Giving both P2P and other visions their due space

You can support this “cultural provocation” in several ways, explained in the FAQ, but my main reason to present it here is another. As you can see yourself, the current list of suggestions, contains both too few, and at the same time too many P2P-related concepts.

The list contains too few P2P-related suggestions, because “P2P alternatives” is a really, really wide field. The concepts that the first participants have suggested so far only give a very partial idea of it. P2P advocates worldwide, but especially from Europe, please add your own suggestions!

When I say that the P2P-related suggestions are “too many”, instead, I simply mean that (SO FAR!)  they are too big a percentage of the total to make the whole list as comprehensive as it should be, to be of any help at all. This is just an obvious consequence of the fact that the first contributors mostly come from my own social circle,which likely contains much more P2P advocates than the average.

But no “foundation for a common cultural literacy” can be such, especially when assembled in a p2p-like way, if it is does not mentions concepts of as many different “categories”, human activities and points of view as possible. Even if the whole proposal is a provocation, with NO ambition to be THE best possible book of that kind… the more diverse its content is, the more  meaningful it becomes. But no single person, not even a new Leonardo da Vinci, which obviously I am not, could do a decent job alone. So I am here to ask everybody reading this post to please:

• just go and add your own suggestions (that is the only way to collect suggestions!!!). The bottom of this posts suggests one possible way to do it quickly.
• (above all) invite as many contacts as yours to add theirs, and spread the invitation

For any question, just email me. Last but not least, there is also a proposal for a “for-Italy-only” version of the same book, if you want to share that too!

THANKS!

Photo by angelaathomas

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important update, 2018/02/06: a new version of the proposal, completely rewritten to take into accounts recent developments and feedback, is HERE.

Preface

A percloud (permanent/personal cloud) is my own vision of a “REALLY usable, all-in-one alternative to Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox…”.

I made the first percloud proposal in 2013. Very soon, however, I “froze it”, for lack of time and resources, and did not do any real work about it, for reasons I have explained in detail elsewhere. Then, at the beginning of 2017, several things happened, including but not limited to:

• The percloud proposal was mentioned here, causing several people to contact me to discuss the idea in detail, showing to me that it may still have some value
• In parallel, the Free Knowledge Institute, of which I am a Board Member, had started some work in Barcelona on a collaborative/community cloud platform
• Other groups have started to work on similar platforms on their own, and invited me to participate
• I did some homework to catch up with the “latest” developments in this space, and discovered that things look much better than they did in 2013

What I mean with the last bullet is that, thanks to projects like Sandstorm, Cloudron and several others, building what I call a “percloud” should, indeed, be easier than in 2013. “Easier” does not mean “easy” though, and I have realized several things.

First, integrating and polishing the several software components, until they are actually usable by non-geeks is still nothing one could do on his spare time (not me for sure, anyway). Second, personal clouds will be easily adopted by non-geeks ONLY if they are offered as a managed service: this means there must be web hosting providers that offer really turn-key perclouds.

Third, a real pilot/field trial of the percloud is needed. Because on one hand, we need many, ordinary Internet users to use the package, and tell us geeks if it works for them or not. On the other, we need to give wen hosting providers some real world usage data of these personal clouds, so they can figure out how much it would cost to offer them as a service.

Taken together, all these things have lead me to put together the proposal below.

Important: as I said, I’m already discussing similar cloud platforms with several groups. But I do not see this proposal in competition with the others. This is all Free as in Freedom software, and the more is shared and reused, the better! Much of what is proposed below may be directly reused in those projects, or similar ones, if not co-developed together.

Now, please look at the proposal, share it as much as you can, give feedback and, since this page may be updated often in the next weeks, follow me on Twitter to know when that happens. THANKS!

Percloud proposal, 2017 edition

Percloud definition and features

Purpose: personal, permanent, basic, online web presence and communication, that does replace {facebook+gmail+dropbox} today. Very little or nothing more. The target user is the average user of facebook, gmail, instagram, dropbox, google drive and similar services, who seldom, if ever, visits the rest of the Web. The goal is to make it possible to these people to get outside today’s walled gardens, as soon as possible. Once that happens, it will be much easier to move the same people to more advanced platforms. Advanced users for which this service is too little/too limited still need something like this for all their own non-geek contacts, if they want their communications to stay private.

