Nithin Coca: The Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium (PCJ) is the first organization in Asia focused on promoting the idea of platform cooperatives — businesses that bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance — to the digital world. PCJ was founded by Mathias Sager and is directly connected to the New York City-based Platform Cooperativism network (Shareable is a member of this cohort). Originally from Switzerland, Sager has spent several years living in Japan. Besides his work with PCJ, he is an independent researcher, social entrepreneur, and leadership and strategy adviser for Japanese and global organizations. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Liverpool in the U.K.

The consortium has members from Japanese academia, the country’s existing cooperative sector and civil society. In a short period, they have already organized several events with the goal of introducing the platform cooperative idea to Japan, and localizing it as a solution for the country’s economic and social challenges. We spoke with Sager to learn more about PCJ and the potential for platform cooperatives in Japan.

Mathias Sager (fourth from left) at Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium event. Photo courtesy of PCJ.

Nithin Coca, Shareable: What is Platform Cooperative Consortium doing to spread the platform co-op idea in Japan?

Mathias Sager, Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium: Our mission is to support the cooperative digital economy through research, experimentation, education, advocacy, documentation of best practices, technical assistance, the coordination of funding, and events.

Our web presence is helping us to reach potential PCJ stakeholders. Currently, we want to extend our online visibility in the social co-op Fediverse and on Mastodon in particular as a Twitter alternative, where there is already a lively user base in Japan as well. Part of our work is to actively contact organizations and individuals who could potentially be interested in the Platform Cooperativism concept and in becoming a member of the PCJ Consortium. As we did in the past regularly, we continue to organize PCJ public events at which we present the concept and discuss with the audience. Besides own events, we welcome guest speaking opportunities as, for example, at the J-Global Institute of Collaboration or at Nerd Nite. Also, other events such as Social Innovation Japan provide a good possibility to spread the word further.

Can you explain more about the challenges facing Japan that platform co-ops could address?

Japan’s economic growth rate in the past 10 years has been averaging in between 0-2 percent range, with negative 4 percent being the lowest in 2009, after the Lehman shock. Japan is hyper-aging and its population is declining due to low fertility. With this aging population and declining working-age population, economic researchers estimate Japan’s potential growth rate no more than 1 percent.

It is deeply worrying today that youth in Japan are often unable to find regular jobs after graduation. Platform co-ops should be able to help this lost generation and provide the many free part-timers fairer job opportunities. It is not the younger talents who are in decision power — due to seniority-based promotion systems, only 9 percent of Japanese managers are below the age of 40, compared to 62 percent in India and 76 percent in China. Hidden under the low unemployment rates are often precarious labor conditions. Working poor comprise an increasingly larger segment of the working population. For example, it could be a promising way to form freelancer-cooperatives who create or work for platform co-ops. Platform co-ops could also emerge from rural revitalization initiatives.

The private and public sector are struggling to address the challenges in personal care, especially for the increasing number of elderly. In Japanese culture, women are still widely encouraged to stay at home. Although women are also used to drive corporate profits, they are not sufficiently supported in their burden of child-rearing mothers at the same time though. Japan’s corporations, long heralded for their lifetime employment strategy, demand long office hours, which keeps fathers away from their families. However, Platform Cooperativism can be an answer to these issues by responding to the desire for more work-life harmony for all. … Cooperatives, and platform cooperatives, can help revitalize the Japanese economy.

Doesn’t Japan already have a large cooperative sector? Can platform co-ops build on that?

Japan is known for its mostly consumer cooperative tradition. Indeed, roughly one-third of Japanese households belong to co-ops. Cooperatives have long been an organizational solution to labor exploitation. Platform cooperatives strive to bring the concept of ownership to the digital economy, exploring not just employee ownership but also user data ownership. We can revitalize cooperative idea with platform cooperatives that will speak to a younger generation because they understand that something is wrong. … Millennials, in particular, may appreciate the opportunities for a better work-life balance. Cooperatives might be able to provide such a balance in addition to purpose and identification. Furthermore, cooperative governance can be designed to reward performance, therefore supporting personal growth in many ways.

