Collaborative consumption allows everything from car-sharing to go to work to exchanging hours of language practice, from offering babysitting services to offering hospitality to people who speak other languages or are part of our network of hobbies. It’s all set of demands whose satisfaction is key to weaving social cohesion.

Dozens of centralized platforms have tried to turn these demands into a source of business. The main business model and way of monetizing was the monopolization of the tools to incentivize and facilitate these kind of collaboration and exchange practices and relationships.

If a group of friends or neighbors was looking for a platform to begin to share objects or services, they couldn’t install their own platform, personalize it, and start to respond to demand for exchange. They’d have that resort to one of the centralized services, which means losing their autonomy and control over their relationships. As we know well, centralization always betrays.

A free and distributed standard for the Sharing Economy

One of the main challenges for the first GNU social Camp was to develop an alternative to the centralization of the collaborative economy using GNU social, a free standard for the development of distributed web applications.

Over the days of the event, we developed the first prototypes, but above all we overcame the limitation of seeing GNU social as a mere alternative for microblogging. Starting there, we’ve been releasing pieces for an “operating system” for the collaborative city.

First was WP-GNU social, and then SocialCapital. Today, with the release of Sharings—a plugin for GNU social—we’ve taken the first big step towards promoting a distributed alternative to the centralization of the collaborative economy.

Sharings: a plugin to share objects and services on distributed networks

This new plugin creates the possibility of adding objects and services to GNU social to share them with the users on your node or, if they’re on other nodes, connected to you through federation.

The result is a catalog of objects that the members of the node offer to share, which may vary from node to node, depending on their users’ connections. Sharings is still in alpha, but it already allows you to share objects, and other users can show interest in the object that you’ve shared and get in contact with you to agree on the details of the exchange.

In this version, the modeling of the objects and services is very simple. Every object or service is identified by a name and detail space where you can explain everything about the object or service you’re sharing and give details on exchanging. Communication between the one who’s sharing and the interested party, for the moment, is public.

Open questions

To continue development, we need to make progress on integration with Qvitter, create tools to edit the shared objects that include the ability to upload images and a more advanced search function, to be able explore the catalog comfortably.

But we also need to decide some even more basic things, like if we should do a more complete modeling of objects and services, and if communication between the one who’s sharing and the interested party should be private, at least after a certain point.

But the important thing is that the platform can already be used to share all manner of things. The alpha version already works without a problem in laMatriz.org and will federate with no trouble when other nodes include the plugin. Feel like creating your own catalog of things to share?

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original.

Photo by colink.

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The SocialCapital plugin is a key piece for the promotion of GNU social as an operating system for cities.

Overcoming the limitation of seeing GNU social as a mere alternative to centralized services like Facebook or Twitter was the most important contribution of the first GNU social camp. With this limitation overcome, GNU social becomes a platform on which we can build a thousand social and distributed applications.

The first set of applications designed with this thinking aim to offer a new operating system for cities. This is a new operating system meant to facilitate and drive participation and interaction between the people in a neighborhood, and, through federation, in the city. In the end, it’s about promoting social cohesion.

Let’s imagine for a second that we will create a system of rules to measure those interactions and estimate their impact on the community. Let’s imagine that a good part of that virtual skin of sharing is blended with neighborhoods, with neighborhood spaces that have their own nodes. We could at least have a index and a series of indicators of social capital in each neighborhood. Additionally, we could measure how the actions of an NGO influence social capital in its surroundings, or how incentivizing exchanges between two cities has an influence on the wealth of your neighbors. Let’s add to all this Juan’s latest reflections, returning to the relationship between common knowledge and social change. Far beyond “karma” or “popularity,” having a measure of what freely is shared would allow any city agent to have a much more effective plan of social action.

The development and specifications of this index us brings us to the first component in this set of applications: SocialCapital.

