Plan for second year

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

The Crowd Angel campaign was completed successfully. We raised over 11,000 euros, which is awesome! That will keep us going for at least the time being. I'll be in touch with all the donators to find out whether they want to have the T-shirt, or they want their whole donation to go to the project. Both are cool with us, basically the question is "Would you wear it?" If you would wear it at least once, to work, to a conference, to the supermarket, wherever, then it's good to help the project get more publicity, which will lead to more adoption.

To reiterate, this is an open project, based on do-ocracy. I think the decisions in this project should be taken by rough concensus on this mailing list. Your vote doesn't depend on whether or not you donated - that's entirely separate. Only on whether you say stuff that makes sense.

I am still learning how to run the project in the best possible way - I try to write all my ideas to this mailing list to see what people say. But please correct me if you think something's going wrong. We only get one chance at this, so it's important that we take the right decision time after time. Only through a chain of choosing the right option ten, fifteen times in a row, and backtracking as soon as we see we chose wrong somewhere, can we hit the jackpot of "web freedom for everybody".

As I said, I'll try to write up what we've achieved in the first year (9 September is date we registered the unhosted.org domain name, so that almost marks one year now). Mainly though, it's:

- version 0.1 of the standard: http://unhosted.org/spec/dav/0.1

- implementations based on mod_dav and on ownCloud

- a client-side library which we called syncStorage

- a demo app that shows how to use it, http://myfavouritesandwich.org

- partial ideas about how to combine unhosted with:

      - federated social web

      - CouchDb

      - google Caja

      - Android

- some ideas about what should go into version 0.2 of our standard

- some ideas of how to integrate with other up-and-coming web technologies, like in-browser apps, app channels, BrowserId, etc.

- an understanding that we should promote 1) the unhosted architecture as a base-level, promote 2) the use of our standard (or change to a different standard if that's better), and 3) show how to use end-to-end encryption on top of that standard.

It's never too early to start making a plan of where we should take the project in its second year. In particular, there's a realistic chance that nlnet will match the money we raised through crowd funding if we can define a good plan, with clear milestones. So that is what we need. :)

In our second year, I've been thinking we should achieve five things:

1 - unhosted storage being available to normal end-users, for instance through a freemium provider, or as an install-option in the control panel of some managed hosting provider.

2 - our standard being free of bugs, yet support the entire set of minimal necessary functionality. we'll just have to develop it as we go along, and fix aspects as we run into them, using our 6-monthly spec update cycle.

3 - lots of web apps accepting unhosted accounts. whether written ourselves or (more efficient) ported from existing apps

4 - peer-to-peer distribution of such web apps. this is not strictly a requirement for data freedom, but it would be awesome for software freedom, and free us from github. it would also reduce the cost of publishing web apps to zero if you can just "float" them.

5 - promote it to web devs as well as to end users, and get them to use it

i think we should divide those 5 things into smaller pieces, so we can define some sort of milestones.

are any of those 5 out of place? is any 6th one missing?

Cheers,

Michiel