What are your future plans and how do you hope to engage your target audiences?

When presenting Platform Cooperativism as a fairer user-worker-owned model of running online platforms, I often hear answers like “that’s a great idea, but it’s too difficult to realize.”

While grassroots efforts are essential, the cooperative way should also be supported top-down as a political priority. A cooperative economy can not only be profitable but by not passing excess profits to just a few it is also able to provide for welfare benefits and community development where often tax paid government efforts failed in demonstrating sufficiently sustainable effects.

The movement is relevant for any individual and organization that is valuing sustainable online platform solutions. Cooperative values ensure that the prosperity and decision-making can be shared between value creators working together for mutual benefit and the transition to a more equitable platform economy.

Platform co-ops could be of local scope but are inherently able to function cross-border in the world wide web to build global membership bases. A parallel development and step-by-step convergence of national and international segments may provide a Japan specific avenue to keep the politics local and open up to international users for global cooperation at the same time. I had the idea to coin the term of “sato-digital” as derived from satoyama or satoumi. Sato (里) means village and yama (山) means mountain. One definition is “the management of forests through local agricultural communities.” More recently, satoyama has been defined not only as mixed community forests, but also as entire landscapes that are used for agriculture. In that sense, Sato-digital could be translated into, suitable to the platform co-op concept — the management of a digital business through (respectively “by, of, and for”) the local digital community and the broader platform co-op ecosystem in Japan.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image by Pawel Janiak via Unsplash

The post Bringing platform cooperatives to Japan: Q&A with Mathias Sager appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from The Guardian

The office planner on the wall features two reminders: “Technosocialism” and “Indienet institute”. A huge husky named Oskar lies near the door, while the two people who live and work here – a plain apartment block on the west side of Malmö, Sweden – go about their daily business.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag moved here from Brighton in 2015. Balkan has Turkish and French citizenship, and says their decision was sparked by two things: increasing concerns about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU, and the Conservative government’s Investigatory Powers Act, otherwise known as the snoopers’ charter, some of which was declared unlawful this week by the court of appeal. The legislation cut straight to the heart of what now defines the couple’s public lives: the mesh of corporate and government surveillance surrounding the internet, and how to do something about it.

Kalbag, 31, is from Surrey, has a web design background and says she’s “always been a very socially minded, troublemaking kind of person”. Balkan, 41, traces what he does now to his experiences as a small child, designing his own games for a personal computer. It was “the last time when we actually owned and controlled our computers – there wasn’t some corporation somewhere watching everything we were doing, storing it and monetising it.”

Now, they style themselves as “a two-person-and-one-husky social enterprise striving for social justice in the digital age”.

Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag with their husky, Oskar. Photograph: Lars Dareberg/Getty for the Guardian

Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied.

What they are doing could be seen as the online world’s equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant – as well as governments whose surveillance programmes have fuelled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralised internet.

Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as “Free is a Lie” and “Avoiding Digital Feudalism”. His appearances have proliferated on YouTube, although he himself uses an online video player that doesn’t harvest personal data. (“If there’s a free and open, decentralised and usable alternative, we try to use it,” he says – he favours, for example, the privacy-respecting search engine DuckDuckGo over Google.) At the same time, he and Kalbag are on a painstaking journey that involves ideas and prototypes aimed at creating a new kind of digital life.

Back in 2014, they came up with a plan for the Indiephone, “a beautiful new mobile platform and a phone that empowers regular people to own their own data”. “One of my mistakes was, I told people about it,” says Balkan. “And then we realised there was no way we could finance it.” Assisted by around £100,000 in crowdfunding, they started work on a new kind of social network, called Heartbeat, whose users would hold on to their data, and communicate privately. Since then, they have launched an app for iPhone and Macs called Better Blocker, purchased by about 14,000 people, and with a simple function: in a much more thorough way than most adblocking software, it disables the endless tracking devices that now follow people as they move around the web.