In a first development effort, we have created the basic structure of this plug-in and some early functionality. The core of this plug-in is the class SocialCapitalIndex where queries on users’ interaction are encapsulated and each one of them is assigned an index of social capital provided to the network. The early functionality of the plugin adds the index created by the class SocialCapitalIndex to the profile of each user.

In parallel to this early development effort, we’ve also written a first specifications document for the development of SocialCapital.

Starting from this first version of SocialCapital and its specifications document, our objective is to open up development of this important piece for the promotion of GNU social as an operating system for cities.

Among the next steps to continuing development are the improvement of current database queries, interaction, and visualization in Qvitter. But, the most important point is designing and improving the algorithm that creates the user index, or, as Andrés commented on GNU social, we want to have a number or set of labels associated with each user. Also, we would have to consult and evaluate other similar algorithms that can serve as a guide–for example, the reputation system at Stack Overflow.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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What we take away from Somero 2015 is a model and a map of social, economic, and technological change that forces us to rethink and refine the framework of work. And internally, for the Indianos, it is the beginning of a new time with a new way of understanding what las Indias is.

Last night we said goodbye to the last participants from Somero 2015. Somero is meant to be our end-of-summer party and beginning of a new year, but also a succinct “Somero” catalog of the socio-economic change created by technological development. In both categories, it was a great success: we learned so many things and we met many new friends that it has forced us to stop and re-order the main reference points from which we understand reality.

The pattern of the emerging change

Throughout the presentations, interviews, and talks, we gradually discovered a common pattern in the changes in the production of software, objects and appliances, in energy, and in the coming finance system, but also, to the surprise of more than one person, in areas as apparently distant from each other as local development and the new missions and operational capacities of the FFAA. This is a radical change that also became transparent in the global view of the economy and geo-strategy.

It’s a relatively invisible but unstoppable change that uses the keys of what we have called the Direct Economy.

The heart of the change: less scale, more scope, lower cost

This common pattern is an across-the-board reduction in the scale of productive units and the growing centrality of economies of scope. What are economies of scope? The disproportionate improvement of productivity obtained from two things:

• The capacity obtained through the intensive use of multi-purpose machines and systems–3D printers in prototyping, “recyclable” production chains in manufacturing, systems integrated into logistics–of multiplying the diversity of low-cost supply, marking a tendency towards low-cost customization.
• The capacity for reaching, at a low cost, across greater distances by using networks and identifying concrete identarian networks, to make them customized offers.

The result of the balance between large scales that are suffering more and more inefficiencies and a new productive “SME” community that is producing a greater diversity of things, in smaller runs, and selling them globally by differentiating more kinds of customers, is clear: the whole sector of the new “small and global” produces at a lower cost and is simply more efficient.

So the slogan of the change, in any setting, could well be less scale, more scope.

Distributed isn’t decentralized

The main contradiction of this world that we started to map out in Somero 2015 is the tension between the decentralized and the distributed.

The Internet of the giants of scale, the world of finance, and the industrial sector that is still dominant today, are the results of the connection of a series of centralized and centralizing systems. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are such centralized networks that they show the user a single entry page. Volskwagen, Endesa or any other industrial giant are such centralized transnational systems that they can plan not only their margins but updates to their equipment from their providers with their corresponding financial costs. These providers, who live in a true monopsony (a market with a single buyer) have no margin for any other technological innovation than that dictated and funded by the buyer.

But starting at certain scale, decentralized systems not only accumulate more inefficiencies, but turn them into costs that are higher than those of their distributed alternatives. These alternatives are not just more and more competitive in industry and even in the credit market. They are, by definition, more robust and resilient, and with a minimal regulation, as we saw in finance, they have systemic effects that underpin the main path of socio-economic and technological progress in our era: the dissipation of rents.

Additionally, when we joined the logic of distribution to that of free software, the free [of charge] nature of the underlying infrastructure appears easily, and the result is the appearance of resilient and accessible markets, and above all of a social fabric that gives a leading role to the community in the city and in conversation.

