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[This is a back-of-the-envelope first draft of top-level design specifications.]
PeerPoint is an evolving, crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer (p2p) applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, distributed database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowdfunding, etc.
The PeerPoint Requirements and Design Specification is not meant to replace or supersede existing software and technology development efforts. It is intended to elicit and catalog the needs of the user community and to help inform and coordinate the work of the floss / p2p / hacker community to promote more rapid convergence towards common standards and interoperable solutions. It is intended to be an open P2P development roadmap, collectively designed by all the stakeholders in a free, democratic future for the internet and its users.
Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, activists, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the PeerPoint project.
The initial scope consists of:
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establish the PeerPoint project’s collaboration platform and process
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survey the needs and desires of various categories of users and other stakeholders
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define a taxonomy of users and user requirements with weights and priorities
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survey the FLOSS/p2p technology ecosystem
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define a taxonomy of FLOSS/p2p solutions and create a comparison matrix
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identify best (or dominant) p2p standards, methods and solutions
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create a recursive cross reference of user requirements and solution sets
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encode the above in a machine-readable linked-data ontology
All of these threads can be pursued in parallel with only a minimal amount of sequential dependencies.
PeerPoint is a design to Occupy the Internet.
The PeerPoint project might ultimately produce far more than a set of design documents. The PeerPoint design specifications could contribute to the development of an operational suite of improved application software specifically designed for social collaboration and activism. The PeerPoint project could also help to create new software development tools and new distributed network infrastructures. But more than that, PeerPoint could help to shift the balance of power from central, corporate authorities to independent digital citizens.
At its most extreme potential, the PeerPoint specification could lead to an inexpensive (or free) self-contained, all-in-one, plug-and-play personal network appliance. Such an appliance would be connected between a user’s PC, home network, or mobile device and a network access point such as a connection to an internet service provider (ISP). It would support multiple access methods (phone lines, mobile devices, wifi, ethernet, etc.) for maximum connectivity. It might be accessed by remote mobile devices either over commercial cellular networks or over independentwireless mesh networks like those used by Occupy Wall Street.
With the PeerPoint approach, each user would retain ownership and control of all the data and content they created. PeerPoint users might connect to the internet via commercial ISPs, but those ISP’s would, if the user so desired, only act as blind, passive carriers of PeerPoint encrypted communications and content.
That is the ultimate vision behind the PeerPoint project framework, but PeerPoint is not intended to be the “one true path” to that goal or any other. It is a complementary and parallel process among all the other R&D efforts in the diverse and evolving ecosystem of open, p2p technology.
Regardless of how far the PeerPoint project evolves, it is designed to create some value at each step along the way. The PeerPoint conceptual framework already adds some value to the conversation among internet stakeholders. The project will evolve outward from this initial nucleus with each incremental addition requiring minimal investment and adding some immediate value for stakeholders.
The Need
The social tools provided by Facebook, Twitter, Skype, etc. have been fun and fairly useful, but if we think about the serious and intensive collaborative effort it will take to shift an entire civilization onto a more principled, democratic, and sustainable footing, we are going to need more powerful and comprehensive digital work tools. Those tools need to belong to us and they need to meet the social and political needs of our time, not the needs of a few self-serving corporations or their shareholders.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are proprietary, for-profit platforms that exploit users to create content and value. But they provide value as well, so a “Facebook killer” must provide greater user value (functionality, privacy, etc.) than Facebook. For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%. They are not 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. This new kind of group interaction over distances is what allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements. It is also what will enable direct participation in the legislative process to function at a large scale for the first time in human history.
The corporate internet business model is based on surveillance of our online activity, our thought, and our expression. By data mining the vast amounts of our information in their custody, they identify our patterns of thought and behavior. They do this ostensibly to sell us stuff and to make money, and so far we have accepted this as the cost of our “free” use of corporatized internet services. But what other, less benign uses can this surveillance and data mining be put to?
I have been hoping for somebody like the Linux community or Wikipedia Community to step up and create an appliance-like p2p node that provides all the apps needed for secure (and when desired, anonymous) social networking, voting, collaboration, crowdfunding, etc. -- something that comes complete, out of the box, with the apps pre-installed; that connects easily to your personal computer, home network, or mobile device, and solves all our needs for personal and social digital tools... But it ain’t happening. Most existing organizations and projects already have a particular vision, scope, or direction that stops somewhere short of the PeerPoint scope or heads in a different technology direction. On the other hand there is a variety of visionary writers and thinkers who imagine next generation networks or future netscapes in graphic terms, but who haven’t created detailed roadmaps to, or technical specifications for, those inspiring visions. PeerPoint is trying to work the middle space between the brick-and-mortar institutions and the visionaries -- with the intent to lay some track between the two.
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