In the last few months, they have started working with people in the Belgian city of Ghent – or, in Flemish, Gent – where the authorities own their own internet domain, complete with .gent web addresses. Using the blueprint of Heartbeat, they want to create a new kind of internet they call the indienet – in which people control their data, are not tracked and each own an equal space online. This would be a radical alternative to what we have now: giant “supernodes” that have made a few men in northern California unimaginable amounts of money thanks to the ocean of lucrative personal information billions of people hand over in exchange for their services.

“I got into the web because I liked the democracy of it,” says Kalbag, who has just published a book titled Accessibility for Everyone, about innovating in a way that includes those who technology too often ignores – not least people with disabilities. “I want to be able to be in a society where I have control over my information, and other people do as well. Being a woman in technology, you can see how hideously unequal things are and how people building these systems don’t care about anyone other than themselves. I think we have to have technology that serves everybody – not just rich, straight, white guys.”

In the Scottish coastal town of Ayr, where a company called MaidSafe works out of a silver-grey office on an industrial estate tucked behind a branch of Topps Tiles, another version of this dream seems more advanced. MaidSafe’s first HQ, in nearby Troon, was an ocean-going boat. The company moved to an office above a bridal shop, and then to an unheated boatshed, where the staff sometimes spent the working day wearing woolly hats. It has been in its new home for three months: 10 people work here, with three in a newly opened office in Chennai, India, and others working remotely in Australia, Slovakia, Spain and China.

Muneeb Ali (left) and Ryan Shea of Blockstack. Photograph: David Chuchuca

MaidSafe was founded 12 years ago by the 52-year-old computing engineer and former lifeboat captain David Irvine. He has the air of someone with so many ideas he can barely get them all out. Despite spurning money from venture capitalists, his company has come from humble beginnings to the verge of its proper launch.

In a pristine meeting room, Irvine explains a mistake carried over from old-fashioned corporate computer networks to the modern internet. “There’s a big server, and people connect to it. That used to be the way companies work; now, they’ve done the same thing to the internet. Which is remarkably stupid, because they are central points of failure. They’re points of attack. There are passwords on them: stuff gets stolen.” He goes on: “And as the internet was starting, it was clear to me straight away that it would centralise around several large companies and they would basically control the world.”

His alternative is what he calls the Safe network: the acronym stands for “Safe Access for Everyone”. In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people’s data – files, documents, social-media interactions – will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people’s computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user’s encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords.

No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people’s (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

One big question hangs over Irvine’s concept of a decentralised internet: given what we know about what some people use technology for, the encrypted information stored on people’s devices will include fragments of nasty, illegal stuff, won’t it?

“It will. It will. It definitely will. It’s all society’s data. All information,” says Irvine

I read him a quote from the company’s blog: “Even MaidSafe staff don’t know who is on the network, where they are based, what has been stored and where the data is located.”

“No. We don’t know. That’s fine, though.”

Is it? Even if it includes child abuse images, or so-called revenge porn or beheading videos?

“Yeah. I think it’s fine. Because to me, the whole thing here is like … You’re building a road, and you think: ‘How can I be absolutely certain that a paedophile doesn’t drive on that bit of tarmac?’ You can’t. That’s the thing with the internet. When you’ve got these controlled things like Facebook, of course they could clamp down on some of that stuff. But also, it means they can manipulate the whole of society. And we can’t be in that position.”

Irvine adds that MaidSafe’s encryption is no more developed than the kind already used by the net’s criminal elements. “We’re not enabling them. We’re enabling everybody else,” he says. He says he would encourage the police to go on to the network and use the same detection and entrapment methods they already use on the so-called dark web, where users can stay anonymous.

Once MaidSafe is up and running, there will be very little any government or authority can do about it: “We can’t stop the network if we start it. If anyone turned round and said: ‘You need to stop that,’ we couldn’t. We’d have to go round to people’s houses and switch off their computers. That’s part of the whole thing. The network is like a cyber-brain; almost a lifeform in itself. And once you start it, that’s it.”

Before my trip to Scotland, I tell him, I spent whole futile days signing up to some of the decentralised social networks that already exist – Steemit, Diaspora, Mastadon – and trying to approximate the kind of experience I can easily get on, say, Twitter or Facebook. They were largely so underpopulated that there’s been no incentive to go back. Won’t the same thing happen to MaidSafe?

