The web notifications API is also interesting. Long term it is the goal of the web to be a robust realtime platform that is capable of servicing "P2P" use cases.

mark

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 4:30:37 PM6/23/12

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Though... When it was initially designed, most folks published from servers running on their desktop workstations. So not quite p2p, but not centralized either.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

From: Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth <dreamin...@gmail.com>

Sender: building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com

Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 15:18:01 -0500

To: <building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: p2p ontology/taxonomy

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 23, 2012, 8:34:43 PM6/23/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> I'm disappointed but not surprised that the PeerPoint project is
> viewed with scorn by old-guard digital libertarians and anarchists.

Please don't count me as either of those, as I am neither.

>
> I am accused of being naive--they've seen everything and done
> everything and they have a superior, smug outlook. They argue that
> what works is more of what they are accustomed to.

Personally, my criticisms are based precisely on lessons learned the
hard way about what NOT to do, because it hasn't worked.
>
> But it is exactly that approach that resulted in the present state of
> affairs in which the internet is colonized and dominated by large
> corporate actors.
>
> Anarchists and libertarians are the unwitting pawns of the powerful
> actors they mean to resist.

I'll certainly agree with you there. Part of the mess we're in with the
Internet comes precisely from folks who refused to play in the political
or business arenas - leaving the Internet ripe for colonization by both
corporate types and by old style regulators. Unfortunately, nobody
wanted to get involved early to help craft a regulatory environment that
would protect the net.

>
> I've been around IT since long before the internet, since it was
> called data processing. Since before email and electronic bulletin
> boards and USENET. And I've been involved in every aspect of it since
> we operated mainframes with teletype terminals and punched tape right
> through until today. I was old guard once, very old guard.
>
And it shows. PeerPoint strikes me as a classic case of analyze,
analyze, analyze, then design the one true solution, by committee. To a
degree that was necessary in the days of expensive mainframes - but it's
also what led to the "PC wars" where corporate IT tried to hold the
reigns of control, while departments bought microcomputers and PCs, and
suddenly everyone was a spreadsheet jockey. Made life a lot easier for
folks who wanted to get their jobs done, not so good for data sharing
and long term preservation. It's not clear that the best balance has
been found after 30 years or so. (I lived on both sides of those wars,
not fun. And I, too, punched cards and toggled boot loaders into front
panel switches before that.)

One of the clear lessons of the past decade or so, is that developing
software in today's world is a lot more like gardening, or maybe
farming, than design and manufacturing. Define simple interfaces,
create a climate, fertilize, cut weeds, do some selective seeding, trim
stuff, and otherwise stand back.

The clearest example is SOA vs. REST. Huge amounts of time and money
have gone into defining SOA architectures, but noboday actually uses
them. On the other hand, we have lots of mashups. There are lessons to
be learned about developing software ecosystems.

My sense is that PeerPoint is based on a set of premises and approaches
that simply don't work anymore.

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 11:24:10 AM6/24/12

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On Saturday, June 23, 2012 7:34:43 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Poor Richard wrote:
> I'm disappointed but not surprised that the PeerPoint project is
> viewed with scorn by old-guard digital libertarians and anarchists.

Please don't count me as either of those, as I am neither.

Sorry, Miles. I got off the rails for a while -- I can be a little bipolar.

PeerPoint strikes me as a classic case of analyze,
analyze, analyze, then design the one true solution, by committee.

PeerPoint is not meant as "one true solution" or one true anything.

It is an attempt to 1) define a certain problem space and 2) catalog a related solution space and 3) to do that via an open process.

Do you see all open process the same as "by committee"?

I'd prefer to find an existing PeerPoint-like effort and participate in that -- but because I haven't found that, PeerPoint is the result. PeerPoint can always be folded into another project if a better one is discovered.

There are many previous and ongoing efforts to produce requirements definitions and solution specifications for particular projects. I don't intend PeerPoint to be better than any of those or to replace any of them. The aims of PeerPoint are

1) to define user requirements at both the individual and the social scale,
2) to catalog work that falls within the scope of free/open/p2p applications and infrastructure, and
3) to serve as a nexus for collecting information from and providing information to interested parties in both the user community and the developer community.

For example, the Foundation for P2P Alternatives has a list of projects relating to "p2p infrastructure". There is no effort to compare, contrast, or rate the projects according to a uniform set of criteria. Wikipedia has a number of pages that compare open source or p2p software in specific categories, but the pages use a variety of criteria and the pages are not all interlinked. One thing PeerPoint collaborators might do is create a Wikipedia page to index the pages on p2p software and infrastructure, and define some common criteria that might be incorporated into the various comparison matrices.

For another example, I assume things relevant to PeerPoint have been done or are in progress in the W3C community. I'd like to collect information about those things and provide a portal to that activity not just for developers but for a wider user community as well.

Every software designer or developer already has methods for keeping track of what goes on in the space they are interested in. I'm not trying to replace any of that. I'd like to add a tool at another layer of context that is oriented to the big picture--the whole free/open/p2p space and the full spectrum of user requirements..

I'd like to develop a set of p2p criteria and a taxonomy that can be used both for comparison of existing work and as context for planning new work.

Each individual already has her own mental map of the big picture, but how can it hurt for us to have an open process and vehicle for analyzing and comparing our different versions? That can be done in free-form conversation, of course, but it can also be helpful to participate in a more structured analysis and formulation.

I may be misunderstanding you Miles, but you seem to have said at one time or other that efforts to focus on the big picture are either arrogant, stupid, pointless, or impossible.

One of the clear lessons of the past decade or so, is that developing
software in today's world is a lot more like gardening, or maybe
farming, than design and manufacturing. Define simple interfaces,
create a climate, fertilize, cut weeds, do some selective seeding, trim
stuff, and otherwise stand back.

Even third world small farmers are using cell phones, computers and websites to share information on production methods and market conditions. That's really all PeerPoint is about.

The clearest example is SOA vs. REST. Huge amounts of time and money
have gone into defining SOA architectures, but noboday actually uses
them. On the other hand, we have lots of mashups. There are lessons to
be learned about developing software ecosystems.

SOA was of, by, and for client-server architecture, not p2p. Software as a service was IMO mostly motivated by corporate bean counters drooling over a subscription-based or fee-for-service business model. They kept the client-server but eventually went to the advertising-based financial model.

Lessons learned have two aspects, historical facts and interpretations. Our interpretations don't seem to agree very often.

I would also be more impressed with "lessons learned" if the current situation were not so terrible. What is the evidence that we have learned very much? Can you point to some projects that demonstrate lessons learned?

The poor adoption rate of technology like freenet should prove that there are still lessons to learn. I've learned that problems can't be addressed in isolation and solutions can't present potential users a dilemma of trade-offs they can't reconcile or the risk of consequences they can't foresee. There are only so many single-issue (or small set) solutions that users can evaluate, install, and learn before they get adoption fatigue. Applications can not be developed as monolithic swiss-army-knife application suites, but they need to be able to be installed that way and look and feel that way to end users. Linux is a pretty good example. Its adoption increased proportionately along with distros that offered more apps, integrated them better, and were easier to install and use.

PeerPoint is not a spec for a monolithic solution--it is a spec for a complete, interoperable, and useable one. You could be a big help in developing that kind of spec if I could redefine the project in a way that you could buy into. But you would have to help me do that.

PeerPoint is still in gestation and totally open to contributions, but they have to be more specific than "toss some seeds and stand back". Where your criticism has been specific, as in your objection to "next net master plan" I could see their value and I made changes.

My sense is that PeerPoint is based on a set of premises and approaches
that simply don't work anymore.

So bottom line, Miles, can whatever you think is wrong with PeerPoint be fixed or do you think I should shit-can the whole thing and play some solitaire?

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 12:16:23 PM6/24/12

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Melvin,

thanks for the link.

DOAP and the stuff it is built on like RDFS and XML are definitely applicable, but in their raw form they may exceed my competence to make use of them. I may be able to use the DOAP-a-Matic interface somehow. http://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/

Is there any way to add a machine-readable semantic interface to a Google doc, spreadsheet, wiki, or database without doing a bunch of coding?

PR

On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:46:50 PM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 1:06:21 PM6/24/12

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On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:47:52 PM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:

The Web itself, of course, was designed to be peer to peer.

Right, and a lot of PeerPoint could be done just in the browser (I know this was not necessarily your suggestion--I'm just brainstorming).

Opera Unite started going that way and there are/were a few FireFox plugins for social and file sharing.

Is that the best model? I don't know at this point. It may narrow the solution set a lot, which could be good and bad. Even if that is a good model, many pieces/plugins would be lacking.

Its hard for me to imagine something as big as LibreOffice as a browser plugin, but maybe it could be forked to work that way.

Then would that mean all the PeerPoint apps need versions for each browser? Browser preferences can be pretty persistent.

I was initially seeing PeerPoint more as something sitting between the browser on a PC or mobile device and the network access point. Doing PeerPoint as an appliance makes it independent of other user devices and the apps only have to be integrated and supported on that one platform which reduces the variety of middleware necessary.

PR

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 24, 2012, 1:40:20 PM6/24/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
>
> PeerPoint strikes me as a classic case of analyze,
> analyze, analyze, then design the one true solution, by committee.
>
>
>
> PeerPoint is not meant as "one true solution" or one true anything.

well.... that's the impression given by:

"a suite of integrated peer-to-peer applications to include (but not
limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content
management, database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics,
complementary currency, crowd funding, etc." that sure sounds like it

and,

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

and "The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet."

>
> It is an attempt to 1) define a certain problem space and 2) catalog a
> related solution space and 3) to do that via an open process.

except that the problem space sounds awfully close to "everything"

>
> Do you see all open process the same as "by committee"?
>

Not all, but in my experience, it generally ends up that way.

What I've seen work well: Single author or small team gathers some
input, puts a vision on the table, collects feedback, puts together
prototypes, gets more feedback, refines based on feedback, releases
initial version, .... over time, if there is positive reaction and
uptake, involve more people... evolves into a community.

What I've rarely, possibly never seen work well, is: We're going to
through the floor open to input from everyone, at the start, develop a
spec that contains a huge laundry list of requirements, then build to
that spec.

In buildings, there are good architects, bad architects, and middling
architects - but I've yet to see a beautiful and functional building
designed by committee. Design competitions yes, maybe an open process
for framing what's being looked for, an maybe an open judging process -
but design by committee doesn't work.

In software, I've been through all together too many government projects
(specs written by committee), and standards processes, to have much
faith in "open process." The one exception is the IETF process - "rough
consensus and running code," and then we might think about making
something a standard after there are multiple, interoperable
implementations and long term use in the field by lots of people.

> I'd prefer to find an existing PeerPoint-like effort and participate
> in that -- but because I haven't found that, PeerPoint is the result.
> PeerPoint can always be folded into another project if a better one is
> discovered.
>
> There are many previous and ongoing efforts to produce requirements
> definitions and solution specifications for particular projects. I
> don't intend PeerPoint to be better than any of those or to replace
> any of them. The aims of PeerPoint are

My basic feedback on this is that I've yet to see something like this
work. You've been out of the field for a decade - in that time, an
awful lot of folks have tried things like this in various fields, and
they've yet to work. I have personal experience of this in the GIS and
military simulation spaces, and have seen failures in a lot more. There
are serious lessons to be learned from those failures, and some
conclusions that can be drawn as to what might work "better" (see below)...

