P2P Foundation

This item can be seen as a continuation of our debate on the ethics of participation of Web 2.0.

My own perspective is that Web 2.0 is a fundamental advance in participation, therefore a reason for rejoicing, but its proprietary structure is a reason for worry. The shark-logic of market scarcity can always turn against the dophin-logic of working in an abundant sea of participation, and the platform owners cleary have dual allegiences, to their shareholders, and to the peer producers creating the value, which they are enabling.

I also stress that Web 2.0 emerges wherever participants have weak links, because the sharing aspect is icing on the cake, and not fundamental. When it is fundamental, we have the community creation of the commons, and commons-dependent companies that creates ecologies of support.

So, it seems clear that if we want to move from stage 2.0 to stage 3.0, the only solution is to create communities that will produce a fully autonomous distributed infrastructure.

This is well expressed in the following reblogged item from Webschuur, here below is just an excerpt:

“What happens, for example when web2.0 goes down? What happens when web2.0 is sold without too much considerations for you? Or when it eats all your hours of data-sifting, all your hard work, just to make some more bucks? In all these cases, you’re basically fsked. If Yahoo! decides they can make more bucks by closing you out from your gigabytes/years of flickr data, bad luck for you. And what about the weeks you spent fiddling with premiere to get that 5 minute video for youtube finshed, only to find out that you are no longer the real owner?

I see a great opportunity for Drupal. Decentralisation. Distribution. P2P communication between webapplications. To Take Back The Web2.0.

Another, more positive reason why that Distributed Web may become the 2007 hit, is the large integration-hype we already see emerging all around. 2007 will be about integration of services, tools and applications. Instead of having your bookmarks only on a single website they can be accessed on many websites, or in your preferred desktop application. Instead of logging in to your Drupal site, to manage hundreds of users on a clumsy HTML interface (even if spiced up with some AJAX), you can use Outlook to manage them. This requires sites to talk to eachother, and to talk to other applications. In order to achieve that integration, we will be building the foundations of that web3.0, the distribution, for free.

Drupal (the community) is relatively small, though I believe large enough to set stuff in motion, to be of substantial influence in the cutting-edge web-folks circles. Combine that, with the cutting edge Ruby on Rails code we see (there is a plugin for about every progressive idea) and the huge, progressive, userbase of wordpress, and we can start that web3.0, the Distributed collaboration web.

Web3.0 the Distributed collaboration web: You run your own bookmarkservice on your own Drupal/wordpress installation (or in your homebrewn RoR app), you run your own image galleries on your server. And you allow openID logins, or even run your own openID server.”