Common vision/Information Technology requirements

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< Common vision
Revision as of 04:24, 21 September 2011 by Nad (talk | contribs) (Trust network: Using physical media also makes the network more useful in remote villages and more robust to Internet outages)

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.