> 1) to define user requirements at both the individual and the social
> scale,

That kind of assumes that people really know what the requirements are.
People don't always know what they want or need, until someone shows
them something new, and which version of something is going to "work" is
never quite clear. (Nobody knew that anybody would use FaceBook until
someone put it online. Nobody really knows why MySpace failed, and
FaceBook is so popular. Makes it kind of hard to write the "FaceBook
killer.")

My personal observation and opinion is that simple tools "work" a lot
better than more complicated ones, and people tend to build more
complicated applications by using simple ones as "building blocks." My
best example of this comes from the military world - where 10s of
BILLIONS of dollars have been spent on various command & control systems
over the years (essentially collaboration tools for planning and
executing military operations). But, everyone one of them is outdated
by the time it ships. If you walk into a military operations center,
you're going to find lots of email and lots of chat - because they're
simple, powerful, and can be adapted to changing situations (setting up
a new organization is as simple as setting up a bunch of chat rooms).

In short - requirements are hard or impossible to define in any
meaningful way - what you usually end up with is a laundry list of
incompatible pseudo-requirements that are off the mark from what's
really needed.

What works is to put a vision on the table and see how people react. Or
to get lots of visions on the table, some of which flourish, most of
which don't. (Call it "the market" or "let a thousand flowers bloom"
depending on your political persuasion.)

> 2) to catalog work that falls within the scope of free/open/p2p
> applications and infrastructure, and

Might make a good survey article, but pretty hard to keep up to date.
Besides, we have WikiPedia. Do we need yet another catalogue?

Caveat: there are some examples where cataloging is useful - I
personally find the "mashup matrix" to be a useful tool - but a HUGE
amount of work goes into maintaining that as a highly detailed
collection of interface details.

> 3) to serve as a nexus for collecting information from and providing
> information to interested parties in both the user community and the
> developer community.

Again, lots of people try this, with limited results or benefit. When
users are looking for something, they Google or go to WikiPedia, or
BestBuy, or an Apple Store, or ask friends - until they find something
that is close enough to what they're looking for. Developers are
usually scratching a personal itch (or working for hire), and do their
own research.

>
> For example, the Foundation for P2P Alternatives has a list of
> projects relating to "p2p infrastructure". There is no effort to
> compare, contrast, or rate the projects according to a uniform set of
> criteria. Wikipedia has a number of pages that compare open source or
> p2p software in specific categories, but the pages use a variety of
> criteria and the pages are not all interlinked. One thing PeerPoint
> collaborators might do is create a Wikipedia page to index the pages
> on p2p software and infrastructure, and define some common criteria
> that might be incorporated into the various comparison matrices.

Cases in point. It might be worth asking WHY those pages are not
adequate. My own opinion:
- they're good enough
- there's not enough demand for something "better"
- it's hard work to keep that kind of thing up to date
- folks who need serious details - be they looking for software, or
developers - are going to do their own research

(Recent example: I've been looking for a video editing package for the
Mac, either free or cheap. It took all of about 10 minutes to go
through this list of open source video editors on WikiPedia, narrow it
down to those that run on the Mac, and then do my own review of the info
on three different web sites.)

>
> For another example, I assume things relevant to PeerPoint have been
> done or are in progress in the W3C community. I'd like to collect
> information about those things and provide a portal to that activity
> not just for developers but for a wider user community as well.

I guess I keep coming back to.. why? Is there interest?

>
> Each individual already has her own mental map of the big picture, but
> how can it hurt for us to have an open process and vehicle for
> analyzing and comparing our different versions? That can be done in
> free-form conversation, of course, but it can also be helpful to
> participate in a more structured analysis and formulation.

It takes time and effort, and folks motivated to do so. Discussions
like this happen in a lot of places. Do we need another one? If you
see a personal need - is your effort better expended in improving an
existing resource?

>
> I may be misunderstanding you Miles, but you seem to have said at one
> time or other that efforts to focus on the big picture are either
> arrogant, stupid, pointless, or impossible.
>
>
> One of the clear lessons of the past decade or so, is that developing
> software in today's world is a lot more like gardening, or maybe
> farming, than design and manufacturing. Define simple interfaces,
> create a climate, fertilize, cut weeds, do some selective seeding,
> trim
> stuff, and otherwise stand back.
>

You are misunderstanding me.

I'm saying that trying to DEFINE the big picture, in detail, in advance
is (to use your words) arrogant, stupid, pointless, and impossible.

Identifying trends, aspects, visions, ... is (maybe) possible and worth
doing (though chaos theory might suggest otherwise).

Fielding's PhD thesis
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm), that
framed the REST architectural model, is a really good and influential
example of taking a big picture look at things. Identifying and
understanding fundamental architectural choices - e.g., SOA vs. RESTful
interfaces - is really important when thinking at the systems level.
(Note, however, that Fielding essentially summarized and codified years
of operational experience in the Internet).

The Unix approach of "everything is a file" is again, a fundamental
architectural choice that effects huge amounts of things.

Raymond's paper on "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is a critical piece of
work on alternative ways to develop software.

If anything, the world of collaborative software requires:
- better building blocks (vs. big, complicated systems)
- an ecosystem model ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as applied to the
evolution of social/collaborative software)

>
> Even third world small farmers are using cell phones, computers and
> websites to share information on production methods and market
> conditions. That's really all PeerPoint is about.

So.. PeerPoint is about cell phones, computers, websites, ..... - again
pretty broad and amorphous.

>
> The clearest example is SOA vs. REST. Huge amounts of time and money
> have gone into defining SOA architectures, but noboday actually uses
> them. On the other hand, we have lots of mashups. There are
> lessons to
> be learned about developing software ecosystems.
>
>
> SOA was of, by, and for client-server architecture, not p2p. Software
> as a service was IMO mostly motivated by corporate bean counters
> drooling over a subscription-based or fee-for-service business model.
> They kept the client-server but eventually went to the
> advertising-based financial model.

That's simply wrong. It may be how it's played out, but SOA is about
standard interfaces between software components. And there's a lot more
software out there than subscription-based services sold to consumers.

>
> Lessons learned have two aspects, historical facts and
> interpretations. Our interpretations don't seem to agree very often.
>
> I would also be more impressed with "lessons learned" if the current
> situation were not so terrible. What is the evidence that we have
> learned very much? Can you point to some projects that demonstrate
> lessons learned?
>

Umm... Linux, Apache, the email ecosystem, chat, the huge universe of
open source software for everything under the sun, the Internet (global
infrastructure that reaches everywhere that we use for everything),
flash mobs, the Arab Spring, crowdsourced responses to natural disasters
(crowd mapping, Ushahidi), the list goes on.......

> The poor adoption rate of technology like freenet should prove that
> there are still lessons to learn. I've learned that problems can't be
> addressed in isolation and solutions can't present potential users a
> dilemma of trade-offs they can't reconcile or the risk of consequences
> they can't foresee. There are only so many single-issue (or small set)
> solutions that users can evaluate, install, and learn before they get
> adoption fatigue. Applications can not be developed as monolithic
> swiss-army-knife application suites, but they need to be able to be
> installed that way and look and feel that way to end users. Linux is a
> pretty good example. Its adoption increased proportionately along with
> distros that offered more apps, integrated them better, and were
> easier to install and use.

Or.. that there isn't a broad need, or a perceived need.

My take is that people aren't adopting FreeNet because they don't see a
need for it.

Good case in point: Napster was incredibly popular - who doesn't like
free music. But... conditions changed, partially onerous legal actions
by the recording industry, but also Apple iTunes and the 99cent
download. There are lots of dirt cheap MP3 players, but people spend a
lot more on iPods.

People use FaceBook, they don't use MySpace, and my personal opinion is
that creating an alternative open social ecosystem is a complete
crapshoot - because people just don't care.

>
> PeerPoint is not a spec for a monolithic solution--it is a spec for a
> complete, interoperable, and useable one. You could be a big help in
> developing that kind of spec if I could redefine the project in a way
> that you could buy into. But you would have to help me do that.

Umm... no, that sounds like a spec. for a large government system,
written by committee - a laundry list of requirements.

Now the corpus of Internet and Web specs (particularly IP, HTTP, XML) is
a spec for a PLATFORM on which one can write interoperable applications
- but as soon as you talk a spec for "a suite of integrated peer-to-peer
applications to include (but not limited to) social networking,
real-time project collaboration, content management, database
management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency,
crowd funding, etc." - you're in the world of MS Office, or Oracle's
suite of tightly integrated applications.

About the only other way to frame things that jumps out comes from "If a
FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application
package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack."
Well... FreedomBox is essentially a plug computer + Debian Linux + a
collection of software with goals that sound a lot like yours. One
might ask: what are you proposing to add?

>
> PeerPoint is still in gestation and totally open to contributions, but
> they have to be more specific than "toss some seeds and stand back".
> Where your criticism has been specific, as in your objection to "next
> net master plan" I could see their value and I made changes.
>
>
> My sense is that PeerPoint is based on a set of premises and
> approaches
> that simply don't work anymore.
>
>
>
> So bottom line, Miles, can whatever you think is wrong with PeerPoint
> be fixed or do you think I should shit-can the whole thing and play
> some solitaire?
>

I think you should seriously rethink what you're trying to accomplish,
the approach you're taking, what you personally are bringing to the
table, and what you're looking for from others.

It might well be that you'd be more effective contributing to FreedomBox
than trying to create yet another project with what sound like similar
goals. Start with a FreedomBox and start integrating additional
applications that align with your vision. Work with a community that
already is on a similar path, rather than try to coalesce a new one.

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 24, 2012, 1:59:13 PM6/24/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:47:52 PM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:
>
>
> The Web itself, of course, was designed to be peer to peer.
>
>
> Right, and a lot of PeerPoint could be done just in the browser (I
> know this was not necessarily your suggestion--I'm just brainstorming).
>
> Opera Unite started going that way and there are/were a few FireFox
> plugins for social and file sharing.

Well, for what it's worth, that's what I'm working on these days. HTML5
is just about up to the job, but there are serious limits to what
current browsers can do vis-a-vis P2P protocol exchanges. That should
change, but for now, you pretty much have to use some kind of
work-around, either a plug-in, Java applet, or a protocol proxy (either
local or on the net).

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 2:04:41 PM6/24/12

to building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com

The DBpedia Ontology

The DBpedia Ontology is a shallow, cross-domain ontology, which has been manually created based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia. The ontology currently covers over 320 classes which form a subsumption hierarchy and are described by 1,650 different properties.

With the DBpedia 3.5 release, we introduced a public wiki for writing infobox mappings, editing existing ones as well as editing the DBpedia ontology. This allows external contributors to define mappings for the infoboxes they are interested in and to extend the existing DBpedia ontology with additional classes and properties.

Overview of the class hierarchy of the DBpedia Ontology

Mark Roest

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Jun 24, 2012, 2:13:51 PM6/24/12

to building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com, Jack Park

I am copying Jack Park, who may be able to offer assistance here.

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 3:36:58 PM6/24/12

to building-a-distributed...@googlegroups.com, Jack Park

Mark, I ran across something while researching ontologies that might interest you: http://cprtheory.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page

This website is used for the project on Scaling up Common-Pool Resource (CPR) Theory. It is a semantic wiki, which is a wiki that holds data. The data in this site describe the values of variables for a set of example social-ecological systems (cases). These data are held in the form of instances of categories. The categories are shown in the sidebar to the left under "Data". For more information on these categories and adding instances of each of them, click on the "Methods" link to the left. What follows here is a brief description of the contents of this site, the outline of which is given in the sidebar to the left.