Services offered

(regardless of which software implements them…)

ONLY the very basic ones, that everybody would surely need, e.g.:

email, blogging, calendar and address book, basic social networking, online bookmarks, save web pages to read them later, online file storage (personal files, pictures galleries).

common essential features of all services

• Inclusiveness (“equal opportunities cloud”?): the percloud must be an accessible service even for the many people who, these days, have a smartphone, but NOT broadband, fixed/safe residence, reliable electricity… (think students, but also refugees, migrants, homeless…)
• Available as a service (PEAAS, Percloud As A Service): even many target users who could run their own hardware server at home will prefer the convenience of not having to worry about any additional device
• Federation (where applicable): that is automatic notification of relevant events among different perclouds (e.g.: user A uploads a public picture or status update, her contacts see a notification about it in THEIR clouds, and can comment it, and be notified of each other comments…
• Social Connectivity with Facebook, Twitter, Gplus… and interface to online storage services like e.g. Dropbox… Google Drive
  • here “social connectivity” means a) possibility to automatically publish a status update also to Facebook, Twitter etc… and b) fetching Twitter timelines or Facebook notifications with systems like these http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/how-to-access-facebook-from-the-command-line/ and showing them INSIDE the percloud interface. Interface to storage like Dropbox is the same as in owncloud/nextcloud
  • PURPOSE: the target users will NOT move to this if it means burning bridges with their friends already on Facebook, etc.. No way.
• As little choices and configuration options as possible: “You can have any color as long as it’s black.” For the target users, this is a feature, not a limitation
• ARCHITECTURE:
  • 100% server-based. A permanent online home, and important data, cannot live on a smartphone or laptop, which may be stolen, or run out of charge every moment.
  • in practice: micro-vps: bare-bone Linux with all and only the services listed above, that can run on raspberry pi, normal PC, virtual hosting in a data center… also because of…
  • HIGH performance, i.e. RAM and CPU requirements as low as possible. Reasons: a) a really personal cloud of this type has very low needs anyway; b) only if it is possible to host MANY of these VPSes on one physical server it is viable to offer this as a managed service. Ideally hosting one percloud in a data center should not cost more than a few USD/month
  • REAL, almost turn-key portability from server to server. This includes automatic set up, at creation time, of own domain name, e.g. “marco-percloud.com”, so that even when changing server all connections with the rest of the world stay the same. There is no real freedom or data ownership if one cannot move her own data from one physical place to another without losses or disruptions of communications.
• MANAGEMENT:
  • complete separation of user interface and admin interface
  • remote administration also possible via command line
  • reason of 2 previous requirements:
  • PAAS providers can only afford to offer the service if administration (creation, software updates etc…) of many perclouds can be fully automatized *if admin is a separate account, it is possible to manage or give perclouds as “gifts” to minors, senior citizens, or everybody else who would like to use a percloud, but cannot or does not want to manage it themselves
  • automatic daily backup to other server
• USER INTERFACE:
  • Accessible from any modern Web browser, from any device (i.e. NOT locked to phone numbers or anything like that)
  • But REALLY usable on smartphones! Many target users only use their smartphone for any digital service, and will not accept something that THEY find hard to use on their preferred device

Possible base software platform:

• barebone GNU/Linux distribution (debian? TBD) +
• SUBSET of the cloudron.io environment with ONLY these applications and 3rd party additions
  • owncloud or nextcloud (online file storage, picture galleries, office suite too?)
  • Lychee (photo management)
  • SoGo or Radicale? calendar and contacts
  • Wallabag (“Read later”/personal web archive service
  • RocketChat
  • Rainloop for webmail (but see “3d party SW” too, below)
  • Ghost for blogging (static blogging with markdown editor is simpler and safer than wordpress, and should require less RAM. See performance above)
  • Wekan or Kanboard?
  • Piwik
  • 3rd party software, i.e. packages not in cloudron today, but that would be nice to have IMO:
  • movim.eu (social networking like that is crucial, IMO)
  • mailpile for webmail?
  • shaarli (nice online bookmark application)
  • SSL key management for web and email servers
  • GPG signatures management

