PeerPoint An Open P2p requirements Definition and Design Specification Proposal



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What to what?



Peer to peer (p2p) theory can be applied to many different domains. The three domains most important to the PeerPoint project are p2p culture, p2p production, and p2p technology. There are a number of different (and sometimes conflicting) versions or interpretations of these domains.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) is not restricted to technology, but covers every social process with a peer-to-peer dynamic, whether these peers are humans or computers.Peer-to-peer as a term originated from the popular concept of P2P distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized byfile sharing systems likeNapster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s. The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P human dynamic affords a critical look at currentauthoritarian andcentralized social structures. Peer-to-peer is also a political and social program for those who believe that in many cases, peer-to-peer modes are a preferable option.
An encyclopedic wiki on every p2p topic imaginable is maintained at the Foundation for P2P Alternatives.
The PeerPoint project will use the following summaries of the three domains as a jumping off point, but participants are encouraged to consider these as open definitions. No attempt to establish a PeerPoint p2p orthodoxy is implied.

1. P2P Culture (or p2p social process)
P2P culture is a post-capitalist socio-economic framework that includes but transcends capitalism and encompasses many hybrids of open and closed, public and private, and hierarchical and egalitarian associations.
P2P emphasizes cooperation, openness, fairness, transparency, information symmetry, sustainability, accountability, and innovation motivated by the full range of human aspirations including, but definitely not limited to, personal financial gain.
P2P is a "post-capitalist framework" because many peers are quite happy to abandon capitalism's euphemisms and reductio ad absurdums altogether. However, others consider aspects of capitalism to have played a role in lifting millions from poverty and would rather adapt it to changing social and ecological needs than to abandon it for something novel. I think it is entirely possible to craft new forms of natural, ecological, and democratic capitalism which "do no harm", and I think there is ample room in the p2p community for such a "diversity of tactics."
P2P social process can operate in almost any economic context if two specific rules are respected. P2P capitalism, p2p Marxism, p2p anarchy, or p2p whatever must honor:


  1. the political and legal equality of every peer

  2. the fully informed consent of every peer

The relative degree to which these rules are followed is the relative degree of p2p-correctness, regardless of any other characteristics of the socioeconomic environment. It is entirely up to the self-identified capitalist, Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist, or whatever, to accept or reject these rules, in which case they are (or are not, respectively) a p2p capitalist, p2p Marxist, etc.


However, the simplicity of these two rules is deceptive because they have many corollaries and implications. And they don't solve the problem of competing or conflicting rights and interests among peers--we still require courts, legislatures, and social contracts for that.
In an ideology-agnostic nutshell, you could say the P2P social framework is about cooperative individualism (this is precisely how Michel Bauwens describes peerism in "The Political Economy of Peer Production").
Individuals are interdependent but retain a self-identity, dignity, and an autonomous intellectual and moral agency. Any system which diminishes that diminishes itself.
A peer is a self-directed individual, voluntarily consenting to various cooperative social contracts or arrangements. Whether cooperation is one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, all cooperators are peers. If they are not peers, the enterprise probably should not be called cooperation. Instead it would be some variety of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation.
A person's success at being a peer and cooperating with other peers depends largely on how well they absorb the ideas of composability, subsidiarity, intersubjectivity and enlightened self-interest.
The mixture of individuality (selfishness) and sociality (cooperation) in each person may reflect the multilevel interaction of individual and group selection in evolution. This often carries a level of cognitive and cultural dissonance that each peer and peer group must grapple with.
2. P2P Production (or Peer Production)
Per Wikipedia: “Peer production (also known by the termmass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome... In these communities, the efforts of a large number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. The information age, especially the Internet, has provided the peer production process with new collaborative possibilities and has become a dominant and important mode of producing information. Free and open source software are two examples of modern processes of peer production. One of the earliest instances of networked peer production isProject Gutenberg, a project that involves volunteers that make "etexts" from out-of-copyright works available online. Modern examples areWikipedia, an online encyclopedia, andLinux, a computer operating system. For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production.Amazon built itself around user reviews,Google is constituted byuser-generated content (i.e.Youtube). Peer production refers to the production process on which the previous examples are based.Commons-based peer production is a subset of peer production.”

3. P2P Technology
Per Wikipedia: “A peer-to-peer computer network is one 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. P2P networks can be set up in the home, a business or over the Internet... P2P networks can be used for sharing content such as audio, video, data or anything in digital format. P2P is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged participants in the application. Each computer in the network is referred to as anode. The owner of each computer on a P2P network would set aside a portion of its resources - such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth -to be made directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. With this model, peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditionalclient–server model where only servers supply (send), and clients consume (receive).”


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