Pages in category "Case"

The following 5 pages are in this category, out of 5 total.

On Sunday, June 24, 2012 1:13:51 PM UTC-5, Mark Roest wrote:

I am copying Jack Park, who may be able to offer assistance here.

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 24, 2012, 3:42:14 PM6/24/12

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On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

Poor Richard wrote:

On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:47:52 PM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:

The Web itself, of course, was designed to be peer to peer.

Right, and a lot of PeerPoint could be done just in the browser (I know this was not necessarily your suggestion--I'm just brainstorming).

Opera Unite started going that way and there are/were a few FireFox plugins for social and file sharing.

Well, for what it's worth, that's what I'm working on these days. HTML5 is just about up to the job, but there are serious limits to what current browsers can do vis-a-vis P2P protocol exchanges. That should change, but for now, you pretty much have to use some kind of work-around, either a plug-in, Java applet, or a protocol proxy (either local or on the net).

Hmmm, I also think HTML5 is pretty close, but ultimately I think a separate app out of the browser (like BitTorrent/Gnutella) will be the only way to go. Despite WebGL, HTML really is designed for a more-or-less flat view of the information universe (actually about 2.3-dimensional with hypertext). You see this dimension inadequacy once participation scales (consider large crowd-sourced sites like slashdot, digg, wikipedia). The project I'm proposing will create a 3 dimensional Presentation layer which is the minimal number of dimensions to deal with the issue of voting on greater than a single axis (users and information).

The other thing to consider when working with HTML is that, despite what I nearly agreed to earlier, I don't believe HTML/HTTP was designed to be P2P and still sits squarely in what I argue is an outdated, monolithic OSI model with DNS playing the middle-man connecting information together. The alternative I'm suggesting inverts the top-three layers of the OSI model, and puts a "content-centric" net right on top of the Transport layer. The users then organize the "App" via the voting model in what is a unified "cloud" of content. The session layer at the top is what is most dynamic in a social-p2p model, particularly as content is no longer being uploaded to servers (as you pointed out), but on each users machine in the form of pictures, blog entries, music, etc.

I'm still trying to formulate a reply to your older question regarding the understanding of why things have failed thus far....

mark

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

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Jun 24, 2012, 3:44:08 PM6/24/12

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On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth <dreamin...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

Poor Richard wrote:

On Saturday, June 23, 2012 1:47:52 PM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:

The Web itself, of course, was designed to be peer to peer.

Right, and a lot of PeerPoint could be done just in the browser (I know this was not necessarily your suggestion--I'm just brainstorming).

Opera Unite started going that way and there are/were a few FireFox plugins for social and file sharing.

Well, for what it's worth, that's what I'm working on these days. HTML5 is just about up to the job, but there are serious limits to what current browsers can do vis-a-vis P2P protocol exchanges. That should change, but for now, you pretty much have to use some kind of work-around, either a plug-in, Java applet, or a protocol proxy (either local or on the net).

... a separate app out of the browser (like BitTorrent/Gnutella) will be the only way to go.

Excuse me Gnutella is a network, not an app.

mark

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 24, 2012, 5:02:50 PM6/24/12

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On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> What I've rarely, possibly never seen work well, is: We're going to through
> the floor open to input from everyone, at the start, develop a spec that
> contains a huge laundry list of requirements, then build to that spec.
>
> In buildings, there are good architects, bad architects, and middling
> architects - but I've yet to see a beautiful and functional building
> designed by committee. Design competitions yes, maybe an open process for
> framing what's being looked for, an maybe an open judging process - but
> design by committee doesn't work.

If anyone's interested, I'll buy and ship to the address of your
choice the following four books from Christopher Alexander's "The
Nature of Order" (send me an email in pvt; limit to four sets of
books; tell me which books you'd like; also please only to places
where Amazon's shipping cost would be reasonable):

http://www.natureoforder.com/ (click on book1, book2, book3 and book4)

Design by committee may not work, but design (_and_ build, review,
adjust, adapt, discover, unfold, involving everyone during the whole
thing) by community does work and is proven to produce life-affirming
architecture, in contrast to deadening architecture produced by the
default "efficient", commercial endeavor.

A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob,
or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?

By the way, Christopher Alexander shows that architecture has been
essentially broken as a discipline since mid 20th-century. The
symptom? It's about everything else you can think of, except the
humanity of the actual individual people that are supposed to inhabit
(use) the work. They are abstracted away, simplified as entities that
have a set of generic needs. They do not actually exist; if you ask
who the work is for, you may know the names, but you don't know them.

So it is easy to point to current architecture and building practices
and say: this is by committee, and it does not work. This is the
"standard", commercially-sound way of doing it, and it "does work".
Except that neither actually works, anywhere, and you just don't know
it because you can't even conceive of what a beautiful world covered
with actual living space would look like. First you'd have to let the
full extent of the unbearable ugliness of what already exists sink in.

Fabio

Curtis Faith

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Jun 24, 2012, 5:14:06 PM6/24/12

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Fabio,

If your very generous offer is still open. I would very much like to have a set of the books. I have a great interest in design and have not had the spare cash to purchase them before, though they are on my list of books for the future.

You can send them to me at:

Jim Jordie
for CMF
206 Kimberly Lane
Ephrata, PA 17522
(717) 344-8936

I am at my in-laws for a few weeks and they live within one day's delivery from Amazon.com so use the cheapest deliver method possible and I'll get them quickly.

Don't put my name on the shipping because the post office sometimes forwards them to my place in Savannah because the postman is trying to be nice. It doesn't help when I'm not going to be there to receive them.

Again, thank you very much. And no worries if the 4 sets are gone.

- Curtis

Bryce Lynch

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Jun 24, 2012, 7:11:52 PM6/24/12

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It's been done before - a couple of years ago there was an experimental peer-to-peer socnet called Peerscape. It was written in Python and was installed as a Firefox add-on. It worked pretty well but didn't catch on, partially because the Python-in-Firefox plugin isn't maintained anymore, so the rest of the project died. Still, it might be useful to take a look at their code to see how they did it.

---
The Doctor [412/724/301/703]
Web: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
Sent from a Global Frequency satphone.

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 7:37:30 PM6/24/12

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practicalOn Sunday, June 24, 2012 12:40:20 PM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Poor Richard wrote:
>
> PeerPoint is not meant as "one true solution" or one true anything.

well.... that's the impression given by:

"a suite of integrated peer-to-peer applications to include (but not
limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content
management, database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics,
complementary currency, crowd funding, etc." that sure sounds like it

and,

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

and "The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet."

None of that implies its the one and only true or exclusive anything, so it shouldn't give that impression; but since it apparently gave YOU that impression I'll try to revise it with that in mind. Feel free to suggest alternative wording.

> It is an attempt to 1) define a certain problem space and 2) catalog a
> related solution space and 3) to do that via an open process.

except that the problem space sounds awfully close to "everything"

Not everything by a long shot, but its fair to say I consider the problem space to include all the network communication and collaboration technologies needed by progressives to help them get and keep the world out of the shitter. That technology ecosystem is a large space, but its also the space this group is addressed to. Its an important space, and I am trying to start with a big-picture map of the ecosystem to give context for the subsequent levels of detail.

> Do you see all open process the same as "by committee"?
>

Not all, but in my experience, it generally ends up that way.

What I've seen work well: Single author or small team gathers some
input, puts a vision on the table, collects feedback, puts together
prototypes, gets more feedback, refines based on feedback, releases
initial version, .... over time, if there is positive reaction and
uptake, involve more people... evolves into a community.

What I've rarely, possibly never seen work well, is: We're going to
through the floor open to input from everyone, at the start, develop a
spec that contains a huge laundry list of requirements, then build to
that spec.

I'm not expecting anything but a small self-selected team and the only PeerPoint product to be built at this point is the spec (laundry list if you like) itself. I think it already has value for users and developers as a layer of context. A PeerPoint appliance is theoretically the ultimate objective, but that's not even on my mind at this point. Most likely any future appliance would be developed as layers of software to sit on top of something like a FreedomBox. But all that is already explained in the doc. How carefully did you read it?

As time and resources permit, I'd like to incorporate an open ontology under which the specs and code of existing open projects could be indexed. Then a developer wanting to do a particular thing would be able search the PeerPoint specs to find specs and code for similar purposes. Searching via PeerPoint could provide much more relevant results and context than searching via Google (if Google could get you directly to relevant specs and code at all).

Companies are exporting large product inventories into RDF schema under Creative Commons license at this moment and people like LinkingOpenData and DBpedia are generating semantic schema from datasets like Wikipedia, so at some point there will be an open internet infrastructure and software taxonomy to work with if there isn't one already.

In buildings, there are good architects, bad architects, and middling
architects - but I've yet to see a beautiful and functional building
designed by committee. Design competitions yes, maybe an open process
for framing what's being looked for, an maybe an open judging process -
but design by committee doesn't work.

Tell it to W3C and IETF. I also mentioned a design competition as an "at minimum" project for PeerPoint. But the current PeerPoint doc isn't anywhere near the point of refinement necessary for something like that. The current iteration is nothing more than a proposal of concept. You seem to be shooting it down for not being things it doesn't really claim to be if you read it carefully at all.

> I'd prefer to find an existing PeerPoint-like effort and participate
> in that -- but because I haven't found that, PeerPoint is the result.
> PeerPoint can always be folded into another project if a better one is
> discovered.
>
> There are many previous and ongoing efforts to produce requirements
> definitions and solution specifications for particular projects. I
> don't intend PeerPoint to be better than any of those or to replace
> any of them. The aims of PeerPoint are

My basic feedback on this is that I've yet to see something like this
work. You've been out of the field for a decade - in that time, an
awful lot of folks have tried things like this in various fields, and
they've yet to work. I have personal experience of this in the GIS and
military simulation spaces, and have seen failures in a lot more. There
are serious lessons to be learned from those failures, and some
conclusions that can be drawn as to what might work "better" (see below)...

We've already pointed out that things like Linux and Wikipedia are larger than PeerPoint and yet they exist. You can say they started out differently, but PeerPoint only started a couple of weeks ago for chrissake. Most of your criticism and advice is just too vague to be of any help. If you pointed me to a succinct analysis of relevant project failures that might be helpful.

> 1) to define user requirements at both the individual and the social
> scale,

That kind of assumes that people really know what the requirements are.

That's why the requirements definition is open and collaborative, to be developed both dialectically and didactically.

People don't always know what they want or need, until someone shows
them something new, and which version of something is going to "work" is
never quite clear. (Nobody knew that anybody would use FaceBook until
someone put it online. Nobody really knows why MySpace failed, and
FaceBook is so popular. Makes it kind of hard to write the "FaceBook

killer.")

If all we knew was that we need a p2p [fill in the blank with application or service name] clone that is user owned (and we do know that) we'd know enough to get started on PeerPoint.

My personal observation and opinion is that simple tools "work" a lot
better than more complicated ones, and people tend to build more
complicated applications by using simple ones as "building blocks."

Why are you ignoring the stated intention or PeerPoint to integrate existing products and to promote new ones that are modular and composible?

In short - requirements are hard or impossible to define in any
meaningful way - what you usually end up with is a laundry list of
incompatible pseudo-requirements that are off the mark from what's
really needed.