Note on interface integration and “real time interactivity”

The several components of a personal cloud as proposed here would share user authentication, and communicate with each other, as smoothly as possible. However, they cannot have a completely homogeneous look and feel as, say, the several features of a Facebook account. Such an integration is simply outside the scope of this proposal, because the only (but crucial) purpose of the percloud is to test and offer something actually usable, as soon as possible: see the “we need it SOON” part of this post, which is even valid now than it was in 2014, to know why.

As far as “real time interactivity” goes, the percloud must offer federation, that is let “friends” who own different perclouds see what each other has published, comment it, get notification, chat, and so on. However, percloud-based social networking does not even try to achieve the same numbers and levels of interactions and notifications of Facebook or similar platforms. This is a feature, not a bug. Facebook bombards people with real time notifications (“Jim tagged you”, 3 years ago you posted this”…) because it exists to… make people stay as much as possible inside Facebook. A percloud, instead, exists to let you interact with your contacts when you need or feel like it. It does not need to be so invasive and stressful.

Looking for sponsors

The contacts and discussions I had at the beginning of 2017 convinced me that a percloud available as soon as possible may still have a lot of value. The same activities also showed me that it should be done quite differently than what I imagined 4 years ago.

In order to build a percloud and test it “in the field”, together with the cloudron developers, it is necessary to have sponsors for: * adding the missing parts * integrating and documenting everything * CRUCIAL: deploy and manage a “large” scale field test/pilot in which e.g. 1000 people are given one percloud for free, for 12 months, in exchange of giving feedback on usability, etc… and allowing basic monitoring of percloud usage (e.g. number of posts and visitors per month, etc). Without this, i.e. without knowing for sure how the actual target users react to the percloud, we cannot make it succeed

As far as hosting goes, the test perclouds may be hosted on lightsail or similar platforms. But it would be great if community-oriented hosting or connectivity providers like guifi.net or mayfirst.org wanted to participate. If you know of any organization or group of organizations who may be interested in sponsoring such an activity, please let me know.

Further suggested reading, added on January 30th, 2018

• The fix for Facebook is NOT a different PLATFORM

• The percloud is still only a proposal. For everybody

• My proposal to integrate the percloud with the Eelo operating system for smartphones

• My posts on Mastodon, online identity and the need to put INDIVIDUALS before “platforms“

Photo by kndynt2099

The post Proposal: the Percloud, a permanent/personal cloud that is a REALLY usable, all-in-one alternative to Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox… appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I have a strong feeling that certain headlines and assertions about the Brexit result are  if not factually wrong, at least very misleading. I refer to statements that summarize charts and tables like the ones above in this way:

• “The U.K.’s Old Decided for the Young in the Brexit Vote”
• “Brexit is a middle finger from the baby boomers to young people like me”
• “Young screwed by older generations”
• “Young voters wanted Brexit the least – and will have to live with it the longest”

Fact is, it was very clear, well before the vote, that opinions varied greatly across age ranges and that

•  “Britain’s young people will suffer most from an EU divorce”
• “Voter turnout would be crucial“
• “Young voters might hold key to Brexit vote“

I suggest that a crucial, and still largely overlooked issue here is in the complete title of the last link I gave, which is “Young voters might hold key to Brexit vote—but will they use it?“. Quoting from there, in late May Ed Miliband:

• “alarmingly [noted that] 1.5 million young people aged 18 to 24 who are entitled to vote are not on the electoral register with a further 2 million people aged between 25 and 35 not registered either”
• declared that “Today is a call to arms to all young people to register to vote… Be in no doubt: if young people don’t exercise their vote, this referendum will be lost and so will many of their futures”

Now, let’s assume that the numbers in the screenshot above also represent  the opinion of those 3.5 millions of young people who did not register to vote (because, a) why not, if it’s above all a generational issue, and b) if not, the whole “young betrayed by elders” argument loses sense).

