I rarely found a technical and design outfilt that was so congruent with the values and visions of the P2P Foundation, as witnessed in their Manifesto.

Apart from that, the Organic Design site is mostly technical, concerned with actually building a p2p-oriented toolbox for everyone.

I asked them for more details, so here is the reply, by “Aran”:

“Thanks for getting in touch with us at Organic Design. We have come across your work a lot over the years and appreciate the depth of research you have engaged in. Your project and ours have an almost total crossover of ideas and are in agreement on all of the philosophical issues such as not allowing money to grow without corresponding growth in resource, removing artificial limitations that prevent the propagation of knowledge, and expanding the currency model to cover all dimensions of resource.

We have reached these same conclusions through our research over the years, but our team consists mainly of developers with little writing experience, so although we have made good progress in the area of implementation and conceptual structure, our documentation is not easily readable. In fact, our manifesto which was upgraded recently is the first article we feel is really expressing what we’re trying to work towards, so your positive feedback has been very inspirational for us.

Here’s a brief outline of what we’ve been up to and are in the process of clarifying on the site:

Initially our project was focussed on a “killer app” which was in the form of a new P2P architecture called the Nodal Model which aimed to incorporate the routing of supply to demand into the network protocol itself (all P2P protocols already need do this for bandwidth, routes, processing and storage resource so it’s really a matter of generalising the dimensionality of the load-balancing and resource allocation mechanisms).

Later we realised that we need to start with a system which already has momentum in the community and integrate that more with the web3/p2p ideology, so for the last few years we’ve been implementing our ideas within the MediaWiki framework. Eventually we hope to distribute the Wikipedia content into a p2p environment.

What we currently have in place now is a reproducible wiki-based organisational system which we use to install and manage servers and workstations for ourselves and clients we work with. We’re in the process of making it more p2p in its structure and also bringing it into the “real world” by adding the general roles and procedures required by most organisations and businesses. We call this real-world organisation template a “platform” which runs “out of the box” and can be refined to specific requirements.”

Amongst their innovations is a tool that allows to rapidly produce online pdf books from a wiki:

PdfBook extension a useful addition to your wiki, it allows your in-wiki books to be downloadable as a PDF even though they’re spread throughout many articles.