Common vision/Information Technology requirements

The goals of the common vision can be achieved far more efficiently if we're able to harness the expertise of the many to find the best solutions for all aspects of the system and to work towards unifying them into a cohesive package that can be distributed around the network. In our project at Organic Design, we've called this package the Platform, and the network of all those using it we called the Platform network. The common knowledge, procedures, documentation and other informational assets and tools we've called the unified ontology. This document concentrates on what the common Information Technology requirements are that best suit the Platform network and best support the participants in working together in it both for themselves, their groups and in alignment with the common vision.

Trust network

The bottom line of the common vision is to build our own social mechanism, but to do this within the context of conflicting organisations, agendas and bottom lines means that the building of such a mechanism together requires a foundation of trustworthy privacy in our communications, and trustworthy objectivity in our information.

These requirements are gaining more and more focus in recent times as people are loosing their faith in the financial system, the legal system, the political system, the media and many other fundamental aspects of the social mechanism. The free software community is responding to these needs with many tools such as Tonika, Friendika and Diaspora.

The requirements of this network are:

• Groups formed from remote members can share information (such as media and documentation) and communicate together privately with text, voice and video etc.
• They can know that their information is safe and only flows over trusted connections between them (i.e. connections of reciprocal trust).
• Open standards compliant so that it can merge with other such social networks.
• Able to maintain network connectivity over a wide range of protocols such as DHT, HTTP, FTP, Email, XMPP and even using physical devices such as memory sticks etc which can take a great deal of off Internet bandwidth leaving it for more dynamic communications requirements such as video conferencing. Using physical media also makes the network more useful in remote villages and more robust to Internet outages.

Organisation

Traditionally most applications (both desktop and web) are not able to work in a peer-to-peer environment. Even the applications that run in the so called "cloud" are heavily reliant on high-bandwidth and high availability network connections. One important new advancement in the web application arena is the massive uptake of JavaScript and the associated frameworks such as jQuery.

This has brought about a whole new paradigm of application called the Single Page Application (SPA) which are web applications which don't ever need the page to be refreshed, yet still take advantage of the ability to use the browser history and to associate the specifics of page view and functionality as a unique URL so that it can be book-marked or sent to others.

Another really important thing about the popularity of the Single Page Application paradigm is that many of these applications have very little reliance of server-side technology, see for example corMVC or TiddlyWiki. Having such a minor reliance on the server-side technology makes them excellent candidates for migration into the peer-to-peer world. This migration is not practically possible for the majority of web applications like MediaWiki, Wordpress, Plone and Drupal because they're heavily reliant on the non-distributable relational database model, see also cloud for more detail about this issue.

If the private shared context that is provided by the trust-network described above were a browser-based environment, then it would be a very attainable goal to create an interface for a group that consists of the organisational and communications tools found in the Single Page Application arena, for example the free and open source mGSD organisational application.

Thousands of widgets created by the jQuery community and other large JavaScript frameworks communities become available to these distributed private group environments. Widgets that can help us to engage in group decision-making and self governance together.

Trade

We know that the financial system in its current form is a fraud, and we also know that there are proven ways for a society to sustainably and fairly manage, produce and distribute its resources. This scale of things is handled by ensuring that the information available to the members of the society is objective, and making accessible the means to organisation together as described above.

But in addition to the funding of industry and the running of large-scale institutions, there is also the need for people to be able to trade amongst themselves, and for this a stable currency is required. But again, the free software community is able to provide a solution, this time in the form of projects such as Bitcoin, RipplePay, OpenMoney and VoucherSafe.

By packaging up software systems such as these into the Platform, the members of the network are able to trade together without any dependence on the corrupt global banking cartels.