If this is the case, it means that  today there are in UK about 1,800,000 people (1.5M*0.6 + 2M*0.49) who want (or should want, in their own interest) to “Remain”, but did not register to vote accordingly. But three days ago, Brexit won because  “Remain” got 1,269,501 votes LESS than “Leave” (16,141,241 vs 17,410,742).

I DO hope I am wrong. Because if  I am right, it means that:

• certain headlines are false, and young UK voters were “betrayed” from their own non-voting peers as much as from their elders. No, more, actually: because the elders did perform their duty, that is show up to vote according to their opinions, their interests and those of their generation
• whatever bad things will come from Brexit, both in the UK and everywhere else, is “the fault” of those young non-voters, at least as much as of the myopic, egoist, etc.. older voters
• the sooner we put to rest this whole “old Britons betrayed young ones” storyline, the better for everybody

In general, this whole story also shows, or confirms, that:

• Just in case you still believed it: the whole concept that “Digital native” means “someone who is surely able to use the Internet for her own good” is pure and total crap. Too many UK “digital natives” were far from being “digital savy” (as their peers in any other country, of course!). Whoever lived in UK and had any kind of Internet access in the last six months also had easy access to understanding how incertain the referendum outcome was, and how different the two choices
• Too many people who are “more digital” also are, all too often, too disengaged. From Brexit to Climate change, everywhere:
  1. “[in the Brexit vote] it’s pretty clear that young people played to type” (i.e, they went to vote in smaller percentages)
  2. “With issues like climate change, the same tendency seems to hold… [T]he conventional wisdom holds that young Americans… should be more engaged with and concerned about the issue of climate change than older Americans.[New data, however] reveal that Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations.”

People can grow up disengaged for a LOT of external reasons outside their control. In many countries, however, young adults who (pun intended) remain disengaged only have themselves to blame for that. Because, if my calculations above are right,  the most important lessons here, for young people in UK and everywhere else, are:

• stay informed, and above all:
• EVERY VOTE COUNTS. EVERY TIME. Even if the effect is not visible for years. Brexit happened last Thursday also because, for years, too many young people in UK did not vote for more pro-EU representatives. Limiting one’s civil and political action to voting would be idiotic, but everything but voting, on principle, is much more idiotic. There always is a lesser evil: if not for tomorrow, in the medium/long term. Think ahead. Voting is not Candy Crush. It is a powerful weapon, that can detonate years after you (do not) caste it

Now do yourself and everybody else a favour, because the whole world has to live with the results of certain choices, not just those who (refuse to) make them: please make sure that this post is read by everybody who, next November, will be called to elect the next president of the United States.

Photo by Carlos ZGZ

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The findings of the preliminary report, which all require further research to be validated, include the facts that Digital DIY, as defined and studied by the project:

1. has much more to do with social innovation than with technology (cfr also point 4 below)
2. in general impacts and nature of Digital DIY (again: as defined by the project) are much less acknowledged than expected, even among its own practitioners and stakeholders
3. together with language barriers, which prevent direct discovery from us of many relevant, local initiatives across Europe with normal online searches, the fact above makes collecting information about Digital DIY much harder than it is for related but “single focus” topics like, e.g., Open Hardware, makers or Open Data
4. the same relative lack of awareness seems, so far, also present in EU-level “digital programs”

Here are some edited excerpts of the conclusions of the report:

I hope that these excerpts, and point 3 of the list above, are sufficient to explain and motivate this request for help:

do you know of any project, public administrators, activists, professionals, consumer associations, NGOs… anywhere in Europe, that are already doing, or studying, Digital DIY? ESPECIALLY non-geeks, i.e. not makers, fablabs and similar? Do you know of any (again: “non-geek”) conference or other event to which we may contribute, or participate, to present, or study, Digital DIY? If so, please tell us or, even better: help us to contact them directly (our email is [email protected]). Thank you in advance!

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Almost ten years ago, I wrote about Free Software’s surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine, noting that, albeit certain statements sound “as if they could have been written by Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in fact, they come from the Vatican Report “Ethics in Internet” (EiI)”.