I may be starting out with incompatible pseudo-requirements but with any assistance PeerPoint can do better.

What works is to put a vision on the table and see how people react. Or
to get lots of visions on the table, some of which flourish, most of
which don't. (Call it "the market" or "let a thousand flowers bloom"
depending on your political persuasion.)

Doing that...

> 2) to catalog work that falls within the scope of free/open/p2p
> applications and infrastructure, and

Might make a good survey article, but pretty hard to keep up to date.
Besides, we have WikiPedia. Do we need yet another catalogue?

Caveat: there are some examples where cataloging is useful - I
personally find the "mashup matrix" to be a useful tool - but a HUGE
amount of work goes into maintaining that as a highly detailed
collection of interface details.

I'm glad you do find such things useful. Which mashup matrix were you referring to? Programmableweb's mashup/API database listed 3 mashups and 13 APIs with "p2p" tags. Not many considering the thousands of mashups and APIs in their database. Anyway, the fact that they exist means they are doable, despite your hand-wringing about HUGE amounts of etc.

> 3) to serve as a nexus for collecting information from and providing
> information to interested parties in both the user community and the
> developer community.

Again, lots of people try this, with limited results or benefit. When
users are looking for something, they Google or go to WikiPedia, or
BestBuy, or an Apple Store, or ask friends - until they find something
that is close enough to what they're looking for. Developers are
usually scratching a personal itch (or working for hire), and do their
own research.

I know all that, including the startup rate of failure. But did you poll developers and find they didn't want an additional research tool dedicated to open p2p projects (seeing that Google is so good for that), or am I supposed to take you as representative and look no farther?

> For example, the Foundation for P2P Alternatives has a list of
> projects relating to "p2p infrastructure". There is no effort to
> compare, contrast, or rate the projects according to a uniform set of
> criteria. Wikipedia has a number of pages that compare open source or
> p2p software in specific categories, but the pages use a variety of
> criteria and the pages are not all interlinked. One thing PeerPoint
> collaborators might do is create a Wikipedia page to index the pages
> on p2p software and infrastructure, and define some common criteria
> that might be incorporated into the various comparison matrices.

Cases in point. It might be worth asking WHY those pages are not
adequate. My own opinion:
- they're good enough

Ha!

- there's not enough demand for something "better"

You said people don't know what they want

- it's hard work to keep that kind of thing up to date

No kidding

- folks who need serious details - be they looking for software, or
developers - are going to do their own research

(Recent example: I've been looking for a video editing package for the
Mac, either free or cheap. It took all of about 10 minutes to go
through this list of open source video editors on WikiPedia, narrow it
down to those that run on the Mac, and then do my own review of the info
on three different web sites.)

Do that for the list off applications in the PeerPoint doc (per the full specifcation) and give me your time on that. I'll multiply it by 1,000 to estimate what it would take the average non-technical internet browser, assuming they are capable of it at all (most are not).

> For another example, I assume things relevant to PeerPoint have been
> done or are in progress in the W3C community. I'd like to collect
> information about those things and provide a portal to that activity
> not just for developers but for a wider user community as well.

I guess I keep coming back to.. why? Is there interest?

Yes. That's been established despite your state of denial. The greatest amount of interest would be at ready-to-go appliance level. The communities of interest are smaller at the detail levels, but you need those levels in order to get to the level of an appliance or a downloadable package for a PC.

> Each individual already has her own mental map of the big picture, but
> how can it hurt for us to have an open process and vehicle for
> analyzing and comparing our different versions? That can be done in
> free-form conversation, of course, but it can also be helpful to
> participate in a more structured analysis and formulation.

It takes time and effort, and folks motivated to do so. Discussions
like this happen in a lot of places. Do we need another one? If you
see a personal need - is your effort better expended in improving an
existing resource?

An existing resource such as...

As I keep saying, point me to something equivalent, please.

> I may be misunderstanding you Miles, but you seem to have said at one
> time or other that efforts to focus on the big picture are either
> arrogant, stupid, pointless, or impossible.
>
>
> One of the clear lessons of the past decade or so, is that developing
> software in today's world is a lot more like gardening, or maybe
> farming, than design and manufacturing. Define simple interfaces,
> create a climate, fertilize, cut weeds, do some selective seeding,
> trim
> stuff, and otherwise stand back.
>

You are misunderstanding me.

I'm saying that trying to DEFINE the big picture, in detail, in advance
is (to use your words) arrogant, stupid, pointless, and impossible.

That's poppycock. I already HAVE defined a big picture, as I see it, albeit at a 5-mile-up perspective without much detail. That happens to be the appropriate starting point.

Identifying trends, aspects, visions, ... is (maybe) possible and worth
doing (though chaos theory might suggest otherwise).

Chaos theory would suggest staying in bed with the covers over your head. It suggests that survival is improbable.

Fielding's PhD thesis
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm), that
framed the REST architectural model, is a really good and influential
example of taking a big picture look at things. Identifying and
understanding fundamental architectural choices - e.g., SOA vs. RESTful
interfaces - is really important when thinking at the systems level.
(Note, however, that Fielding essentially summarized and codified years
of operational experience in the Internet).

I added the link to the PeerPoint resource list. I'm no Fielding, but PeerPoint codifies years of experience as well.

The Unix approach of "everything is a file" is again, a fundamental
architectural choice that effects huge amounts of things.

In the web of data, everything (to the extent practical) is a datum. The general practical limit of exposable data resolution is the point at which a uri is bigger than the resource it identifies.

Raymond's paper on "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is a critical piece of
work on alternative ways to develop software.

Not universally agreed with. At best its a limited case.

If anything, the world of collaborative software requires:
- better building blocks (vs. big, complicated systems)

Agreed and fully acknowledged in the PeerPoint doc as I've personally pointed out to you on multiple occasions.

- an ecosystem model ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as applied to the
evolution of social/collaborative software)

PeerPoint is intended as an ecosystem model -- partly (not totally) in a descriptive sense and partly (not totally) in a prescriptive sense.

> Even third world small farmers are using cell phones, computers and
> websites to share information on production methods and market
> conditions. That's really all PeerPoint is about.

So.. PeerPoint is about cell phones, computers, websites, ..... - again
pretty broad and amorphous.

Read more carefully. Its about information on production methods (solution sets) and market conditions (problem sets).

> The clearest example is SOA vs. REST. Huge amounts of time and money
> have gone into defining SOA architectures, but noboday actually uses
> them. On the other hand, we have lots of mashups. There are
> lessons to
> be learned about developing software ecosystems.
>
>
> SOA was of, by, and for client-server architecture, not p2p. Software
> as a service was IMO mostly motivated by corporate bean counters
> drooling over a subscription-based or fee-for-service business model.
> They kept the client-server but eventually went to the
> advertising-based financial model.

That's simply wrong. It may be how it's played out, but SOA is about
standard interfaces between software components. And there's a lot more
software out there than subscription-based services sold to consumers.

I may have overstated the of, by, and for part, but as you say that's how it played out, mostly because the players in that space have mostly been companies and contractors with client-server and "walled garden" business models. Universities hardly any less so. In the IT world the word "services" is almost always associated with client-server and with closely-held intellectual property. The SOA framework itself is agnostic about network architecture and intellectual property, but most of its users have not been. Am I still simply wrong?

> Lessons learned have two aspects, historical facts and
> interpretations. Our interpretations don't seem to agree very often.
>
> I would also be more impressed with "lessons learned" if the current
> situation were not so terrible. What is the evidence that we have
> learned very much? Can you point to some projects that demonstrate
> lessons learned?
>

Umm... Linux, Apache, the email ecosystem, chat, the huge universe of
open source software for everything under the sun, the Internet (global
infrastructure that reaches everywhere that we use for everything),
flash mobs, the Arab Spring, crowdsourced responses to natural disasters
(crowd mapping, Ushahidi), the list goes on.......

Assuming everything that exists represents the sum total of lessons learned, and we are still heading for a global anthropogenic apocalypse, I'll concentrate on the lessons not yet learned. In the first place your answer is just glib, flippant crap without any specification of what lesson each is supposed to exemplify. In the second place large projects like Linux, Apache, and the Internet generally support my design thesis better than your no-design thesis. In the third place the Arab Spring and natural desisaters support my PeerPoint use case better than your case for emergence unless your thesis is that thanks to Ushahidi the problem space has been fully covered.

> The poor adoption rate of technology like freenet should prove that
> there are still lessons to learn. I've learned that problems can't be
> addressed in isolation and solutions can't present potential users a
> dilemma of trade-offs they can't reconcile or the risk of consequences
> they can't foresee. There are only so many single-issue (or small set)
> solutions that users can evaluate, install, and learn before they get
> adoption fatigue. Applications can not be developed as monolithic
> swiss-army-knife application suites, but they need to be able to be
> installed that way and look and feel that way to end users. Linux is a
> pretty good example. Its adoption increased proportionately along with
> distros that offered more apps, integrated them better, and were
> easier to install and use.

Or.. that there isn't a broad need, or a perceived need.

My take is that people aren't adopting FreeNet because they don't see a
need for it.

My take is that they see the need but have no awareness or comprehension of, or confidence in, the solution. Awareness, comprehension, and confidence are fundamental objectives of PeerPoint.

Good case in point: Napster was incredibly popular - who doesn't like
free music. But... conditions changed, partially onerous legal actions
by the recording industry, but also Apple iTunes and the 99cent
download. There are lots of dirt cheap MP3 players, but people spend a
lot more on iPods.

People use FaceBook, they don't use MySpace, and

These bedtime stories about technology history are sloppy, inaccurate, and lack any coherent point.
.

my personal opinion is
that creating an alternative open social ecosystem is a complete
crapshoot - because people just don't care.

Wrong, Miles. That point is not even in play.

> PeerPoint is not a spec for a monolithic solution--it is a spec for a
> complete, interoperable, and useable one. You could be a big help in
> developing that kind of spec if I could redefine the project in a way
> that you could buy into. But you would have to help me do that.

Umm... no, that sounds like a spec. for a large government system,
written by committee - a laundry list of requirements.

Then move along, Miles. There's nothing to see here.

Now the corpus of Internet and Web specs (particularly IP, HTTP, XML) is
a spec for a PLATFORM on which one can write interoperable applications
- but as soon as you talk a spec for "a suite of integrated peer-to-peer
applications to include (but not limited to) social networking,
real-time project collaboration, content management, database
management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency,
crowd funding, etc." - you're in the world of MS Office, or Oracle's
suite of tightly integrated applications.

I've already explained the difference, but if you don't acknowledge anything that doesn't match your thesis, there is little point in my responding, and I won't reply to your future posts unless they contain something new.

About the only other way to frame things that jumps out comes from "If a
FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application
package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack."
Well... FreedomBox is essentially a plug computer + Debian Linux + a
collection of software with goals that sound a lot like yours. One
might ask: what are you proposing to add?

I've answered that. If you wanted the real answer (I don't think you do) read the list of PeerPoint apps then read the FBx poll near the end of the PeerPoint Doc.

One of these things is not like the other....