The key word is community

And as Juan had already told us on the second day and again remarked in the send-off, the new world doesn’t relate in impersonal ways, talking about “here’s what you should do,” but about many different versions of “here’s what we’re doing,” from many real communities, each one with their own values and ways of being themselves.

Somero 2015 was, above all, a community event. From the first days, we saw the birth of a powerful, imaginative and cohesive development community: that of GNU social. Working in parallel with the seminar of the “Sharing Cities Network,” in less than three days, it made a true show of force by developing the basics of the free and distributed toolbox of the “sharing city.”

But that wasn’t the only community that took shape in those days. The participation of many of our friends of la Matriz, who had jointly rented and organized accommodations and transportation to participate, gave shape to turning An?ovoligo into “las Indias Club.” Their participation in conversations and in software development, their contributions to the development of the event, and their interaction with the speakers were fundamental to everything turning out as marvellously as it did. In the end, as we wanted, we are something closer to a country than a landscape. Now the “Indianos” are not just the members of the cooperatives, but the network of friends of las Indias Club, our “happy few,” our “we,” united by values and ideas, but above all by experiences, feelings, and affections.

Towards Somero 2016

This morning, while the apartment rented by la Matriz was emptying out and its Indianos were leaving for train stations and airports, the other one, that of the cooperators, was ringing with accounts, bills, and telephone calls. Among them were the first preparatory calls for Somero 2016.

We feel that we entered, reinforced and excited, into a new year, our fourteenth year, and into a new stage. This is a stage in which las Indias is no longer only a community with cooperatives but also a Club to think and do together. During the upcoming weeks, we will build its new webpage and we will publicize the first contents published and produced in and as a result of Somero 2015.

Somero 2015 was exciting–it gave us all momentum, filled us with ideas, and let us glimpse a powerful general framework from which many valuable things can be made. None of it would have been possible without all those who came and gave the best of themselves. Endless thanks to everyone!

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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1. The leaders of the Sharing Cities Network will share in participatory workshops how citizen change was built in cities like Seoul, Cleveland or Bologna..
2. Experts from the UME will explain what social and physical infrastructure is most helpful for the resilience of cities when disasters occur, and will teach us to design services and infrastructures for resilience in what we do.
3. The developers of GNU social will draw a roadmap of the distributed social web for you: objectives, new apps and plugins to strengthen sharing through collaborative consumption, integration with WordPress…
4. Businesses in the Direct Economy like Chufamix or Kano will teach you how to create a sustainable economic project (and will give us workshops on making horchata or teaching information science and electronics to children).
5. The leaders of the European network of energy cooperatives will tell us how to create community projects based on green energy and save money on your electric bill.
6. The author of “The End of Banking” will design an app to put an end to banks with us.

Interested? We’ll have all this and much more at Somero 2015. Reserve your place now!!

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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The Facebook and Twitter socialization model, the FbT model, is like a large plaza where everyone can shout their slogans, while barely listening to each other and without taking responsibility for looking at context and understanding conversations. The result is like a big chicken coop, a “fray,” where any attempt to maintain a conversation on any topic is immediately cut off by an avalanche of slogans and aggression by users who, quite possibly, haven’t even read the article that led to the conversation.

Why does GNU social create more value in its conversations than Twitter?

It is no coincidence that what users most value is having “fewer links that on Twitter, more characters and more conversation,” “a space without noise for calm conversation,” “speaking calmly and dealing with other topics,” etc. All these messages point to the intimate relationship between the value of a conversation and the trust that has already been established within the nodes. It is a consequence of the distributed structure of GNU social. Thanks to it, GNU social is free of anyrecentralizing tendencies and builds the network based on independent nodes — generally formed by affinity between groups of friends who communicate with each other thanks to the federation of content.

What is “federation?”

The connections between the nodes of GNU social are established by the users who follow each other. Through these “following” relationships, all nodes can communicate and form a network. It’s what’s known as “federation,” and could be understood as a network of agreements.