In 2013, I greatly expanded that same thesis in “Catholic Social Doctrine And the Openness Revolution: Natural Travel Companions?”. Today, I’ve just discovered that the June 2015 newsletter on Faith, Economy and Ecology of the Maryknoll Office for global concerns:

• points out that “the free transfer and use of knowledge and technology is becoming increasingly important for human development”
• quotes just that second paper of mine as showing that “though Catholic social doctrine has not referred to intellectual property specifically until very recently, it has favored the ideals behind open source technology.

Just for your information, they got bot my name and gender wrong. However, it doesn’t matter. I’m happy to finally see more interest, discussion and activities around those theses. The more, the better (*). Even more so in this moment, that is just days before a new Encyclical on ecology, that is, in my humble opinion, a closely related theme.

I’ve seen people wondering if that letter will explicitly talk about the Commons.  At the moment, I have no idea. However, my own personal, that is absolutely humble, unofficial, unqualified answer to such questions is: even if there are no such explicit mentions, I believe that the “most Catholic” practical answers to any concern and call the Encyclical may contain about ecology would be those centered around commons/p2p/openness as described in my paper and in that newsletter. We’ll see.

(*) if I can help with that, just contact me!

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The official definition of Biourbanism starts with the focus on “the urban organism, considering it as a hypercomplex system, according to its internal and external dynamics and their mutual interactions.”

In practice, as an almost total ignorant when it comes to architecture, urbanism, psychology and the like, I understand this to mean that Biourbanism proposes to make the places we inhabit decent places, that is places worth living in because they are:

• (self) organized, bottom-up
• taking their history and unique characteristics into account
• designed with a process which is biophilic, that is friendly to all the levels and sides of human life (family, personal relationship, emotion, work…)
• managed with little interventions, cheap and not invasive (biourban acupunture), that match the real needs and features of each place

The International Society of Biourbanism (ISB) has led, and continues to organize and propose with this spirit, several initiatives for the renaissance of italian villages and small towns, in the mountains and elsewhere, starting with Progetto Artena.

I discovered ISB by chance in the summer of 2013. Since then, we have done several things together, including the parts on education on digital matters and open technology of Progetto Leo. This cooperation has also led, among other things, to the reorganization of several courses, which I and others were already proposing, in a new package called Minimi Comuni Digitali, which is both autonomous but perfectly compatible with Biourbanism activities and educational programs. The package name, roughly translatable with “Minimal Digital Commons/Cities” hints to the possibilities, also for small towns, to benefit from knowledge and usage of appropriate, open digital technologies and communities.

Why talk of architecture, psychology and so on, on a website like Pionero (where the original article appeared), whose slogan is “Digital Innovation”? Easy: to suggesto a generic model just for digital innovation.

Italy (and many other countries, if you ask me) needs to be rebuilt from the foundations. ISB, if I got it right, proposes and practice a way to rebuild it based on the principle that, if you want a decent life, you should rebuild common spaces and services from the bottom, putting people in the first place, in the most efficient and sustainable way. They aren’t the only ones to say this, of course, but I like their approach and general vision.

Above all, since we should be talking about Digital Innovation, I like Biourbanism for a very specific reason I believe that, if you start to reboot a city the way Biourbanism does, things like Free Software, Open Data, Open Government, Fablabs, Maker Faires and so on surely enter the picture, eventually. You couldn’t avoid them even if you wanted. BUT, the point is, starting from Biourbanism those things would enter the picture in a way that is much more productive, sustainable and long lasting than all the other ways tried so far by us “digital maniacs”: only, that is, as the last thing, stealthily, in the smallest possible amounts, as an unavoidable consequences of the starting ideas, and actual needs, of local non-geeks. Stay tuned for more, but in the meantime do let me know your thoughts!

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First, a couple of definitions

Catholic Social Doctrine (“CSD”): offers guidelines for the develop- ment and management of society inspired by the Gospel.