> PeerPoint is still in gestation and totally open to contributions, but
> they have to be more specific than "toss some seeds and stand back".
> Where your criticism has been specific, as in your objection to "next
> net master plan" I could see their value and I made changes.
>
>
> My sense is that PeerPoint is based on a set of premises and
> approaches
> that simply don't work anymore.
>
>
>
> So bottom line, Miles, can whatever you think is wrong with PeerPoint
> be fixed or do you think I should shit-can the whole thing and play
> some solitaire?
>

I think you should seriously rethink what you're trying to accomplish,
the approach you're taking, what you personally are bringing to the
table, and what you're looking for from others.

It might well be that you'd be more effective contributing to FreedomBox
than trying to create yet another project with what sound like similar
goals. Start with a FreedomBox and start integrating additional
applications that align with your vision. Work with a community that
already is on a similar path, rather than try to coalesce a new one.

I'm all over it, Miles. Always have been. Thanks for the advice. :)

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 8:09:44 PM6/24/12

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On Sunday, June 24, 2012 4:02:50 PM UTC-5, Fabio Cecin wrote:

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:

<snip>

> design by committee doesn't work.

<snip>

Design by committee may not work, but design (_and_ build, review,

adjust, adapt, discover, unfold, involving everyone during the whole
thing) by community does work and is proven to produce life-affirming
architecture, in contrast to deadening architecture produced by the
default "efficient", commercial endeavor.

A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob,
or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?

LOL, Fabio. Brilliant answer.

By the way, Christopher Alexander shows that architecture has been
essentially broken as a discipline since mid 20th-century. The
symptom? It's about everything else you can think of, except the
humanity of the actual individual people that are supposed to inhabit
(use) the work. They are abstracted away, simplified as entities that
have a set of generic needs. They do not actually exist; if you ask
who the work is for, you may know the names, but you don't know them.

So it is easy to point to current architecture and building practices
and say: this is by committee, and it does not work. This is the
"standard", commercially-sound way of doing it, and it "does work".
Except that neither actually works, anywhere, and you just don't know
it because you can't even conceive of what a beautiful world covered
with actual living space would look like. First you'd have to let the
full extent of the unbearable ugliness of what already exists sink in.

Oh, I have. I have 20-20 vision of both the ugliness and what the world could look like if people weren't such horses' asses. I often post outrageous works of community and DIY architecture -- tree houses, cob houses, etc. -- on my Facebook page.

ciao,

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 8:21:58 PM6/24/12

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Thanks, Doc.

I haven't looked at the code because that isn't my department any more. But Peerscape is listed in the PeeerPoint doc and I hope others will be able to dissect it at some point for anything instructive or reusable.

I'd like to see someone take an open source code debugger and turn it into a semantic code profiler that could export key characteristics of the code to a machine- readable OWL format. Then maybe we could drop that into our jiffy code generator (created by the same guy) and produce a p2p version in the language of our choice.

Are you that guy? :)

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 9:08:18 PM6/24/12

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Here's another, Mark:

Bio2RDF Datasets https://github.com/bio2rdf/bio2rdf-scripts/wiki/Bio2RDF-Datasets

Poor Richard

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Jun 24, 2012, 9:11:07 PM6/24/12

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Curtis,

I was hoping you'd join this thread. Any comments on PeerPoint or the p2p apps ecosystem in general?

PR

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 24, 2012, 9:43:36 PM6/24/12

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The big issues are:
- embedding the p2p code directly in javascript, so no plug-ins are require
- current limitations on what javascript can do vis-a-vis talking to the
net (essentially http)
- limits imposed by security mechanisms, notably protections against
cross-domain script attacks, that pretty much require a page to talk to
the server it came from (particularly screws you if you want to
load/save a file on your local filesystem)

On the horizon are some p2p protocols for media exchange from
browser-to-browser. Right now, Chrome is the only browser with any
support for this stuff.

Bryce Lynch wrote:
>
> It's been done before - a couple of years ago there was an
> experimental peer-to-peer socnet called Peerscape. It was written in
> Python and was installed as a Firefox add-on. It worked pretty well
> but didn't catch on, partially because the Python-in-Firefox plugin
> isn't maintained anymore, so the rest of the project died. Still, it
> might be useful to take a look at their code to see how they did it.
>
> ---
> The Doctor [412/724/301/703]
> Web: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
> Sent from a Global Frequency satphone.
>
> On Jun 24, 2012 1:59 PM, "Miles Fidelman" <mfid...@meetinghouse.net

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 24, 2012, 10:04:01 PM6/24/12

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Fabio Cecin wrote:

> If anyone's interested, I'll buy and ship to the address of your
> choice the following four books from Christopher Alexander's "The
> Nature of Order" (send me an email in pvt; limit to four sets of
> books; tell me which books you'd like; also please only to places
> where Amazon's shipping cost would be reasonable):

That's a pretty generous offer... but I should be able to get those from
the library. Good pointer.

>
> Design by committee may not work, but design (_and_ build, review,
> adjust, adapt, discover, unfold, involving everyone during the whole
> thing) by community does work and is proven to produce life-affirming
> architecture, in contrast to deadening architecture produced by the
> default "efficient", commercial endeavor.

Well, I was thinking of architecture by serious architects (e.g., Frank
Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen). But point taken, I've seen some examples
of public involvement in design that have worked pretty well - mostly
around parks and public places. Seems to work on a small scale, not
sure that how well that kind of things scales.

> A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob,
> or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?

Organization and process, perhaps?

> By the way, Christopher Alexander shows that architecture has been
> essentially broken as a discipline since mid 20th-century. The
> symptom? It's about everything else you can think of, except the
> humanity of the actual individual people that are supposed to inhabit
> (use) the work. They are abstracted away, simplified as entities that
> have a set of generic needs. They do not actually exist; if you ask
> who the work is for, you may know the names, but you don't know them.
>
> So it is easy to point to current architecture and building practices
> and say: this is by committee, and it does not work. This is the
> "standard", commercially-sound way of doing it, and it "does work".
> Except that neither actually works, anywhere, and you just don't know
> it because you can't even conceive of what a beautiful world covered
> with actual living space would look like. First you'd have to let the
> full extent of the unbearable ugliness of what already exists sink in.

Did you just come full circle here?

Though, I think you just highlighted an interesting three-way division:
- "traditional" architecture - conducted by individuals with unique
visions (with or without user input)
- bureaucratic design ("by committee") - sucks the life out of everything
- participatory, which, as you point out, can have some very good
results (though it can also gridlock really easily)

Miles

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 25, 2012, 12:21:06 AM6/25/12

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On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Miles Fidelman
<mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

> Fabio Cecin wrote:
> That's a pretty generous offer... but I should be able to get those from the
> library. Good pointer.

Thanks! I hope you do check them out.
I'm always curious to see if someone will find value in them.

>> Design by committee may not work, but design (_and_ build, review,
>> adjust, adapt, discover, unfold, involving everyone during the whole
>> thing) by community does work and is proven to produce life-affirming
>> architecture, in contrast to deadening architecture produced by the
>> default "efficient", commercial endeavor.
>
> Well, I was thinking of architecture by serious architects (e.g., Frank
> Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen).
> But point taken, I've seen some examples of
> public involvement in design that have worked pretty well - mostly around
> parks and public places. Seems to work on a small scale, not sure that how
> well that kind of things scales.

Quick aside, CA's has criticism directed to Frank Lloyd Wright &
friends as well.

But let me stop before I give the impression that I actually know
anything of the field of building-design and/or of building-building
(I'm just a whiny and apparently ungrateful user :-) ).

>> A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob,
>> or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?
>
> Organization and process, perhaps?

Yeah, but I was really aiming for the "softer" stuff. Communion,
caring, true involvement, empathy, extended sense of self, etc.

And then again, these are labels. Maybe others have their own
definitions. But when I think community, I think a bunch of people who
really care about the other actual people that are in it.

> Did you just come full circle here?

Perhaps.
I'm lost. That's what I get for trying to wield logic.

> Though, I think you just highlighted an interesting three-way division:
> - "traditional" architecture - conducted by individuals with unique visions
> (with or without user input)
> - bureaucratic design ("by committee") - sucks the life out of everything
> - participatory, which, as you point out, can have some very good results
> (though it can also gridlock really easily)

Yeah, I was thinking along these lines.
So, that's the whole point. Make a mess, extract 0.1% value, heal
word-shaped wounds, declare collective victory, repeat ad infinitum...

Fabio

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 25, 2012, 8:46:42 AM6/25/12

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Fabio Cecin wrote:
>
>>> A committee and a community. Both are groups of people. So is a mob,
>>> or an army, or a corporation. What's the difference?
>> Organization and process, perhaps?
> Yeah, but I was really aiming for the "softer" stuff. Communion,
> caring, true involvement, empathy, extended sense of self, etc.
>
> And then again, these are labels. Maybe others have their own
> definitions. But when I think community, I think a bunch of people who
> really care about the other actual people that are in it.

Seems like different axis.

Connection/community/involvement seems to fade with numbers - members of
a congregation vs. all members of a particular denomination, co-workers
vs. a professional community, members of a unit vs. all marines. As the
numbers grow, what might remain is a sense of solidarity, common values,
maybe a common way of looking at things. But...

A mob may share values, and rally in the streets - but actually doing
something, be it showing up at the same place, at the same time; or
conducting rescue operations; or fighting a battle; takes something
different - goals, some measure of plans, some measure of coordination -
i.e., organization and process.

Come to think of it, people can work together who don't like each other
or feel much connection at all, other than in the moment or the job at
hand ("strange bedfellows" and all that).

It strikes me that a sense of community and shared values/mindsets/etc.
have a lot to do with goals, and perhaps with the possibility of
self-organizing and emergent actions. But tools (like we're discussing
here), and tool development, are more about organization and process -
providing vehicles for turning shared goals/values/mindsets into action
and concrete outputs.

Coming back to the question of "design by committee" vs. design by
something else - my experience has been that:

- one person can have a vision (clear or not, accurate or not) and act
on it (perhaps with help)

- a small team can arrive at vision and plans and action by discussion
(or argument)

- as numbers grow - 10 people around a table, 20 people sitting in a
circle, 100 people in a town meeting, 1000 people on an email list,
etc.... - it not only gets harder to gather in the same place, at the
same time; it gets harder and harder for each person to have time to
talk, much less for each person to hear and process what everyone else
is saying -- hence we have to rely more and more on structure,
delegation, process, etc. And things almost have to become more
bureaucratic, "lowest common denominator," "plain vanilla," and so
forth. More and more of which get embodied in tools over time (from
pictures and words on stone, to pictures and words on paper, to pictures
and words on computers) -- and, to a point, computers and networks let
larger numbers engage with each other, but there's still the point at
which we reach limits of available time and human bandwidth.

Regarding the discussion here, on PeerPoint, I keep thinking that there
are a lot of lessons to be learned from large-scale, open source
projects - both successful and failed - their origins, their histories,
the structure of their communities, the tools and processes and "social
contracts" that hold them together, and so forth.

My general observation (and not a very original one) has been that all
the really big, successful ones I know of (Sendmail, Apache, the gnu
tools, the Linux kernel, various Linux distribution) all started with an
individual or very small group, with an "itch to scratch," and usually
funding or support of some kind (a research grant, a thesis to write, a
work project, being ticked off and forking a project). Over time, with
interest/adoption/contributions by other people, a community arises, and
some level of organization and process follows - a process that a lot of
projects don't survive. (One does kind of wonder what will happen to
Linux when Linux Torvald moves on.) Debian Linux and Redhat Linux
provide interesting contrasts - both old, mature distributions, one with
a mostly volunteer community, the other tied to a very successful
commercial entity.