“It might,” he says.

But is he optimistic or pessimistic? “Oh, this won’t fail. It won’t. If you ask me: ‘Will this be the future?’ … absolutely. Not necessarily my version, but a version of a completely decentralised network based on privacy, security, freedom – that will exist.”

One big focus of the conversation about a different internet are cryptocurrencies and so-called blockchain technology, whose most spectacular story so far has been the rise of Bitcoin. All users of a cryptocurrency have their own “private key”, which unlocks the opportunity to buy and sell it. Instead of financial transactions having to be hosted by a bank – or, for that matter, an online service such as PayPal – a payment in a cryptocurrency is validated by a network of computers using a shared algorithim. A record of the transaction is added to an online ledger – the blockchain – in a way that is unalterable. And herein lie two potential breakthroughs.

One, according to some cryptocurrency enthusiasts, is a means of securing and protecting people’s identities that doesn’t rely on remotely stored passwords. The other is a hope that we can leave behind intermediaries such as Uber and eBay, and allow buyers and sellers to deal directly with each other.

Blockstack, a startup based in New York, aims to bring blockchain technology to the masses. Like MaidSafe, its creators aim to build a new internet, and a 13,000-strong crowd of developers are already working on apps that either run on the platform Blockstack has created, or use its features. OpenBazaar is an eBay-esque service, up and running since November last year, which promises “the world’s most private, secure, and liberating online marketplace”. Casa aims to be an decentralised alternative to Airbnb; Guild is a would-be blogging service that bigs up its libertarian ethos and boasts that its founders will have “no power to remove blogs they don’t approve of or agree with”.

Muneeb Ali, 36, is originally from Islamabad in Pakistan and is one of Blockstack’s two founders. He is an admirer of Snowden, who, in March, will be the star attraction at a Blockstack event in Berlin.

An initial version of Blockstack is already up and running. Even if data is stored on conventional drives, servers and clouds, thanks to its blockchain-based “private key” system each Blockstack user controls the kind of personal information we currently blithely hand over to Big Tech, and has the unique power to unlock it. “That’s something that’s extremely powerful – and not just because you know your data is more secure because you’re not giving it to a company,” he says. “A hacker would have to hack a million people if they wanted access to their data.”

David Irvine of Maidsafe. Photograph: Maidsafe

It’s significant that Blockstack isn’t based in northern California: Ali says: “The culture in Silicon Valley isn’t the right fit for us.” Even though the startup has attracted millions of dollars from its backers – who include venture capitalists – Ali insists they are in for the long haul.

Back in Malmö, Balkan recalls that Zuckerberg put out a new year statement in which he tried to sound a note of sympathy with people who have grown sick of an online world controlled by a few big players. “In the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralising force,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies – and governments using technology to watch their citizens – many people now believe technology only centralises power rather than decentralises it.” He mentioned encryption and cryptocurrencies, and said he was “interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies and how best to use them in our services”.

Balkan marvels. “How does that work with a huge entity like Facebook, that just sucks power up?” he asks. “It’s absolute spin.”

He and Kalbag have much more modest ambitions, and that, he says, is the whole point: if we want a more diverse, open, decentralised internet, developers are going to have to wave goodbye to the idea of huge platforms that will supposedly make them rich.

“We’ve kind of been brainwashed into this Silicon Valley idea of success,” he says. “You know: ‘Unless you’ve made a billion dollars and you’re on the cover of Forbes magazine as the next king, you’re not successful.’ With our projects, no one’s going to make a billion dollars if we’re successful – not me, not Laura, not anyone.”

He drains the last of his coffee and checks his phone. “And if we do, you’ll know something’s gone wrong. We’ll have screwed up.”

Lead image: Punk rock internet illustration. Illustration: Andy Martin/Heart

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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.

Towards a more democratic Web

In the aftermath of the recent Harvey Weinstein revelations, Rose McGowan was suspended from Twitter for breaching its Terms of Service. Twitter made an unusual move by commenting on the status of a specific user’s account, which it normally publicly declares it does not do.

Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.

Twitter: a neutral platform or a curated community?

No matter if you’re a conservative, liberal, a woman, an apologist for a serial rapist (fuck you), or a Nazi (fuck you too), chances are good that at some point you’ll:

1. Say something on Twitter that leads to your account being suspended, and/or
2. Be frustrated by Twitter’s actions (or inaction) surrounding moderation

Twitter is a public space for conversation and community for millions of people, so for Twitter to suspend an account is akin to banning someone from the public center. That should not be taken lightly.

But we should also not take it lightly when when someone is harassed into silence by speech that threatens violence. Threatening speech is no longer just speech – we must consider how that speech impacts other peoples’ voices.

And here lies the problem. Twitter cannot be both neutral platform and arbiter of good and bad speech. Nor do I want Twitter to be either of those things!

• If Twitter acts as a neutral platform, then unless Twitter can provide very powerful tools to help users manage their feed and who they engage with, then the platform will be flooded with bots, harassment, racism, libel, and all flavors of filth. A purely neutral platform leads to a terrible experience for users.
• If Twitter acts as the decider of good/bad content, then we all have to worry about whether or not our opinions align with what Twitter has deemed “appropriate”. Maybe they align right now, but what happens if Twitter gets new executives, or if someday Twitter’s leadership is pressured by powerful forces to silence people with beliefs like mine?

Neither of those situations are ideal, and currently Twitter is dancing somewhere between these two worlds, trying to be a neutral platform while selectively enforcing bans and suspensions.

Twitter’s stalemate

You may not agree with Twitter’s policies, but you can likely observe the forces at play here, and understand why Twitter’s moderation policies have appeared inconsistent, unfair, and sometimes downright wrong.

It’s because Twitter is not driven by doing the right thing. Twitter is motivated to avoid upsetting users to the point that they leave Twitter. Users leaving Twitter is bad for business.

For example, If Twitter suspends alt-right accounts that intentionally toe the line between American pride and white supremacy, then they lose a not-insignificant number of users who’ll cry “free speech haters”. If they don’t suspend those users, they risk losing the users who won’t stand for Twitter being used as a platform for harassment and racism.

It’s not going to get better.

Don’t hold your breath

Twitter’s executives likely think their moderation policies are driven by being fair and judicious, but those policies can’t escape the fact that Twitter’s bottom line depends almost entirely on engagement and ad revenue.

Unless we expect Twitter’s business model to change, then we shouldn’t expect their moderation policies to change. No matter what decisions Twitter makes regarding moderation, some large group of users will feel targeted, and will swiftly exit the platform.

Moreover, what could Twitter do that would be a reasonable solution? I don’t see any way out of this.

So what should we do?

Decentralize. Twitter is responsible for moderating who and what shows up in your feed because Twitter’s servers house the content that composes your feed. A centralized service like Twitter or Facebook has the choice to act as a neutral platform for speech, or set strict content guidelines and then work to uphold those policies. I don’t believe either option is a good choice.

The dream of a decentralized Web

I want to decide what is good content for me. I want help making that decision based on how people I trust have responded to that piece of content. I want to be able to mark another user as a porn bot or a Nazi, and I want people who follow me to be able to see that information, and to decide how to act on it.

And most importantly, I don’t want any single person deciding if another person has the right to speak. The fragility of expecting a “media monarch” like Twitter to make good decisions is too risky. I want online media to work much more like a democracy, where users are empowered to decide what their experience is like.

Moving forward

A lot of people feel the same way, and several decentralized social media apps have bubbled up out of this mess.

You have many options if you’re ready to give up on Twitter.

MASTODON

Mastodon has been around for a while, but since it operates on a federated network, it’s not quite the flavor of decentralized I think we deserve.

In order to participate, you have to sign up to an instance, whose servers are run by somebody else. If you pick a good instance with a good administrator, you shouldn’t have any trouble, but you still have to depend on a single person to decide what you should or should not be allowed on your feed.

Running an instance is also hard and expensive work. It would be great if we could find a way to make social media apps both free and easy to use.