All it takes is for me to follow a user on another node for everything that that user publishes to be visible to all members of my node. Thanks to this, you can see not only messages from the people that you follow in your inbox or on your personal time line and messages that are published in your node on the public timeline of the node, but also a much broader collection of messages, “the whole known network,” where, in addition to previous messages, you’ll be able to see messages from people in other nodes who at least one user in your node follows.

This creates wonderful things, like “the whole known network” being different in every node, because its composition is based on the people you follow and who follow your nodemates (or “nodies”). This is a very valuable aspect because it means joint exploration of the network. And starting from the existing relationship of trust between the members of a node, each time a member of the node follows — which is to say, establishes an agreement with — a user on an external node, the space of trust is expanded.

The key to creating space and favorable conditions for conversation is that the federation of content is based on what the users of each node follow on others, and not the general aggregation of all content by all nodes. The result is that if a person that neither I nor anyone else on my node follows says something in a conversation, I won’t see their posts. This might seem like a “bug”, but it’s really the result of an agreement, an implicit contract: to be part of a conversation of another node, I first have to have received the trust of someone who is taking part in it.

“Federation issues”

This model of federation is criticized by many new users who land on GNU social having had the experience of socialization of Twitter and Facebook. They label this difference “federation issues” and complain that conversations they participate in only show messages from the person that they themselves follow or other people in their node. The solution is as technically simple to implement as it is dangerous.

What such a request would do, in reality, is break the federation of content based on implicit contracts and open the doors to the aggregation of everything, everywhere, breaking any chain of trust. That is, it would remove the basis for allowing the nodes to create spaces for real conversation. By breaking this model of federating content, we would be importing the social model of the great centralizers, the Facebook-Twitter model, into the spaces and networks that we built on the basis of tools like GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica, etc.

Massive socialization through Facebook and Twitter has impoverished conversations and cut off the birth of new identities. It has done so by imposing a narrative about how the more accessible any conversation is to anyone, the better a network and its interactions are. In other words, when it is not necessary to have a minimum of prior trust to be able participate or interrupt the conversation of others. However, the search for this kind of accessibility obscures the very basis of distributed networks: the fact that a distributed network is made up of nodes, of independent groups that communicate among each other.

Conclusions

The problems or defects of the federation of content are only such if we accept and approve of the FbT socialization model. Really, we should call them “federation advantages,” because if which we’re seeking is to build enriching and conducive spaces for conversation, what we have today in GNU social is the structure that makes it possible.

The federation of content based on following relationships — agreements between people — is the base on which to build enriching and conducive spaces for interaction and for conversation. This is a determining aspect to not give in to centralizing pressure and turn spaces built with GNU social into a new version of the chicken coop that Twitter or Facebook currently offer us. The distributed structure of servers is “invisible,” and if we change the spontaneous logic of federation so that the user sees the network and behaves the same as in a centralized network, we will have changed everything to keep everything the same.

The world of the federation of content is passionate, and will largely determine the future of the web. Speaking concretely of the model of the federation of content, we sincerely believe that the challenges that we have to confront are in developing private communication and enlarging the system of exchanging short messages to a system where we can share everything useful — creating networks of hospitality, supply and demand, music, etc. — for our circle of friends, associations, community and surroundings.

That is, we believe it would be a mistake to replicate the centralized model and its culture. That would serve information without agreements between people, and therefore, approve of irresponsibility and encourage confrontation. For us, GNU social’s priority should be on becoming the “Swiss Army knife” of distributed networks based on sharing, by developing a culture of socialization based on trust within the nodes and the responsibility for understanding what is being talked about when someone joins a conversation. And for that, the key is to connect through federation, as has been done so far, on the basis of the minimum responsibility that comes with the fact that, to be an equal on another node, someone from that node has to considers what I say interesting enough to follow me.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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GNU-Social can become the basis of a whole new free software on distributed architectures, and we want to make our contribution.

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