Let me say that differently. Since past software has been centrally controlled and administered, it was assumed, that the license-holder of a database owns the data in the database, as well as controlling whatever user accounts and permissions exist for accessing it. Even the most open of organizations (like Wikipedia, who lets you download copies of their databases) can still terminate user accounts or purge spammy advertisements from their database, because it runs on their centrally controlled servers.

Think of your corporate email account. The company you work for can change your password, lock you out of your own email, and they own messages sitting on their server. They control both the identity and the data.

However, what happens when software no longer runs on a central server, but each person publishes data to their own local storage first? Then when that data is intended to be shared, gets published to a shared space (DHT) from your local store. Since Holochain is structured this way, by default each user controls their own data, and via our key management app, they control their own identity, even across any and all Holochain applications. So if a corporation wanted to run a Holochain application under centralized control, instead of generating your own app keys and revocation keys, a corporation would do that and maintain control the revocation keys, so that they could kick you off the system at any time.

On Holochain, to accomplish the old pattern of centralized control that is assumed by software licenses of the past, you essentially have to strip away each user’s control of their own cryptography by owning their keys. This seems like a very different category of USAGE of the software, than Holochain’s native design where users control their own data and identity, thus it merits a different class of license. This isn’t about whether you can copy or change the software, but about how you structure the cyrptographic relationship to users and data generated by the software.

Introducing the Human Commons License

If people run your Holochain app as network of autonomous humans, where each one manages the keys that control their data and identity, then you are operating a “human commons” and operate under that classification as Holochain apps are intended to operate.

However, If you structure the management of keys for the people running your hApp such that you can revoke their keys to the hApp or if you have required them to agree to be stripped of their ownership of data they’ve authored, then this is a commercial classification of the software (not autonomous humans, not a shared commons among them).

We’re still sorting out some of the details for each classification. For example, in the Human Commons case, the software license may be fully free and permissive (like MIT license?), where the commercial usage may be more restrictive (like GPL) such that you’re at least contributing new code back into the commons if you’re taking away people’s identity and data.

However, this classification may be more important to the apps running on top of the Holochain software, than the effect it has on your rights to Holochain. Distinguishing these different usage types at the underlying level lets apps more effectively choose how they want to charge customers. Consider an app like P2P Slack where everyone controls their own data and identity, in contrast to one where a corporation owns the data and user accounts. The builder of that hApp may want to give it freely to those operating a commons, and charge for usage in the corporate case.

New Distinctions in Licensing

Whether you agree with our explorations of increasing restriction on commercial use or not, the point of this article is to call out the importance of distinguishing the fundamentally new patterns of data ownership and identity as part of software licensing concerns for truly P2P software.

In addition to the topic of control of your own data and identity, authored by you and stored on your own device, is the matter of data shared to into a shared space (in Holochain this means published to that apps DHT). For this we look to licenses like Open Data Commons for models there.

What else should we be considering to get licensing of P2P apps right?

Thanks to Eric Harris-Braun. Some rights reserved

The post Licensing needs for Truly P2P Software appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This online map quickly became the default basemap for a wide variety of responders – search and rescue teams, the United Nations, the World Bank, and humanitarian mapping organizations such as MapAction. It turned out to be the first step in the formation of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, which has gone on to organize dozens of similar humanitarian mapping projects over the past five years.

The project amounts to a “mapping commons” whose freely available geographic data is invaluable to humanitarian responders to natural disasters and crises. The maps are also widely used by communities to help them formulate and pursue their own development goals.

The heart of the HOT project is a large corps of concerned volunteers who are committed to creating online maps freely available to anyone. The maps – all based on the open source collection of maps hosted by OpenStreetMap, the Web map wiki project – are especially valuable in places where base map data are scarce, out of date, or rapidly changing.

HOT relies on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative global project started by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004 following the success of Wikipedia. Relying on crowdsourced data from more than 1.6 million registered users, OSM maps are compiled entirely by people who survey land with GPS units, digitize aerial imagery, and collect and liberate existing public sources of geographic data. Unlike many other providers whose maps are made by paid professionals and sold as proprietary products, OSM allows anyone to contribute information, correct mistakes and access it anywhere in the world. This allows vast quantities of information to be gathered together on one platform in highly participatory and efficient ways.

