Docker

I've seen that a lot of projects and organisations are using Docker now. Containerisation in Linux has been around since 2008 in the form of LXC, but it wasn't until Docker was released into the open source environment in March 2013 that it's been a generally accessible and understandable enough concept to start gaining widespread use.

It's only recently (as of April 2016) that Sven told that it's really important and that I should know about it and incorporate it into our processes. So I started looking in to it, and it started really getting me thinking about how it might apply to the Organic Design vision statement:

Our vision is to see all of our world's inhabitants governing ourselves with an open, accessible and understandable global system which has as its bottom line the common good, and which we define and operate ourselves by effectively utilising and allocating our common expertise and resource.

Containerisation as a simple to use component is an important piece to the ultimate puzzle of how we at Organic Design could implement a system that supports our vision. Containerisation offers a means for implementing self containment and All aspects changeable which are core values for the Organic Design project.

The core values of openness and completeness refer to the fact that every facet of our reality and how we relate to it is covered by this system, and that state is available to all and made as understandable as possible. Of course that doesn't mean that nothing is private, this just refers to the ways we go about things, not to the personal details being managed in these ways.

The core value of "all aspects changeable" is that any part of the system, including the system environment itself, is able to be developed on by the community. An important part of being able to understand and change things is to be able to have an exact copy of the thing locally that you can use and experiment with, and Linux containers allow us to do this. Within this context is the core value of "think global, act local" is a general guide line to keep the system generally evolving in a selfless way that has the common good as its bottom line.

Of course containers aren't the whole picture, for the system to be truly open and transparent we must "own" it ourselves, which is where peer-to-peer comes in. And to be truly independent we must be able to maintain and own our identities, accounts and reputations together, which requires the best methods available for our privacy and security within this system. This requirement wasn't possible in a fully distributed environment until 2008 with Satoshi Nakamoto's proposed his solution to the "Byzantine generals" problem.

What we have here is quite a clear requirement: a peer-to-peer environment that we can log in to with our own distributed identity to access a network of public and private containers (i.e. complete environments) that we can collaborate on together. This network is formed by relationships where the basic geometry of relationships is defined to give a general class-instance relationship (i.e. what is an instance, or live copy, of what, and what implements what). We can see the combinations that others make for any aspect and have enough information to make informed decisions about how we'd like those things to be in our view.

So what aspects of this idea are already available, and what are the best options? How much of it would we need to code ourselves?

See also

• Core values
• Self containment
• Independence
• Software