Openness: here I give this name to the set of attitudes, technologies, concrete practices, and legal infrastructures, all driven by principles that include a “share-and-share alike” approach to ownnership and reuse of goods, and massive usage of the Internet for affordable, large-scale collaborative design and mutual support. Such characteristics make Openness particularly well suited to address (among other things) the “real needs” of many people, as defined in the paper.

Thanks to software and the Internet, many spontaneous communities worldwide, whose common characteristic is Openness, have already developed collaborative goods, services, and ways of working. Collectively, they constitute what in the paper I call “Openness Revolution” and present as relevant in CSD.

Natural travel companions?

In the paper I describe and explain in detail two things. First, that CSD, starting straight from the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, has always strongly proposed a society built on solidarity, subsidiarity, and common good. A society that should help the poor by empowering them through government that is small in assistentialism but “big” in fair rules. Through active participation (at all levels, from family to State) and distributed ownership of means of production, that society should serve the real needs of all its members, both at the spiritual and at the practical level.

Next, I describe how concrete implementations of Openness like Free Software, Open Access, Open Data, Open Hardware, ICT for Development and so on are all, by their own nature:

1. legally and deeply adaptable to very diverse, local, real needs and the common good of all their users without special permissions, at the smallest possible cost;
2. perfect for decentralization at the lowest possible levels;
3. driven by, and supportive of, free and spontaneous initiatives, by individuals and communities, and voluntary, participated work, instead of assistentialism from above;
4. not driven by profit, even if they do not exclude it;
5. based on means of production that (at least in the immaterial parts) really belong to all their users, thus distributing ownership at a much bigger and more resilient scale, than wouldhave been possible even a few years ago;
6. usable, and already used, to build tools of peace of all sorts, from tractors to textbooks; and
7. beneficial even for people without (broadband) Internet access.

Openness in CSD

“If development were concerned with merely technical aspects of human life… then the Church would not be entitled to speak on it”, said Pope Benedict XVI. But the leading concepts behind the technologies, community and practices of Openness are not technical.

For example, development in CSD implies active participation of peoples, “on equal terms, in the international economic process.” Openness makes this easier, turning globalization, that is borderless access to appropriate knowledge and to the most efficient means of production, to the poor’s advantage. In this sense, it seems to me a bit like globalization done right.

Even Subsidiarity, another pillar of CSD which I may summarize as “whenever people can do something by themselves, the State should help them to do so!”, requires and contains Openness. No State may delegate powers and tasks that it completely or partially lost due to globalization, international trade treaties and intellectual property abuses. By encouraging Openness, States can get back some of their power to offer subsidiarity.

In other words, Openness already exists and does not require any “extension” or changes to CSD. It may be used to implement with Information and Communication Technology the orthodox CSD that already exists.

Another way to express the same concept is that, if we had to build from scratch technologies and ways to use them that match CSD point-by-point, the result would be unavoidably very, very similar to what is de- scribed as Openness in the paper. So, why do it from scratch?

As far as I am concerned, the Openness Revolution also proves the timelessness and modernity of CSD and, in general, of the message of the Church: it is a bit like CSD had already conceived, decades or centuries ago, solutions so advanced that technology has been able to build the necessary tools only in recent years.

That is why, in my opinion, while Openness is good in and by itself, Catholics have even more reasons than others to promote, teach, and use it. Incidentally, this assertion may be extendable to every religion, belief system, or NGO that proposes subsidiarity, care for the poor, and similar goals (of course, this does not mean the opposite, that is, that one should be Catholic or, for that matter, “support” any established religion, in order to appreciate and practice Openness). For more details and examples, please read the full paper.

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Following the links from Slashdot I discovered this interview to the arkOS developer and even more projects in the same space that I didn’t know: buddycloud, Personal Clouds and unhosted.

After a look at those projects and a few email and tweets exchanges, including the explicit question “why not just help the FreedomBox Foundation, instead”, I came to two conclusions.

First, I’m happy that all these projects exist. On one hand, they prove very well my point that now is THE moment for personal clouds. On the other hand, they make my own work much easier and more likely to succeed (if it does start, see below) because they are already doing parts of it.