The maps themselves are licensed under an Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), which means that the maps are freely available to anyone to “copy, distribute, transmit and adapt” so long as any derivative map information is also available under the same terms.¹ This licensing is very important in disaster situations because it allows responders to have quick, no-cost access to accurate information about a region – something that conventional commercial maps do not ordinarily allow. The freely licensed geographic data also makes it far easier for responders to adapt the raw data to create printed maps and mobile applications.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was incorporated as a nonprofit shortly after the spontaneous collaboration of humanitarian mappers in response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010. While HOT has a board of directors and a voting membership that comprise the legal body of the organization, anyone with an OSM user name can contribute to the HOT mission via its “Tasking Manager,” a tool that divides up a mapping job into smaller tasks that can be completed rapidly.²

HOT is part of a sprawling global commons of geographic mapping volunteers who apply open-source principles and open data sharing to improve the welfare of communities in which they work, especially those at risk of natural disaster or other crises. The project engages participants in two ways: by coordinating volunteers from around the world in using satellite imagery to compile maps, and by providing training and support to OpenStreetMap communities in countries prone to disasters. HOT also globally advocates the importance of free geodata in saving and improving lives in times of political crisis and natural disasters.

In late 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest typhoons on record, hit the Philippines, destroying thousands of homes and displacing thousands of people. The OpenStreetMap Philippines (OSM-ph) community and HOT were not strangers prior to such scenarios; a colleague group of humanitarian mappers, MapAction, had used OpenStreetMap to develop an official response map in 2009 after tropical storm Ondoy.³ In the case of Typhoon Haiyan, both the OSM-ph community and the HOT community began mapping the city of Tacloban together even before the typhoon made landfall. Thirty-three mappers used open satellite imagery to add 10,000 buildings to the map, or about one-quarter of all buildings in Tacloban. This data about the location of health facilities, government buildings, water and electricity sources, and so forth have obvious value to responders who must plan activities in rapid, on-the-fly ways from remote locations. The Red Cross has used the map data, for example, to assist in performing a damage assessment. Over 1,600 volunteers from all over the world contributed some five million map changes in the first month after the typhoon. This data was extremely useful to the Philippines government and international response organizations.

In responding in 2014 to the massive Ebola outbreak, which has infected an estimated 24,000 people and killed 10,000, HOT’s volunteer mapping was quite helpful to Doctors Without Borders (Medicins sans Frontieres, MSF), CartONG and the Red Cross. Detailed, accurate maps were vital in helping emergency field workers to navigate Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and to identify infected people who needed medical care.

Not all of the work of the HOT community is focused on this type of intense disaster response. Often mapping of places that do not have detailed data occurs in preparation for an event. In the case of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo the goal was to create a detailed street map of the city so Doctors Without Borders could better track community health and know when a full-scale response was needed.

This interaction began with a “mapping party” in Berlin at which volunteers got together to extract information from satellite imagery. Once they had mapped much of the city remotely, a member of HOT traveled to Lubumbashi to collaborate with MSF.⁴ There, they worked together with the University of Lubumbashi to collect even more detailed street data using a tool called Field Papers, a tool that lets one print a map from OpenStreetMap and then write on it.⁵ This provides a way for people to write annotations on paper copies of maps, and then to take a picture of the annotations with a mobile phone. The digital image with notes are then loaded into an OSM editor, and volunteers in remote locations can get together at scheduled mapping events to transcribe the notes and add them to the online OSM.⁶

This is a common pattern of HOT engagement with a community – remote volunteers map communities in need whose settlements and landscape are not well mapped. Ideally, the volunteers are also connected to OSM mappers in those communities, though in some places this is not practical. Another common HOT approach is to teach communities how to use OSM tools to map themselves, often through field missions such as the one in Lubumbashi.

Much is learned through these collaborations and trips, and that information in turn is used to improve OSM globally. For example, the learning tool LearnOSM⁷ was first developed in Indonesia during trainings by HOT. LearnOSM offers clear introductions to key elements the OSM technology with step-by-step instructions in nine languages.

Another example is the special Humanitarian map layer of the OSM map, which contains data of great interest to disaster responders – the location of water and sanitation facilities, road quality, fire hydrants, electricity networks, street lights and social facilities.⁸ The map layer can also reveal informal shops clustered together – information that is not usually disclosed by traditional Web cartography that doesn’t update the rapidly changing urban environment nor allow Web users to zoom in closely enough.

The HOT experience illustrates the contagious nature of local acts of commoning. What is initially useful to people in one disaster zone often proves valuable to people in another part of the world, and so a cycle of learning and access to tools expands from one community to another, and around the world.

Kate Chapman (USA), a geographer by training, worked extensively in Indonesia to build an OpenStreetMap community and was Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team from its inception in 2010 until 2015.

Photo by Peter Ito

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commoning in Times of Disaster – The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team appeared first on P2P Foundation.