Similarly, the history of most businesses starts with a founder or small
founding team; evolving as founders move on - perhaps leaving behind a
corporate vision/culture - but still HP is not the HP of Hewlett and
Packard, Apple will change without Steve Jobs.

And that strikes me as what's missing from this whole PeerPoint
discussion -

>> Did you just come full circle here?
> Perhaps.
> I'm lost. That's what I get for trying to wield logic.
>
>> Though, I think you just highlighted an interesting three-way division:
>> - "traditional" architecture - conducted by individuals with unique visions
>> (with or without user input)
>> - bureaucratic design ("by committee") - sucks the life out of everything
>> - participatory, which, as you point out, can have some very good results
>> (though it can also gridlock really easily)
> Yeah, I was thinking along these lines.
> So, that's the whole point. Make a mess, extract 0.1% value, heal
> word-shaped wounds, declare collective victory, repeat ad infinitum...

That is a nice way of putting it. :-)

I guess it kind of leads to a question of who makes the mess:

- lots of people/teams acting separately and in parallel -- some make
less of a mess and survive, most fail (though, arguably, some survive by
making a mess and leaving it for others to clean up)

- one big collective effort, trying one thing at a time, until they get
it right (or run out of time/resources)

For really big things - say going to the Moon - there's no choice but to
rely on very big efforts (though arguably, the Apollo project succeeded
because it had a Soviet competitor; and the whole effort kind of lagged
after there was a "winner").

For most things though - like, say, software, it strikes me that the
larger the initial group, the less likely to end up with anything
useful, much less anything elegant.

Which is kind of my reaction to this PeerPoint thing. I know how to
review, comment, and otherwise add value to something - once there's
something to review, command and otherwise add value to - but being
asked to contribute to the initial design and concept, particularly in
survey mode (add to the requirements, add to the list of technologies to
compare and contrast), that just strikes me as a recipe for going
nowhere fast. (Might be interesting to look at FreedomBox as an example
of something with similar motivations, but a very different approach -
and ask why it seems to be getting some traction and making some progress.)

Melvin Carvalho

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Jun 25, 2012, 11:15:43 AM6/25/12

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On 24 June 2012 18:16, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Melvin,

thanks for the link.

DOAP and the stuff it is built on like RDFS and XML are definitely applicable, but in their raw form they may exceed my competence to make use of them. I may be able to use the DOAP-a-Matic interface somehow. http://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/

Is there any way to add a machine-readable semantic interface to a Google doc, spreadsheet, wiki, or database without doing a bunch of coding?

You're probably best off fielding that one on the DOAP mailing list. Edd is normally pretty good about getting back.

There's more modern ways than RDF/XML these days such as HTML5, JSON-LD, turtle (as used by facebook) etc.

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 25, 2012, 1:42:10 PM6/25/12

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On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> (lots of stuff)

I see. (x 100)

> - as numbers grow - 10 people around a table, 20 people sitting in a circle,
> 100 people in a town meeting, 1000 people on an email list, etc.... - it not
> only gets harder to gather in the same place, at the same time; it gets
> harder and harder for each person to have time to talk, much less for each
> person to hear and process what everyone else is saying -- hence we have to
> rely more and more on structure, delegation, process, etc. And things
> almost have to become more bureaucratic, "lowest common denominator," "plain
> vanilla," and so forth. More and more of which get embodied in tools over
> time (from pictures and words on stone, to pictures and words on paper, to
> pictures and words on computers) -- and, to a point, computers and networks
> let larger numbers engage with each other, but there's still the point at
> which we reach limits of available time and human bandwidth.

Yes.

My tentative answer to this is that our cognitive ability is a finite
resource, Dunbar's Number and all, so it has to be about employing it
intelligently.

Let's say you have a small software team writing a tool. Their
cognitive ability is limited. You can set up a dumb system where you
try to minimize the time it takes to hack a fix to every issue that's
submitted, and soon enough you'll find yourself with a useless blob of
failing software that has to endure a linear growth of reported
issues. Or, you can realize that whatever limited cognitive resources
you have need to be employed to fix all of the structural faults
first, and only when all of the ones you can see are addressed (or,
more specifically, when all programmers feel that the structure
underneath the fixes they have to make is sufficiently sound), you
move into addressing superficial issues.

What if we don't have cognitive ability to spare, and we can't waste
time not doing anything that's not firmly grounded in ourselves
(whatever a self is)? What if it is a mistake to try to fix
"externally reported defects" without addressing the more structural
faults which are difficult to see, accept, describe? What if our
cognitive ability feels insufficient because we are just doing it
wrong? What if we could achieve scale-free "coordination" (being,
living, working) while imposing a fraction of the cognitive load of
modern life?

(I don't know. It's just a hunch)

> My general observation (and not a very original one) has been that all the
> really big, successful ones I know of (Sendmail, Apache, the gnu tools, the
> Linux kernel, various Linux distribution) all started with an individual or
> very small group, with an "itch to scratch," and usually funding or support
> of some kind (a research grant, a thesis to write, a work project, being
> ticked off and forking a project).

The one thing that I see in projects that look "successful" is that
the description of the itch is "complete". That is, at whatever level
you choose to locate the description of the itch, it has that quality
without a name of wholesome things.

Of course, you can fake that with marketing. "Optimized", well-crafted
but otherwise hollow marketing messages last a while (usually long
enough for you to buy something) but eventually fades quickly and then
you discover you haven't gained anything as a person.

> I guess it kind of leads to a question of who makes the mess:

>(...)

> Which is kind of my reaction to this PeerPoint thing. I know how to review,
> comment, and otherwise add value to something - once there's something to
> review, command and otherwise add value to - but being asked to contribute
> to the initial design and concept, particularly in survey mode (add to the
> requirements, add to the list of technologies to compare and contrast), that
> just strikes me as a recipe for going nowhere fast. (Might be interesting
> to look at FreedomBox as an example of something with similar motivations,
> but a very different approach - and ask why it seems to be getting some
> traction and making some progress.)

I'm thinking the users of a piece of software are as important as the
programmers, if not more because the programmers get the programming
flow kick while the users have to eat all that initial dog food.
Quality users, users that care, are actually part of the development
effort. They _are_ developers, even designers of the original intent.
That you don't need everyone to write the software is actually a
feature?

As for the "survey mode" of participation you mention. If you don't
like it (I don't particularly like it as well), then just don't do it.
Doesn't it feel sometimes that these things "pull us in"? You have to
tell yourself whether you're participating or not. If you participate
you care. If you don't participate, don't do anything "concrete", you
don't care. Then you decide you're not going to be a passive bystander
and will care, and participate. And then the participation effort,
which is determined by a collective conversation that may go this or
that way, may turn into something that seems like a waste of your
time. And then, as an individual, you're stuck between "leaving the
effort" and judging yourself as a quitter, or trying to help the
conversation shape the effort that's to be taken better (e.g. by
reporting about other projects that did this or that and worked or
not), while at the same time executing to what the current
conversation determines is the mode of participation because that's
what walk-the-talk, consistent people do.

What if _that_ is crap? What if the point is for all of us -- as
"uncoordinated" individuals that are just here -- to have "fun" (a
certain lightness of being, not absence of suffering) _all the time_,
and for that we have to review our own notions of what "to contribute"
means? What if the contribution that matters is _only_ the one that we
don't internally coerce ourselves into doing out of "sacrifice"? What
if we're in messes because we don't just _stop doing_ what isn't
aligned with that center in us that tells us what it wants to do or
not do, that is shut off by that other layer of cultural nonsense
about "sacrificing for the greater good"? If everyone is sacrificing
for the greater good all the time, then who's left to enjoy anything?
What if to "sacrifice" for a piece of software and hack in that fix
that you know should have been preceded by a structural overhaul is
not actually a contribution in any meaningful sense -- I mean, it is
not a contribution _at all_ to the world. It is inherently invalid,
devoid of _all_ value simply because you knew better, because you
betrayed yourself? What if you can _never_ do that -- the silent
internal override -- in a saner protocol for being?

What is it that children do? Their groups seem to work awfully well in
that sense. They connect, disconnect, and connect again, and not much
thought is given to it all. It just works, then doesn't work, then
works again...

Fabio

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 25, 2012, 4:10:42 PM6/25/12

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Fabio Cecin wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 5:46 AM, Miles Fidelman
> <mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>> (lots of stuff)

(lots more stuff :-)

> What if we don't have cognitive ability to spare, and we can't waste
> time not doing anything that's not firmly grounded in ourselves
> (whatever a self is)? What if it is a mistake to try to fix
> "externally reported defects" without addressing the more structural
> faults which are difficult to see, accept, describe? What if our
> cognitive ability feels insufficient because we are just doing it
> wrong? What if we could achieve scale-free "coordination" (being,
> living, working) while imposing a fraction of the cognitive load of
> modern life?
>
> (I don't know. It's just a hunch)

I hate to say it, but isn't that what "the magic of the market" is
supposed to be about? :-)

Or perhaps we're talking about "the wisdom of crowds" and other emergent
behavior?

(Likewise, I don't know, but it's a hunch.)

>> My general observation (and not a very original one) has been that all the
>> really big, successful ones I know of (Sendmail, Apache, the gnu tools, the
>> Linux kernel, various Linux distribution) all started with an individual or
>> very small group, with an "itch to scratch," and usually funding or support
>> of some kind (a research grant, a thesis to write, a work project, being
>> ticked off and forking a project).
> The one thing that I see in projects that look "successful" is that
> the description of the itch is "complete". That is, at whatever level
> you choose to locate the description of the itch, it has that quality
> without a name of wholesome things.

Hmmm... or at least concrete? (There are lots of observations about
good vs. bad "mission statements" - the prototype being "man, moon,
10years" vs. the motherhood and apple pie mission statements that lots
of organizations seem to have.)

>> I guess it kind of leads to a question of who makes the mess:
>> (...)
>> Which is kind of my reaction to this PeerPoint thing. I know how to review,
>> comment, and otherwise add value to something - once there's something to
>> review, command and otherwise add value to - but being asked to contribute
>> to the initial design and concept, particularly in survey mode (add to the
>> requirements, add to the list of technologies to compare and contrast), that
>> just strikes me as a recipe for going nowhere fast. (Might be interesting
>> to look at FreedomBox as an example of something with similar motivations,
>> but a very different approach - and ask why it seems to be getting some
>> traction and making some progress.)
> I'm thinking the users of a piece of software are as important as the
> programmers, if not more because the programmers get the programming
> flow kick while the users have to eat all that initial dog food.
> Quality users, users that care, are actually part of the development
> effort. They _are_ developers, even designers of the original intent.
> That you don't need everyone to write the software is actually a
> feature?

That's a pretty fair point. I guess I kind of focus on the projects
where somebody goes out and builds the <whatever> that they've been
trying to find, but can't. Somewhat easier in software, a lot of the
time - with the right tools (hypercard comes to mind), I've seen some
really interesting end-user developed software (particularly by
educators who've wrote courseware in hypercard).

Failing that, there's lots of value in user input and feedback - but for
new stuff, it's kind of a matter of putting something out there, and
listening closely to feedback. It's unclear that users are all that
good at defining the solution they're looking for, or even necessarily
articulating the problem they'd like to see solved. (You know, the "I
know good art when I see it" thing.)

