image via http://bit.ly/ri4FtI

(originally posted on Shareable)

In the last nine months of planning the Contact Summit, I’ve come across a range of projects and initiatives building toward the “Next Net.” Though they vary in their stages of development and specific implementations, they fall under the common themes of enabling peer-to-peer communication and exchange, protecting personal freedom and privacy, and giving people more control over their data and identity on the web. Here’s list of just ten projects, many of which will be demoing at our exhibitor space at Contact on October 20th in New York City. Continue reading →

this post is an update of activity around Next Net initiatives we’re monitoring for the upcoming Contact conference in NYC

We set up the Next Net google group several months ago as a space to welcome discussions around the opportunities for a distributed, decentralized internet infrastructure. Now individuals from a range of projects are coming together, sharing ideas, and beginning to build out useful documentation of the necessary and existing components of an open hardware and software stack.

Proof of Concept

Within the past week, members of the Future Forward Institute have put together a simple diagram of a minimal-requirements test case for experimenting with combinations of networks, protocols and resources. It consists of an initial arrangement of three devices, and can be scaled up to demonstrate how an architecture for connecting many devices in many ways could work.

Continue reading →

In preparation for the Contact conference that I am helping to organize this October in NYC, I’ve been in discussion with many different communities about the types of initiatives they would like to bring to the table. The purpose of the event is to ‘realize the true potential of social media,’ and determine what infrastructures need to be in place to enable peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and governance.

My goal is to help facilitate these conversations now, so that come October, there is already a higher level of awareness and understanding of these issues, and more connections between groups working on similar objectives.

To that end, one of the conversation threads that has begun, with the help of Paul B. Hartzog, Richard C. Adler, and Sam Rose of the Future Forward Institute, is:

What are the fundamental requirements and building blocks of a distributed internet?

We’ve already seeded the question out on Quora and a google group, and found that developers will answer this question in many ways, because it raises many questions. Such as:

• Is a ‘distributed internet’ one thing or many things (one internet or many internets?)
• Should the focus be on hardware or software? Perhaps both in parallel, as a linked ecosystem of interoperable parts?
• Could we make more progress by building on the existing internet architecture, or would an entirely new architecture offer a better set of advantages?
• What about hybrid architectures of old and new (mesh networks conntected with community-owned ‘trunks’ for instance)?

Our plan is to get a sense of the various perspectives and opinions around these questions, find the common ground, and see what patterns and insights emerge. It’s not an either/or solution.. it’s probably more like both/and. As nature has shown us, diversity is a good thing. When you have a monoculture, you’re much more susceptible to collapse and catastrophic failure. Resilience is often associated with options.

So if we’re using evolutionary processes as our model, it would make sense to have a multitude of experiments and prototypes out there, with an understanding that “failure” is actually a necessary component of more agile iteration and adaptability.

As these conversations continue and we get a clearer understanding of the current landscape, a roadmap will start to come together with implementable ‘next steps.’ Once the basics are understood, we’ll start asking the harder questions, like:

• What are the political, economic, and technological reasons for a distributed internet(s)?
• Are distributed systems for technologically efficient?
• Do distributed systems afford more freedom?
• What are the core principles of a distributed internet(s)? (technology layers, philosophy, etc)
• Who are the key players in terms of people implementing hardware ann software, participating in co-governance, and exploring legal issues around emerging infrastructures?
• How do economics change when all of the participants are co-owners in the system?

And so on.

I hope this will be an opportunity for many of the communities, groups, and organizations to come together in a common forum and work through these questions together. This area is relatively new to me, so while I am aware of some groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Peer to Peer Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, I know there are many more that I have yet to discover and engage.

If you have suggestions of people and groups that should be involved in the conversation, please pass it on! Another initiative we are working on is to map out an infographic that lists as many of the stakeholders associated with a distributed internet, as well as the many projects that are currently underway, in order to make sense of it as a larger ecosystem. Also, if you know of places where these conversations are already happening, please give us a heads up so we can direct people to those places as well.

As a start, we’ve posted the first question on Quora –

What are the fundamental requirements and building blocks of a distributed internet?

A google group was also started:

Building a Distributed Decentralized Internet

We’ll be distilling all the responses and posting results here within the next week or two, and then move through the various questions together.

As always, looking forward to learning with you!

—

This post co-authored by Paul B. Hartzog, Samuel Rose, Richard Adler, and Venessa Miemis

For those interested in alternative internet infrastructures, I’ve been assembling a list of projects and initiatives working to build mesh network solutions, as well as communities and resources around this topic. I’ve also posted this on Quora. Please feel free to add any projects I’ve missed. We’re hoping to understand the landscape of this initiative and how these projects & communities can better coordinate their efforts, in preparation for the Contact Conference in NYC this October 20, 2011.