In the second place, just because of what I read about those projects, I still believe that there is space and need for the percloud as a separate effort. Before explaining why, let’s deal with the FreedomBox question (which was already a FAQ anyway…):

Q: why not just help the FreedomBox Foundation, instead?

• because @FreedomBoxFndn itself seems uninterested, and that’s PERFECTLY fine, of course!!
• because it’s a bit like asking “why don’t help Debian to become Ubuntu, instead of forking it?”
• I have no problem to help whoever is working towards certain goals. That’s why I explicitly said since the beginning that all my work would be “Free as in Freedom” code and documentation. However, at this point my only feasible way to help is to get paid to do the percloud “phase 1” myself

What about those other projects?

arkOS is “a Linux-based operating system… designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services”. It also seems a very flexible, general purpose environment, not a locked-down (=much simpler to use) one. Buddycloud is (emphasis mine) “a set of tools, open source software and protocols to help you build a completely new kind of social network.” Unhosted is about “serverless”, “client-side”, or “static” web apps. “Personal Clouds” is, if I understand correctly, a great, complete ecosystem of web apps, (tools to enforce) user-controlled Terms of Service agreements, network services etc…

The percloud, instead…

The percloud is just another GNU/Linux distribution, and this is a good thing. It will certainly be possible to run it also on a Raspberry Pi, or any other computer hosted at home, but I do not want to tie it to any specific hardware device. I want to build one single blob of software that can run on everything from data centers to home computers, with the smallest possible set of external constraints or dependences.

ICT experts will tell you that only a cloud running on computers you physically control can provide the greatest possible privacy, or that stuff like buddycloud or “Personal Clouds” could become much more complete and scalable than the percloud. Let me say one thing: they would all be right!

In my opinion, however, a really portable, software-only, relatively “quick and dirty” percloud as I am proposing shoud still be done and widely adopted for (at least) these reasons:

1. If somebody is sleeping in a burning house, you don’t wait until another house, at least as good as that one, is ready: you wake them up and tell them to get out NOW, to take shelter in whatever refuge you can set up in a hurry. PRISM and friends prove that we should really start to deploy realistic countermeasure soon. We can’t wait until greater but complex platforms or, even worse, actual alternative Internets like this are ready.

2: It is certainly not done on purpose, but ANY version of “running your cloud on some hardware you own and keep at home” is limited to minorities. We can celebrate Raspberry Pi for being “so cheap” (terribly relative term, don’t you think?) all day, but the reality is that only people with affordable and reliable electricity and flat rate broadband and reasonably high confidence that their home hardware wouldn’t be stolen or sequestrated could use arkOs as proposed. And that’s not even the biggest issue, because…

3: in my opinion the real, or at least the most urgent problem, is social and psychological, not technical. While the real solutions to PRISM-like issues are not technical, we can’t get there unless a lot of average Internet users are willing/prepared/able to get there. We need awareness and confidence much more than “platforms”.

Today, most average Internet users can’t see at all how replacing with something open the corporate walled gardens in which they currently live could ever be within their reach. Or why they should want it in the first place. I want to prove to how many of those users as possible, as soon as possible, that they can live online outside those walls. Why should they care if their first “refuge” may not be everybody’s ultimate, perfect digital home, since they could leave it whenever they wish for something better, without losing their data?

Let average Internet users get something that is really easy to use and, in many cases, perfectly adequate as-is for all their needs and skills. Do that, and they will all become both able and, often, willing to move to other, more complete solutions when they (both the solutions and the users…) are ready. But tell the same people that they have to either buy/configure/use extra hardware, or that they have to enter more than a handful of configuration parameters and they’ll NEVER get started.

This is why the percloud, by design, won’t be some ultra-flexible environment able to do whatever cloud computing you may want. It will, instead, be the simplest possible replacement for the main cloud activities that the majority of cloud users needs, with as little as possible initial configuration.

Final note for software hackers:

Software hackers who already run their own servers won’t need a percloud, but they should still recommend it to all their non-hackers friends. It would be the most realistic way to make sure that all email and other content they exchange with those friends does not end up on some centralized server that makes centralized, large scale surveillance much easier.