PATCHWORK

Patchwork is a peer-to-peer social media application with a rich community. It’s built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt, and acts as a standalone desktop application. It’s a little rough around the edges in terms of UI and performance, but the community is really great.

BUILD A PEER-TO-PEER SOCIAL MEDIA APP ON BEAKER

I work on Beaker, a peer-to-peer browser, and we’ve built APIs that give developers the ability to publish on the user’s “profile” and “timeline”.

Profiles in Beaker are just datasets that live on the user’s computer, and are transported over a peer-to-peer network. With Beaker’s APIs, applications can ask the user for permission to read/write to a user’s profile.

The best part is that because user data is separate from application code, there’s no one social media app we all have to agree upon. As long as we all structure our data in the same format, we’re each free to use any compatible application.

I work on Beaker because I think it’s the kind of Web we deserve. Keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming 0.8 release, where we’ll be releasing the Web APIs I mentioned above. Or if you live on the bleeding edge, you can try building the development branch. If you do, be sure to check out beaker://timeline :).

Photo by Donna McNiel

The post Moving forward from Netarchical platforms in the post-Weinstein era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is part of a series exploring the sociological and technological ramifications.

I call it “The Medium is the Message: Cypherspace Edition”.

Speaking at a recent re:publica conference, my friend Rich Bartlett voiced his lack of faith in blockchain as a solution for all that ails us. Specifically, he threw this challenge:

“If you’re going to claim that your project is decentralising power, please explain it in terms of justice, rather than just efficiency and disintermediation.”

This got me wondering how our project Scuttlebutt, a decentralised social network, is any different from other hype. Most pressing was the question, “Can we guarantee that people will be safe from bullying and abuse?”. If we can’t build a community which is free and open for everyone to participate in — if it’s a space where some people are sexually harassed, or receive threats of violence — then we’re wasting our time.

Our decentralised architecture certainly makes global spamming attacks hard, and data only flows along lines of trust. But it’s still technically possible for people to abuse others within our community, particularly if they have a lot of friends in common. In our history to date, we’ve only had a few incidents of behaviour and communication that run strongly against the community culture I want to support.

So how have we dealt with abuse?

Just kick them out

On corporate platforms like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, there’s a single central organisation with (essentially) a single data storage system. In that context, it’s easy for the owners of the system to delete content or users — in fact it’s their prerogative and, some would say, responsibility to do so. Most platforms have a “report” or “flag” feature which marks content or users for review/exclusion. This can be good, but also results in endless arguments about these rulings, since policing and judging fairly is expensive and difficult.

Companies like Reddit get around some of this overhead by being a platform for community-moderated ‘subreddits’ (channels for specific topics). Sometimes Reddit admins will still step in and ‘moderate’ user content, like when their CEO messed with Trump posts , which was simultaneously funny and pretty troubling.

As a federated network, Mastodon takes this a step further — communities self-host their own ‘instances’ of the platform, meaning there are many self-governing fiefdoms. Each sets their own rules and can kick content and people off their instance. It’s great because there’s no corporation shaping your experience, and you don’t need one policy to cover all the people in the world. The challenge is you have to be fairly organised as a group to set up and pay for the infrastructure, and to actively govern your space.

Scuttlebutt goes even further: it’s fully decentralised, with no single central organisation or federation of fiefs. There are only fully autonomous peers, each running the software on their local computer and making their own choices about how they want to interact.

There is no owner of any shared physical space or hardware from which you can kick a person.

This is the double edged sword of p2p social networks — it’s a space safe from authoritarian interference and it’s harder to assert boundaries.

Have a strong culture

As described above, this decentralisation might sound like total anarchy.

It is, but maybe preconceptions have coloured your expectation of how this might pan out. In practice, what emerges is not that different to other networks — people migrate toward and away from conversations and people they want to interact with. We see ‘islands’ or ‘domains’ of community, which might be distinct, overlapping, or totally disconnected. It’s similar to the dynamics of Twitter, but while Twitter’s global space leaves it open for witch hunts and hashtag storms, Scuttlebutt is more localised and stable.

What is culture in such a fragmented space?

