[occupyaustin-it] "The Global Square" - an ambitious vision from abroad

[Nolan Darilek]

Er, design a protocol my ass. Forgot that one already exists:

http://activitystrea.ms/specs/json/1.0/

So basically you have these sites that yours trusts to automatically 
save and republish their activity streams. You extend the existing 
schema with something for proposing policies, votes, etc. if such an 
extension doesn't already exist. Then someone's local occupation site is 
more than just a feed of what their local group is doing. It also 
automatically contains info about neighbors, crucial needs of neighbors' 
neighbors and, on occasion, very important things from around the 
country or world. Add a mechanism for publicly signing updates and 
preventing information from being injected by untrusted nodes and this 
might work.

I'm somewhat more interested in realizing this since there is already 
existing work in this area. But I think I should stop spamming your 
inboxes. :)


On 11/03/2011 02:17 PM, Nolan Darilek wrote:
> The problem I have with this idea is that it seems to be proposing a 
> central server. In addition to the obvious issue of this being a 
> single point of failure of many kinds, it seems to be asking that the 
> global community agree on a number of things--a featureset, acceptable 
> usage agreements/policies, platform/language, etc. That may be 
> reasonable for something like Facebook or Twitter. They own the space, 
> so if you don't like their rules then you don't play in their court 
> (or take your ball elsewhere.) I don't think that would be workable 
> for movements like these.
>
> What might work, though, is some sort of standard protocol for 
> exchanging propositions, offers, etc. Kind of like a market for ideas. 
> It would be a way for each assembly to run an app of some kind into 
> which they add all their proposals, needs, issues, etc. They could 
> then federate with other trusted assemblies and possibly a global feed 
> to aggregate others' ideas and proposals. It'd basically be a way for 
> local groups of assemblies to know about important things, transmit 
> things of a certain importance to their neighbors automatically, and 
> possibly relay messages automatically between neighbors of neighbors 
> (I.e. maybe we're directly connected with Houston and Dallas, maybe 
> Houston is connected with New Orleans, and if some issue becomes 
> important in New Orleans then Houston automatically picks it up and 
> relays it to us and its neighbors.) Similarly, assemblies might opt to 
> connect into a global feed, and if something becomes incredibly 
> important to a local assembly and its neighbors then it propagates 
> outward. So basically, if Oakland had a pressing need today, and if 
> its neighbors also felt that this information was important and needed 
> to spread, then that Oakland needs blankets or something might appear 
> in our instance of this app.
>
> Note that I don't know how this would work, should work or indeed if 
> it would be useful. As proposed, I think they'll be trying to herd 
> cats if they build something centralized. I also think that pushing 
> issues globally has the potential to be very noisy even if it does 
> seem like a great idea. I'm just brainstorming as to new systems that 
> might work better than this one.
>
>
> On 11/03/2011 12:46 PM, James Casey wrote:
>> At first I was thinking this should be directed primarily at people 
>> interested in the "occupy-X" topic we put up on the board last night, 
>> but on reflection decided such ambitions involve nearly every area we 
>> discussed. Throwing it out here to see what people think.
>>
>> http://roarmag.org/2011/11/the-global-square-an-online-platform-for-our-movement/
>>
>> At the bottom of this post there are several links to web sites and 
>> faceborg pages for the groups behind the proposal.  I visit 
>> Reflections On A Revolution periodically (roarmag.org 
>> <http://roarmag.org>).
>>
>> -- Jim C.
>>
>>
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>

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