Of course, nothing of this will happen…

(not from me, at least) if you don’t whatever you can to fund phase 1 of the percloud. Thanks for your support!

The post The real problem that my p2p/personal cloud wants to solve, and why it’s still necessary appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(important: I originally posted this call here. Please also check that page to know what the status is, as I can’t guarantee that this copy will be regularly updated!)

I have been using my own email service and self-hosted blogs since 2006/2007. I started explaining why everybody should do the same three years ago, when I proposed Virtual Personal Email Servers to overcome the big limits of today’s email. In 2011 I repeated why it is important to find alternatives to Gmail.

Since real support for privacy, control and data ownership should be present in everything we do online, last January I also pointed out that alternatives to corporate social networks already exist and only need proper packaging.

Now the Snowden/NSA/PRISM affair has finally made evident, to an audience immensely larger than geek circles, that I (with many others of course) was right. Everybody, including non-geeks (no: starting from them) should have, as soon as possible, at least the possibility to:

• store personal data and files a personal online space
• own and use email addresses
• run a personal blog with social networking capabilities (“find friends”, see as one page what all your friends are doing on their websites etc…)
• share calendars online
• do collaborative work (e.g. co-writing text through the Internet)
• use strong cryptography for all communications, in the most transparent way that is possible
• do all the above from any device

in a way that:

• requires the least possible amount of software CONFIGURATION skills
• is not tied to any single, non-replaceable organization, be it a software multinational or a Public Administration, or computer platform
• if not gratis, is as cheap as possible, i.e. a few USD/Euros per year, possibly because it…
• may be (temporarily) outsourced to many trusted third parties (e.g. community-owned data centers, relatives with a permanent Internet connection…). Please note that this would also be a new, huge business opportunity, for all the small ISPs and consultants that may host, manage or customize the software
• could be also freely moved in any moment to other personal or third party computers without losing data or disrupting services (meaning that one’s email address, domain name, links to blog posts etc… would not change because of that migration)

and my proposal is…

I do know that things like Mailpile, FreedomBox and Diaspora have been already proposed to solve the same problems. While they are all great, in my opinion they also have a few serious limits that I have explained in another post. My proposal, which I first made here, remains instead:

1. study which already existing Free Software applications may best replace each component of the proprietary, centralized services, and are most compatible with point 2
2. study and specify how a single, graphical control panel for all those applications should work (*)
3. build and maintain that control panel
4. define the procedures to integrate and keep integrated with the smallest possible effort all these applications, that is to build and maintain ONE software bundle that contains all of them and can be installed with one procedure on any server
5. do the actual maintenance/integration/quality testing as time goes by
6. develop iOS/Android app versions of the control panel

Point 3, 5 and 6 are work for (teams of) real programmers, possibly coordinated by some Foundation. I could be part of it, but never do it myself.

I am, however, qualified to do the other points, or at least a good initial part of them. Having such documents would prove that there is wide interest for this kind of solution and describe how to make it happen. The only reason I’m not doing this yet is that I can’t do it for free, as even this initial part should be almost full time work for a few months.

Therefore, and following several private requests I got recently, I officially announce that:

1. in the next few days I will set up an Indiegogo page to raise the money to crow-fund me to write those specs and publish them online with a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license. In this way all the work will remain available for reuse. I’ll publish the details of this commitment, that is what exactly I’ll study and write down if I get funding, in a separate post
2. regardless of point 1, this winter I’ll start an online course at the Free Technology Academy on how to build your own cloud from scratch by yourself (that is how to assemble and configure these applications by yourself, without a central control panel)

Follow me via RSS or Twitter to be informed of any further development. In the meantime, please do spread the word as much as you see fit AND provide any feedback you may have as comments to this post. Thanks!

(*) here’s a 4-line definition of “single graphical control panel” (writing the real one would be part of the job…): ONE window with links to the existing dashboards of each single package, or to new ones developed from scratch, that would open as sub-windows of the main one, all pre-configured to have the same theme/colors/etc…

The post Call to fund research on an easy and COMPLETE alternative to Gmail, Facebook etc… appeared first on P2P Foundation.