I can only talk about the parts of the Scuttleverse I interact with. It’s filled with open-source programmers, communists, vegans, feminists, sailors, and mycologists — and not capitalism or trolls.

The community space around me has something like emergent governance. When someone presents rough behaviour, it’s common for one or more people to intercede and apply some combination of:

– polite inquiry and clarifying questions

– assertion of what sort of interaction they’d prefer

This costs time and energy, and it’s totally worth it.

As individuals and as a group, we get the opportunity to:

– check our assumptions, and (maybe) build connections with new cultures

– clarify our beliefs and who we are

– role model what respectful conversation and good boundary setting looks like

Our conflicts have advanced us individually, and as group we have built stronger relationships and are more skilled and articulate. I absolutely believe this is the fundamental and unavoidable work of community, and that community is integral to any human ecosystem.

This is all really cool and cerebral, but does this stop rape threats?

(Hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but it’s a decent question.)

Information flows in a peer network

Block them

This is the feature I’ve just finished building. Applying culture only gets you so far — it can’t necessarily protect you from a malicious actor.

In an extreme situation, the things I want you to be able to avoid are:

1. being contacted by someone
2. being stalked by someone

The first one is easy to implement — you can just tell the interface to not show anything new from that person. What I’ve built actually goes further, by ceasing propagation of that person’s data to friends of yours not already connected with this person.

The second part is harder. We’re a p2p network, where messages are gossiped — how do you say things publicly and have them not get to that person?

You tell your friends that’s what you want, and they respect your decision!

In programmatic terms, a ‘block’ is just another type of message which is gossiped. As soon as a peer receives it, their local setup effects the change and stops passing information about you to the person you’re blocking.

In a p2p context, being blocked means you have fewer connected peers, because the number of people gossiping your messages is reduced. Highly abusive characters might find themselves enjoying just the freedom of their own speech, alone.

The Medium is the Message

Marshal McLuhan coined this iconic phrase, and I’d summarise it roughly as, “The physics of your medium determine what is possible in that medium, and so ultimately the message.”

Given Scuttlebutt is a cypherspace (a space whose foundational physics is cryptography), what is the nature of the medium that is different here, and what is that message?

The underlying cryptography is what makes it possible for people to be totally autonomous agents in this social network. It affords a level of freedom from coercion that is probably unprecedented in a digital space. It also removes all responsibility for governance or custodianship of a space from any particular entity and devolves it to the level of individuals making choices. So far in the Scuttleverse, I’ve seen this lead to a lot of personal responsibility and growth.

It’s also fascinating to watch how the lack of dependence on shared hosting infrastructure means that we can have a multiplicity of overlapping communities. A recent example was when I found a user, who calls themselves Johnny Null, in the #dads channel (which I started because I’m going to be a dad soon, and wanted to talk about that with other crypto-dads). I was surprised, because I had experienced a lot of antagonistic threads with this person, leading to some of my friends blocking him, but I hadn’t yet.

In this new context, I wasn’t seeing unproductive abuse from him. We found another way to connect on a really human topic. I was surprised to learn he was a dad, and to receive encouragement and offers of support from him. It was such a sharp contrast from previous interactions. The diversity of approaches available made it possible for some people to block him, but he wasn’t banned from the network, leaving open new possibilities. I don’t know where that will go … but perhaps we could still have a chance at understanding each other.

I see alignment of the physics of p2p space and the physics of everyday in-person space. It feels poetic that the way we’ve implemented a block in Scuttlebutt is through communicating boundaries and asking our peers to respect them. That’s how it works in offline spaces, too. I see this pattern a lot in what we’re building — p2p interactions mirroring human interaction — and it’s the heart of what I want to communicate by invoking The Medium is the Message.

Building systems with peers means the tools we build might be just a little more human, and make space for adaptive communities. My hope is that this space will help us re-learn some of what we’ve forgotten in society, and that maybe this will make a difference in the rising challenges we have to face.

If you’re an excellent human with a rad project you’d like to collaborate on, our little tech coop would love to hear from you. I’m at [email protected], or you can join the Scuttleverse from scuttlebutt.nz

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