Of course, there are times when users commission a piece of work, and
have a somewhat clear idea of what they want - and are looking for
proposals to match against their vision. Sort of like hiring an
architect to design a house - it's an interactive process.

>
> As for the "survey mode" of participation you mention. If you don't
> like it (I don't particularly like it as well), then just don't do it.

<snip>

Yeah.. I know what you mean. Sigh...

Cheers,

Paul Hughes

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Jun 25, 2012, 6:21:01 PM6/25/12

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Hi Richard,

Sorry for the late reply - I've been so busy these days, which
reinforces your point about that precious resource - time. I don't
think it's redundant because if it was, where is the original? Your
project is ambitious, but I believe ambitiousness is precisely what is
needed at this point. The problem I see is that there are many smaller
projects languishing and they all seem to get one or more critical
things wrong. From what I've read so far, your PeerPoint seems to get
them all right. I am by no means a computer/network expert, but I've
thinking about this domain for a long time.

Some of the questions I have are:

1) What aspects of p2p communications/networking can be done on the
fly, and without archival storage? For those things no central server
seems necessary, only the reliable means to connect any one node to
any other node on the p2p network. This would imply that all that is
needed is a client based program that can use PeerPoint protocols to
connect with another user. Of course, then the question becomes, what
happens to the message if the other person is not connected? Where is
it stored and how is it delivered once the receiving device is back
online?

2) For those aspects that cannot be done on the fly, the question
becomes to what degree can that information be decentralized securely?
Dave Winer's idea of using the RSS technology for "posts" is
interesting. With his idea everyone can have their own RSS feeds,
allowing them to control who can see what feeds. So there would be
feeds for family only, one for friends, one for business, and for
everyone, etc. What I like about this idea is that it uses existing
technology and the decentralize nature of websites to bring social
networking into the fold. All that is needed is a server somewhere. So
making server side set-up easier for more people would be an important
goal.

With the right protocols, and an evolving open-sourced platform I
could see PeerPoint eclipsing what Facebook does now, and offering a
lot more freedom and functionality than what is now available, not to
mention privacy that is totally controlled at the user end. There could be
everything from the most open bazaars to private/personal network for
just your friends. Cryptography should be built in from the start. Why
is it after all this time, PGP and any consumer level cryptographic
program so damn hard to set up? Again I'm no expert, but I understand
it well enough that it does not have to be hard. Two seniors, with
little computer experience and on different sides of the country,
should be able to start communicating privately with less than a
minute of easy-to-walk-through set up.

~Paul

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Paul.
>
> Good points, man. Thanks for chiming in! What I've been saying is that the
> p2p/floss/hacker community has plenty of chops. The resource in shortest
> supply is time.
>
> Do you think the PeerPoint Open Design Specification effort is redundant?
>
> Are you interested collaborating?
>
> PR
>
>
> On Monday, June 18, 2012 10:35:15 PM UTC-5, Paul Hughes wrote:
>>
>> Mark,
>>
>> Wikipedia and Linux are two prime examples of substantive creations
>> greater than Poor Richard's proposal that were done almost entirely by
>> volunteers with no desire for compensation other than the joy of creating
>> something awesome.
>>
>> I believe the time is ripe for PeerPoint or something equivalent. In fact
>> it's long overdue. Because of the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, and
>> efforts to control and censor the net, there are more people wanting, and
>> willing to build something like this than ever before.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jun 18, 2012, at 20:15, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth
>> <dreamin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Richard, there is very little such application suites on the "drawing
>> > board" because we're way ahead of you. These conversations have been going
>> > on for over a decade. You're excited to get started, so you start afresh,
>> > but many of us have heard it all before. That there isn't something more by
>> > now is a difficult fact to explain. But probably the biggest reason is
>> > that after the litigation over p2p file-sharing and such, no one (with
>> > financial resources or political clout) has taken the "leap of faith" to
>> > "get it done". Such a comprehensive and radical project isn't that far
>> > from the process that created the protocols of the whole Internet to begin
>> > with... and you know how many years and millions that took....
>> >
>> > So, if you want this to happen, I suggest you solve the political and/or
>> > financing problem.... don't go rei-inventing the wheel.
>> >
>> > mark j

--
(~*~)

Fabio Cecin

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Jun 25, 2012, 7:26:12 PM6/25/12

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On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Miles Fidelman
<mfid...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>> What if we don't have cognitive ability to spare, and we can't waste

>> time not doing anything that's not firmly grounded in ourselves (blah blah...)

>
> I hate to say it, but isn't that what "the magic of the market" is supposed
> to be about? :-)
>
> Or perhaps we're talking about "the wisdom of crowds" and other emergent
> behavior?

Great point (assuming I'm getting it). But I'd try going at: a
market's optimization magic is limited by its logic, culture, language
or protocol. It can only optimize as far as it can "see". Same for
crowds and individuals. The fact that there's such a thing as an
individual that "doesn't know himself" makes things very
interesting...

> Hmmm... or at least concrete? (There are lots of observations about good
> vs. bad "mission statements" - the prototype being "man, moon, 10years" vs.
> the motherhood and apple pie mission statements that lots of organizations
> seem to have.)

Nice. Ok.

> Failing that, there's lots of value in user input and feedback - but for new
> stuff, it's kind of a matter of putting something out there, and listening
> closely to feedback. It's unclear that users are all that good at defining
> the solution they're looking for, or even necessarily articulating the
> problem they'd like to see solved. (You know, the "I know good art when I
> see it" thing.)

That's precisely the kind of stuff I'm interested at :-)

I'm amazed by superior technology that doesn't "catch on". I mean...
"What!?" Makes no sense to me.

To reduce the "blatant thread hijack despite explicit request to
maintain focus" factor a bit: PeerPoint is geared towards "Occupying"
the Internet. This statement is clear: there's a desire to capture the
"magic" of the Occupy movement, the deeper, quality stab at it that it
achieved, whatever it actually is, and contribute to it. You will feel
that connection when you use and/or help develop this system. It will
feel that the better world that seems concretely (and joyously) closer
with Occupy will also seem so when contributing to that other form of
Occupy that is PeerPoint.

And since Occupy was framed at times as something ill-defined,
difficult to describe, aimless and purposeless -- a key indicator it's
probably interesting and worth digging deeper -- that nevertheless
attracted throngs of vibrant people (purposeless? right...) and then
proceeded to show patterns that reflect things of longing in my deeper
self -- more positive signs -- I perhaps hoped it was possible to
translate to both the pattern of participation in the "creation" of
something like PeerPoint, whatever actual roles end up being there.
That is, there's some substrate of equality and shared purpose that
underlies it, a hope that we'll see each other using different lenses,
like in Occupy.

...

Thanks for insisting, I really appreciate it.

Fabio

Mark Roest

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Jun 26, 2012, 1:11:54 AM6/26/12

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Hello Paul,

WorldVistA.org is working on a similar problem, which comes up in networking hospitals. Central authority (CA) types at the VA have a weird desire to turn everyone else into dumb terminals, subject to their gatekeeping, whims, and capabilities. Of course those capabilities pale in comparison to what the people on the front lines built under continual opposition, until they won an (apparently temporary) political victory. The CA types were going to send transaction fragments as they grabbed them -- not a good idea when the electricity browns or blacks out with great frequency, and the communication lines are no better.

World VistA's solution is to only send completed transactions, and to expect and log an acknowledgment. If there is no acknowledgement, the sending clinic assumes that there was a power failure or communications blackout or both, or that perhaps a mudslide obliterated the receiving hospital or clinic. So, it re-sends until it receives the expected acknowledgment.

In a leaf-and-dendrite system (like a taxonomy), starting from the bottom (smallest clinic, or independent doctor, shaman, or resident health aid) sends reports upstream. Each higher-level entity keeps a record of all transactions from the one below it, an also sends them up to the top level -- the national repository. This way, when mudslides or other disasters happen, the health record for a local community or region can be reconstructed immediately.

Given the reasons for building a new, peer-to-peer internet in the first place, it would be reasonable to offer choice as to whether to request that someone else keep a mirror of your transactions, and that the choice should be granular; for instance, I do want my health records and some other records kept, but if Mitt and Rove are in charge of the country, I don't want my political activities or beliefs available to them, so I might gladly join such a system and toggle politics off the store list.

Regards,

Mark

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 11:00:56 AM6/26/12

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Forwarded:

from:		Alexandre Lachèze via librelist.com
reply-to:		web...@librelist.com
to:		web...@librelist.com
date:		Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 1:54 PM
subject:		[webp2p] KadOH DHT experimental twitter-like application
mailing list:		webp2p.librelist.com Filter messages from this mailing list

Hi everyone,

As we announced earlier (“Introducing KadOH, a Javascript framework

for P2P based distributed applications”), we were busy building a
prototype application on top of KadOH. Now, it’s time to present it !

So, KadOH-twitter is an application that imitates basic twitter
functionalities, but in which all the data are stored in a web DHT
(aka in users’ browser) and communication between nodes uses XMPP!

Okay, that sounds great, but we launch this just as an experiment
during a limited period of time (say 1 week if all runs well). We want
indeed to measure how our DHT behaves on top of XMPP when used by real
users in a real application. So don’t expect to have a completed,
secured and optimized twitter-like service, neither totally reliable
but, please, make some noise on it : let’s tweet !

http://twitter.kadoh.fr.nf/

Don’t hesitate to use your smartphone since we are interested of
seeing performance on this kind of device. All your actions will be
anonymously logged in a database and we’ll later compute statistics
based on them.

You can “follow” us :
http://twitter.kadoh.fr.nf/#author/alex
http://twitter.kadoh.fr.nf/#author/pierre
or check what’s going on the dedicated #webp2p hashtag :
http://twitter.kadoh.fr.nf/#hashtag/webp2p

Hackers warning :
The application we built is not designed to be robust to attacks, and
since all is open, there is no merit to hack on it. So please don’t
feel like breaking our experiment, this will just be a waste of time
for us..

Technical details:
- we did this application in a hurry, because we need some results
rapidly. So you can check the code here :
https://github.com/alexstrat/kadoh-twitter, but it’s done quick and
dirty.
- we tried in this project to bring a REST-like interface to our DHT
and, as proof of that, we used BackboneJS directly to deal with the
models and collections stored on the DHT. By the way, we found this
REST/DHT interplay interesting and we think there is something
theoretically we’d like to explore later regarding data-structures on
DHTs..
- our logging service uses the great project cube. Every clients
runs a reporter service sending informations to a cube collector
running on an EC2 instance that stores all the informations on a Mogo
Database (see https://github.com/square/cube)
- to provide a direct access to the application, we used XMPP
anonymous login : don’t need to enter a Jabber or GMail account
credentials.
- to give a bit of reliability to our DHT, we run continuously 30
bots. Maybe we don’t need so much : we hope our result will show us
how many are needed to ensure a certain degree of reliability.

Cheers,

Alexandre L. and Pierre G.

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 1:06:06 PM6/26/12

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On Monday, June 25, 2012 7:46:42 AM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Connection/community/involvement seems to fade with numbers - members of
a congregation vs. all members of a particular denomination, co-workers
vs. a professional community, members of a unit vs. all marines. As the
numbers grow, what might remain is a sense of solidarity, common values,
maybe a common way of looking at things. But...

Excerpt from http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2011/02/20/the-new-toolkit/
I strongly recommend the entire article, all of which bears on the issues you raise about collective efforts, in terms of both problems and solutions.

