About

Starting some notes about the org to evolve into discussed useful documents (this is just at the stage of internal notes requiring a lot of shared context). The wiki has been main programming-development focussed and so the documentation of our core concepts at the project-scale have not progressed. In fact there's many notions that have been developed over the years of our part in the project which have not been "wikified" yet, much of this could be extracted from the so-called "Trinity" printed a few years back.

The Project

The big-picture project of which the Yi is an instance of an attempted solution, ie supplying tools to the common people allowing them to grow organisation in accord with the fundamental patterns. Organic Design is an organisation that is set up like a "branch office" to carry out work on behalf of the project in the region covered by its nodes.

People & their Roles

Aran's role is to direct the path of development of the nodal model and develop its software implimentations. My responsibility lies firstly with The Project, Organic Design is the org I've set up to help assist in The Project development, but is currently not trading. My main areas of development are the nodal-core, network-architecture, interface-geometry.

Milan works for The Project voluntarily, and is in the process of setting up a similar organisation to Organic Design to support his work on The Project. Milan specialises in finding and connecting with other aligned organisations and maintaining relationships and information between these various organisations and roles.

Rob is a voluntary developer for The Project specialising in Graphical interfaces, PERL and Peerix aspects.

Sven is a voluntary developer for The Project specialising in PERL, R, LaTeX and Statistical analysis.

Jack is a voluntary writer for The Project attempting to make the workings of the nodal-core generally accessible.

Organic Design Limited

An organisation set up by me (Aran) for assisting with the development of The Project through its organisational structure, not through its ability to generate profit. It is a legal trading entity that could be paid for performing services in the field, and any profit generated goes into paying fairly for man-hours and required resources, and into propagation and growth of other independent Project instances. It is not currently trading since development hasn't yet reached a stage where it can support the its intended services. After it reaches that stage, it is intended to build and run the Organic Design Limited business system using the developed tools.

• Organic Design Limited currently has no staff, clients, suppliers or any relationships. It owns a domain name, and has a single director/shareholder (Aran).
• Organic Design is just a single instance of work for The Project.

Platforms & Sanctuaries

The business OD will be carrying on is organisational-functions and seminars and would be set up as a system including cafe, accomodation, education etc. The busniess plan would be a platform-template to allow other orgs to set up in the same way with more or less focus on the carious service aspects. For example a modified version was under construction called sanctuary which was desgined to be more remote and handle longer-term accomodation and education programs.

Money

I think a concern that needs to be made clear is that money is not the only means to success or influence. It is a centralised way of thinking to assume that to make a significant difference we need money and resource. This way of thought leads to the competitive model which has little use for sharing. Things can propagate through their excellence and easy accessibility with no strings attached.

If other people see what your doing and decide to do it that way without your permission and maybe make money out of it - great! you've succeeded in propagating your way further. Maybe that person "saturates the market" with a better implimentation than your original one - great! your way's propagated even more with less work for you to do.

Not being in it for financial gain, means not worrying about the state of other peoples financial gain from it either. Those concerns are trivial and anti-spritual merely serving to hinder progress.

Intellectual property & security

One of the main principles is sharing and absolute knowledge re-use. The core organisational structure shows us that the intellectual property concept is invalid and anti-spiritual. Any groups we work with will need to be working in accord with the same principles. We believe in privacy of conversation and specific organisation or personal information, but not in the hiding of knowledge. For project-related wikis this means that most articles should have public read access, but may be protected from public editing. Articles relating to server configuration or financial information can have private access.

Liscencing & Intellectual property protection

Another problem with intellectual property law is the ability for knowledge to be prevented from being used by others. We've been ensuring that we put LGPL liscences on all core programming to prevent reduced access to it. We've chosen the LGPL rather than the standard GPL so that there are no restrictions on commercial use.

Project Redundancy

Another aspect of all this is that it is actually a very simple and common logical structure at its core and is being developed simultaneously in many places and disciplines. At any time any one of these could reach its critical foundation development and begin spreading exponentially thereby making further effort of the others redundant.

Peer

Most of the development strands are focussed on the peer. This is the full p2p network operating system built on The Nodal Model. It is designed to be widely available using any OS/interface environments, but to be capable of working completely independently as well using its own Linux destribution called Peerix. This is an interface designed for non-IT-specialists to design and maintain any kind organisations in an extremely efficient and sustainable manor while inherently increasing co-operation, re-use and growth.

XmlWiki

This is a collaborative development environment built on top of the freely available wiki software called MediaWiki which was designed for the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. We have found that existing solutions like Source Forge are excellent for raw programming, but are too complex and rigid for conceptual development or other use by non-developers. With XmlWiki, we've combined the programming features we needed into the more adaptable wiki environment allowing us to evolve the environment to our needs as we go.

The purpose of XmlWiki has always been to be a temporary stepping stone into the new environment. We were unable to progress on the peer-environment effectively without an existing, but adjustable environment to work togther in.

The peer and XmlWiki enviornments are closely linked as far as content goes, but most actual programming development is wasted going into XmlWiki and should instead be put into peer-based solutions. Although many features are still being specifically added to XmlWiki every week because its a powerful enough environment to add a lot of functionality with little effort.

Requirements

• Writers - general and specific (Jack is currently making an attempt at describing the nodal-core in non-technical language)
• Programmers - there are strict conditions on this which have made it impractical to try to integrate other programmers so far. There are many threads of development that could be assigned to different kinds of IT-specialists, but the problem is that the organisation is not of a scale to support this properly. We have not found any financial support solutions that could abide by the projects principles and work sustainably so far. It's not as bleak and stagnant as it sounds though! since what we're developing is a distributed development environment, it means that development can help itself more as it progresses.
• Administration, The role that's needed to hold all the other work together is administration, which would include the management and maintenance of content, contacts, routing of information to roles (eg. driver updates to the IT role). This role is also has crossover with the general-writer role. Milan is working "In the field" on setting up a sustainable situation supporting this project-role.