Projects:

– Open Mesh Project – building a mesh network for Egypt
– Open Source Mesh – group looking at how to build a reliable open source meshing software
– B.A.T.M.A.N. – better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking; routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks
– Roofnet – 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL
– GNUnet – framework for secure p2p networking that doesn not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
– Dot-P2P – a free, decentralized, and open DNS system
– SMesh – seamless wireless mesh network being developed at John Hopkins University
– Coova – open source software access controller for captive portal (UAM) and 802.1X access provisioning
– Babel – a loop-free distance-vector routing protocol for IPv6 & IPv4
– SolarMESH – solar powered IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN mesh network  and relaying infrastructure solution
– WING – wireless mesh network for next-generation internet; partially built on Roofnet
– Daihinia – a tool for WiFi; turns a simple ad-hoc network into a multi-hop ad-hoc network
– P2P DNS – building a distributed p2p DNS system
– Digitata.org – develop an inexpensive infrastructure (low bandwidth internet terminals) for basic internet exposure to children in African countries
– Netsukuku – an ad-hoc netowork that uses only WiFi connectivity and a specifically-built adddress system that allows direct communications between machines without resorting to the HTTP protocol
– Tonika – open source organic network project; administration-free platlform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees

Communities:

– We Rebuild – cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free internet without intrusive surveillance
– Freifunk – non-commercial initiative for free wireless networks, in english here
– Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network – grassroots wireless community in Greece
– Wireless community networks by region – list on wikipedia
– wlan ljubljana (in slovenian) – open wireless network in ljubljana
– The Darknet Plan – reddit thread dedicated to organizing anad creating a decentralized VPN as the first stage of the darknet plan
– the connective – Q&A for a citizen-owned internet

Resources:

– Border Gateway Protocol – free and open source implementations of BGP
– XO laptop by OLPC – resource for mesh networking details
– Ad hoc network routing protocols – list on wikipedia
– list of ad-hoc mesh network routing protocols that can be used during an ‘internet kill switch’ – reddit thread

Commercial:

– Meraki – cloud-hosted networking systems bringing enterprise-class networking to organizations
– Open Mesh – creates ultra low-cost zero-config, plug & play wireless mesh network solutions
– firetide – manufacturer of wireless networking equipment & provider of wireless infrastructure mesh for video surveillance

—–

related:

– How to Remain Connected if your Internet Gets Shut Off

– How to Communicate if the US Government Shuts down the Internet

– How To Set Up An Open Mesh Network in Your Neighborhood

– How Do We Communicate if the Internet Goes Down? (Quora)

– Diaspora-dev on google groups

– What true P2P networking projects exist or are in development, which may spring into action if the Internet is ever unacceptably co-opted or controlled? (Quora)

Hi Tim,

I wanted to let you know about a platform/infrastructure I am trying to inspire. This idea has been buzzing for months, but it finally came together in my head. Here’s a quick post about it:

Junto is Born!

The Junto is just the conversation platform, but everything is built upon it. We launched the alpha prototype on Friday night, and without “advertising it”, we had nine of us in there live on video, and about 500 people in the backchannel watching.

People are already writing blog post reviews of it:

Me, We, and Junto

Playing with Junto

I think this could be huge, but there needs to be a way to be certain it remains open source and free and distributed. There needs to be a new infrastructure built to distribute the bandwidth of the video streaming. I don’t really understand the technical aspects of this, but there needs to be some kind of alternative internet structure to run this, but I see it. It starts with a 3D conversation interface, where we interact in a floating space similar to the look of the Virtual Choir, and the only components it needs is a live video stream of the people, data visualization (a la Pivot), a way to record the conversations, and an AI to parse and summarize the conversations so they’re searchable.

All the components already exist, we just have to put them together, and it needs to be a global cooperative effort.

The interface is like a 3D landscape of conversations, with 2 people engaged in dialogue, and an “audience” (backchannel) of people around them listening in or taking turns to speak. The individual in the conversation has a view something like shown below. When the conversation itself is the focus, the 2 video boxes are center stage on screen. When a document or shared whiteboard or concept is the focus, the video boxes shift to the side, and the item of discussion becomes center stage. The entire platform is a concept/idea generation engine.

Personal profiles are generated by the contents of your conversations and the people you’re talking to. There is no ability or need for assertion – you are what you talk about and what you do and who you talk to. Profiles are data visualizations generated by your actions.

There’s more, but we’re talking about a microfinance platform on top and a virtual currency system. This is disruptive.

If you can help me, please contact me.

Thanks,

Venessa Miemis

I’ve quietly been watching all the opinions about the potential impact of the iPad over the past few days, and want to provide a roundup of perspectives. Though my initial reaction was lukewarm, (I believe my tweet was “iWasExpectingToBeMoreImpressed”), I decided that that reaction was completely ignorant. So, after spending some time *thinking* instead of just reacting, an interesting picture is beginning to form. Let’s take a look. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the keynote address or the video released by Apple, you can watch it here.

Naysayers

Many of the thoughts about the iPad are focused around what it’s missing, namely Flash, USB, camera, and multitasking. There are also heated arguments about it being a closed system that will kill creativity. I want to share some views around the web addressing these points:

I checked out a post over on Scoble’s blog, “Can Flash Be Saved?“, to get a sense of the conversation around this one. I found this in the comments section:

Steve Jobs is a genius in deciding which technologies are obsolete and thus should be discarded. He did this first with Floppies (and now the world has no floppies). He did this with serial ports and SCSI ports (and how we have USB). He is now doing the same with Flash. Thus, I predict Flash will be dead to the rest of the world soon. When Google has its HTML-5 YouTube up and running, then there will be no reason for using Flash on YouTube. Continue reading →