The New Toolkit

I: Hyperconnectivity
How many people can any given person on Earth reach directly? Before the Urban Revolution that value had a strict upper bound in Dunbar’s Number. This number sets an functional limit on the troupe (tribe) size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Human units larger than this fragment and bifurcate along lines of relation and communication. One tribe grows from stability into instability, and fissions into two. In the transition to the city, humanity developed other mechanisms for communication to compensate for our lack of cognitive capacity; the birth of writing proceeds directly from the informational and connective pressure of dense communities. . .

Which is kind of my reaction to this PeerPoint thing. I know how to
review, comment, and otherwise add value to something - once there's
something to review, command and otherwise add value to - but being
asked to contribute to the initial design and concept, particularly in
survey mode (add to the requirements, add to the list of technologies to
compare and contrast), that just strikes me as a recipe for going
nowhere fast. (Might be interesting to look at FreedomBox as an example
of something with similar motivations, but a very different approach -
and ask why it seems to be getting some traction and making some progress.)

Miles

Miles, what do you suppose FreedomBox looked like three weeks from first words on paper? Far from being a very different approach, the approaches are essentially the same if you adjust for chronology. PeerPoint is starting in one of the ways you have said such things must start. In the time you've spent throwing stones you could have contributed something substantial.

PR

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 1:23:23 PM6/26/12

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Excerpt from blog.p2pfoundation.net

Book of the Day: Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

Book: Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. Byh John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. Basic Books, 2012
In Interop, technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore the immense importance of interoperability — the standardization and integration of technology — and show how this simple principle will hold the key to our success in the coming decades and beyond.
The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity.
As Palfrey and Gasser show, interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system—and now it is more important than ever. Today we are confronted with challenges that affect us on a global scale: the financial crisis, the quest for sustainable energy, and the need to reform health care systems and improve… Continue reading »

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 1:41:28 PM6/26/12

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Thanks, Melvin.

I'll contact some more mail lists after I have a bit more of a comparison matrix developed so the scope of the required ontology will me more obvious.

Right now I'd be happy with a simple nested outline or index of network infrastructure and software development terminology.

Do any come to mind?

PR

On Monday, June 25, 2012 10:15:43 AM UTC-5, melvincarvalho wrote:

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 1:55:54 PM6/26/12

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On Monday, June 25, 2012 12:42:10 PM UTC-5, Fabio Cecin wrote:
<snip>

I'm thinking the users of a piece of software are as important as the
programmers, if not more because the programmers get the programming
flow kick while the users have to eat all that initial dog food.
Quality users, users that care, are actually part of the development
effort. They _are_ developers, even designers of the original intent.

I agree, and that is one reason the PeerPoint doc starts at a level that is "vague" or "naive" to someone who wants to start programming. The first draft of PeerPoint tries to split the difference between users and developers and isn't very satisfying for either. It needs to be extended in both directions, preferably by members of each group.

If PeerPoint doesn't serve anyone, there is no point to PeerPoint. And unless someone sees how it might serve them, there is no motive to participate.

Seems like a catch 22. Any advice?

PR

Mark Roest

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Jun 26, 2012, 2:00:11 PM6/26/12

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Cool! Thank you!

Regards,

Mark

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Poor Richard <poor.r...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mark, I ran across something while researching ontologies that might interest you: http://cprtheory.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page

This website is used for the project on Scaling up Common-Pool Resource (CPR) Theory. It is a semantic wiki, which is a wiki that holds data. The data in this site describe the values of variables for a set of example social-ecological systems (cases). These data are held in the form of instances of categories. The categories are shown in the sidebar to the left under "Data". For more information on these categories and adding instances of each of them, click on the "Methods" link to the left. What follows here is a brief description of the contents of this site, the outline of which is given in the sidebar to the left.

Pages in category "Case"

The following 5 pages are in this category, out of 5 total.
A

Atlantic bluefin tuna
G

Great Barrier Reef Marine park
I

Indonesian forests
M

Montreal Protocol and Ozone
R

Rhine watershed

On Sunday, June 24, 2012 1:13:51 PM UTC-5, Mark Roest wrote:

I am copying Jack Park, who may be able to offer assistance here.

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Poor Richard wrote:

Melvin,

thanks for the link.

DOAP and the stuff it is built on like RDFS and XML are definitely applicable, but in their raw form they may exceed my competence to make use of them. I may be able to use the DOAP-a-Matic interface somehow. http://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/

Is there any way to add a machine-readable semantic interface to a Google doc, spreadsheet, wiki, or database without doing a bunch of coding?

Miles Fidelman

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Jun 26, 2012, 2:02:59 PM6/26/12

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Poor Richard wrote:
> On Monday, June 25, 2012 7:46:42 AM UTC-5, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
> Connection/community/involvement seems to fade with numbers -
> members of
> a congregation vs. all members of a particular denomination,
> co-workers
> vs. a professional community, members of a unit vs. all marines.
> As the
> numbers grow, what might remain is a sense of solidarity, common
> values,
> maybe a common way of looking at things. But...
>
>
>
> Excerpt from
> http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2011/02/20/the-new-toolkit/
> I strongly recommend the entire article, all of which bears on the
> issues you raise about collective efforts, in terms of both problems
> and solutions.

Interesting read. Doesn't quite deal with the issue of how
hyperconnected individuals actually share information or work together.
As McLuhan points out, we have retribalism going on - we still form into
smaller groups, they're just no longer constrained by geography (though
religions have had this property for a lot longer than we've had
electronics).

>
> Which is kind of my reaction to this PeerPoint thing. I know how to
> review, comment, and otherwise add value to something - once there's
> something to review, command and otherwise add value to - but being
> asked to contribute to the initial design and concept,
> particularly in
> survey mode (add to the requirements, add to the list of
> technologies to
> compare and contrast), that just strikes me as a recipe for going
> nowhere fast. (Might be interesting to look at FreedomBox as an
> example
> of something with similar motivations, but a very different
> approach -
> and ask why it seems to be getting some traction and making some
> progress.)
>
> Miles
>
>
> Miles, what do you suppose FreedomBox looked like three weeks from
> first words on paper? Far from being a very different approach, the
> approaches are essentially the same if you adjust for chronology.
> PeerPoint is starting in one of the ways you have said such things
> must start. In the time you've spent throwing stones you could have
> contributed something substantial.
>

Well.. three weeks from first words, I'm not sure, but the actual first
words are here:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html
summary of highlights here:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/10/highlights-eben-moglens-freedom-cloud-talk/

Note that the context was a talk to the NY Internet Society Chapter by
someone who's been a prime mover in the FOSS community - so there was a
lot of context to frame the talk.

And there a rather specific vision, embodied in a much longer talk:

Problem being addressed (summarized) - loss of privacy and control.

Very specific solution being proposed:

"We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in
any place. ... it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your
cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the
world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens
to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that
attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should
know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of
the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to
send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It
should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise
that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In
other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a
dangerous word - avatar - in a free net that works for you and keeps the
logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody
wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search
warrant."

"Now there’s a little more we need to do. It’s all trivial. We need some
dynamic DNS and all stuff we’ve already invented."

"Off the shelf hardware now. Beautiful little wall warts made with ARM
chips. Exactly what I specked for you. Plug them in, wire them up."

" Debian Gnu Linux social networking stack delivered to you free, free
as in freedom I mean. Which does all the things I name - brings itself
up, runs it’s little Apache or lighttpd or it’s tiny httpd, does all the
things we need it to do "

And a process:

"We need to give a bunch to all our friends and we need to say, here
fool around with this and make it better. We need to do the one thing we
are really really really good at because all the rest of it is done, in
the bag, cheap ready. "

-------
To a large degree, what Moglen had to say was that we should get back to
the roots of the Internet, before it was occupied by MicroSoft, Google,
FaceBook, et. al. - by packaging and making it easier to use - put it in
your pocket and plug it in.

No call for "occupying the Internet," no call for writing specs, or
surveying all the technology out there. A very clear and actionable
statement - that's moving forward rather quickly.

Poor Richard

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Jun 26, 2012, 3:33:18 PM6/26/12

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Hi, Paul.

My response to your questions and suggestions can only be as competent as I am (which is not so much, compared with others in the group) so I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems to me that just about anything but real-time communication and collaboration formats can be asynchronous, meaning that peers don't have to be connected at any particular time in order to send and receive the content of interest, whether it be "tweets", "status updates", emails, blog posts, documents, etc. In those cases I don't see why intermediaries between any pair of peers would be necessary until the number of subscribing nodes got pretty high. Content is stored by the originating peer until it can be pulled by the subscribing peer. The subscribing peer can decide on the frequency of updates desired. RSS or something equivalent may be pretty good at that as long as the number of endpoints and feeds is not too great. There is something called FeedSync (per Wikipedia):

The scope of FeedSync for Atom and RSS is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating applications to use Atom and RSS feeds as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
Note that while much of FeedSync is currently defined in terms of Atom and RSS feeds, at its core what FeedSync strictly requires is:
A flat collection of items to be synchronized
A set of per-item sync metadata that is maintained at all endpoints
A set of algorithms followed by all endpoints to create, update, merge, and conflict resolve all items

I don't have a big enough email address book to make it impractical for a p2p email client to check for my mail at each peer's outbox if my peer has been offline for a while, or to keep polling those to whom I am sending mail until they come online. But at some number of addresses that pure p2p approach can take a lot of resources and a shared drop box can start being pretty appealing. In that particular case the application footprint isn't very big and lots of PeerPoint peers could act as "community" drop boxes or servers for each other.

At some scale, depending on the application, a dedicated server can also be pretty appealing. In the case of email, for example, If I'm a big organization, I may want a big private email service to handle most of my mail. I think the approach for PeerPoint is to allow as many alternatives as possible. I should be able to select a trusted email service as a default mail server but still easily flag specific messages, senders, or recipients for top-security p2p (direct point-to-point) delivery only. At a more technical level, even point-to-point delivery may involve sending fragments of content by different routes.

On the other hand, live, real-time communication and content collaboration requires live connections between participating peers. I think one or more common "hubs" can make that more efficient and reliable, and I think PeerPoint apps should allow all kinds of network configurations, including "star" networks with trusted servers, as long as users are aware of the trade-offs between security, privacy, demands on their own hardware resources, etc.. There must be a user interface that lets them make those choices easily and in an informed manner.

A PeerPoint appliance or software stack would come with something like PGP already pre-configured. Its a lot easier for users to turn applications and features on and off via a good umbrella GUI (something like Windows' "Install/Uninstall Programs" but better) than to install and configure the individual packages. We might also learn something on that subject from the relative popularity of various Linux distributions.

PR

PeerPoint Discussion - please don't use for other topics

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

96 words on the future of the internet

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

Paul Hughes

Miles Fidelman

Sepp Hasslberger

Eugen Leitl

Fabio Cecin

Paul Hughes

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Fabio Cecin

Poor Richard

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

Poor Richard

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

Sepp Hasslberger

Sepp Hasslberger

Sepp Hasslberger

Poor Richard

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Fabio Cecin

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Mark Roest

Melvin Carvalho

Melvin Carvalho

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth

Melvin Carvalho

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Poor Richard

Miles Fidelman

Miles Fidelman

Poor Richard

The DBpedia Ontology

Mark Roest

Poor Richard

Pages in category "Case"

A

G

I

M

R

Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth