Revision as of 15:02, 12 December 2011

OMPlanet 12 Dimensions

Open Media Planet

OMPlanet is An Initiative to Co-create a Self-Governing Multidimensional Network Ecosystem of interconnected social, economic and ICT systems owned and governed by its members:

• to help people to self-organise, co-create harmonious living environments and thriving communities,
• to support continual interaction between people, spaces and activities at local and global scales,
• to gather a new Flower of Life - an interconnected global matrix of people, groups and collectively contributed resources from many different dimensions.

This is both a revolutionary ICT and a revolutionary societal project incorporating new solutions from both fields:

• In the ICT field it is an effort to create a network ecosystem of interoperable platforms to provide a decentralized medium for free communication, exchange of social media, participatory decision making, activity planning, collaboration and value exchange. An open source distributed software with open protocols that is developed and managed by its owning members. Focus on federation of ownership, interoperability between different dimensions of services and careful consideration of users' privacy preferences. As a result to trigger a seamless flow of free interaction.

• In the Social field it is an initiative to create a new organization owned and governed by its participant members, with chaordic principles. It has the practical goal to interconnect all independent intentional communities worldwide, youth/spiritual/ecological NGOs, non-formal educational institutions, caring and inspired individuals with a new, holistic vision of life, people dealing with innovative solutions for global civil society, sustainable co-living, holistic human well-being, and other related areas.

This project does not promote one particular philosophy or vision. The creation of favorable conditions for solutions to emerge is the essential goal, and it therefore does not try to influence the decision-making power of individuals. This only aims at providing free tools of interaction, cooperation and sharing, to increase the visibility and connectivity between the ordinary and caring people free from command-and-control organisations and acting spontaneously, guided by their common sense, to let them self-organize and find the right vector of growth.

While this is a clean slate design and there is much space for creativity, many similar projects are emerging in the scene. Some examples of this include: federated/decentralised/p2p social networks, p2p file sharing tools, real life transport/ride sharing web sites, p2p couch/garden/garage/car sharing and renting web sites, participatory democratic decision making platforms, eGovernance platforms, crowd-funding/micro-funding platforms, non-monetary value exchange systems, virtual currency or bartering, in the social field: sustainable eco-villages and communes, experimental settlement projects, etc.

The OMPlanet Organisation

OMPlanet has the principles of chaordic organisation owned and governed by its participant members. It is initiated by an independent team of volunteer researchers who are working to implement participatory democratic processes of self-organisation and distributed ownership through the use of ICT solutions.

The OMPlanet organisation is entirely transparent or open source. By design it will guarantee that there will be no profit-driven company owning or controlling OMPlanet in a centralized way. No one will become a single shareholder to receive direct credits or provide direct goods on behalf of OMPlanet. The ICT systems will be based on free software platforms with interoperable protocols open to all communities, organizations and individuals. To organize itself it will need an administrative core that will act transparently and rely on its members' voluntary contributions and will take into full account their decision-making power. The free will of people will keep the project running for as long as it is useful.

The informal purpose of the initiative is to project a vision of fair and just human affairs into all areas of human activity, to empower individuals to self-organize into sustainable communities and to live in harmony with themselves and with the environment: Together, we have the ability to transform societies and governments by putting them into the hands of many more individuals, by providing them the freedom to self-organize and co-create sustainable and harmonious life on this wonderful planet Earth. And we are not dreamers, we want to live it during our lives and we offer rational solutions for it.

Technical Description

The Planetary System

We use the planetary system analogy to help explaining the architecture of the OMPlanet network ecosystem.

Here the nodes of the network are the OMPlanet platforms which are the planets. Each user, organization or a community can have its own hosted planet and it will belong to its community. In their planet the users can control their private data and applications of interaction.

Users will be able to interact with each other within their planet and as well with the users of other planets. OMPlanet has 1 to 12 different dimensions of interaction: such as social networking, file sharing, offering services, banking, etc. Users can interact as well cross-dimension wherever such interoperability will be made possible.

In order to increase the flow within the communities and enable seamless interaction, maximum number of such dimensions must be made interoperable within the OMPlanet ecosystem and whenever possible also with other open systems in the Web.

The advantages of the OMPlanet planetary system is that it is community-centric - each group of users controls its planet with their data and services, it is poly-centric - all the ecosystem is federated between different communities, and that it is interoperable - there are agreements between different dimensions of interaction within and between the planets and there are neutral bodies helping to create such agreements. This model contrasts with the cloud computing model where the data, applications and services are centralized in external cloud servers and millions of users are reduced to dependent controllable clients of few corporate cloud service providers.

Of course achieving interoperability of such complex community-based ICT platforms is a complex process involving various actors and challenges far beyond technical issues. We offer as a solution first to keep the space open for creativity and experimentation and second to invest in creating stronger and neutral standardisation bodies within the ecosystem and externally (such as W3C, ISO, etc).

Again using the planetary analogy here the standardisation body is the sun of the planetary system . The sun holds all the planets in the system in their orbits (provides the standards and common protocols of interaction). As the sun is only giving and not taking anything - the one who decides the rules should not be the one who benefits from it. While in contrast in the cloud model the rules can be dictated by the strong cloud providers themselves and as we know competing companies are not successful creating rules that is beneficial for all parties if they have the chance to create one which is beneficial only for them.

• 12 Dimensions - Technical description of the 12 dimensions of the OMPlanet platform

The Real-time Social Radar

The migration of web services from the PC to mobile devices brings new dynamics into social network interactions. New dimensional parameter has entered into the scene - the real time location information.

To use the full potential of geolocation feautures the OMPlanet is developing its own social radar called FreeSonar. It provides real-time location-based social networking and activity sharing mobile application which respects users privacy and interoperability with other web services. One of the winning features of FreeSonar is that users can choose to become visible to each other if they are sharing common interests.

• FreeSonar - Free Software Mobile GeoSocial Networking Application to connect People, Places and Events of OMPlanet ecosystem.

The Social Taxonomy System

The Internet now is an overflow of information coming from maltitudes of different social media channels. The standard keyword based searching has its limitations when it comes to searching of multimedia content from particular interest domain. The user-based collaborative tagging, annotating and rating of multimedia content provides an entirely new solution of how to solve this problem.

OMPlanet offers a new taxonomy system of community-based collaborative tagging. Each community of users creates the taxonomy for its own domain and collaboratively integrates it into the main taxonomy called Flower. Furthermore it provides networking of tags with people, places, events and other dimensions of OMPlanet platform creating cross-domain taxonomies.

• Flower Hamaspyur - A new type of folksonomy system with interactive user interfaces to serve as a semantic core shared between different dimensions of OMPlanet platform.

Target Groups, Dissemination

Consistent interaction of people through OMPlanet ecosystem can only be realised, once 1) the technical platforms are properly deployed 2) several target communities are actively involved using key applications and services and 3) a process has started to interconnect more actors from different domains via different platforms.

The initial group of users is chosen to be:

• The Global Ecovillage Network - more then 3000 sustainable co-living settlements worldwide.
• EU Youth in Action Program - Over 110 000 young people (aged 15-28) organizing activities with subjects of non-formal learning, active citizenship, solidarity, tolerance, etc.
• Libertarian ICT Communities - LibrePlanet, Lorea, Diaspora, etc.

Collaboration and Related Endeavours

Key chalange for the initiative is the adoption of already existing open technologies and collaboration with other groups and projects dealing with related or complementary endeavours to find possible synergies.

• Related ICT Endeavours
• Related Social Endeavours

Media

• A Federated Social Web for Peace - Video: How to empower a Global Civil Society, which may be able to address some global problems that individual states and economies are unable to deal with. By Markus Sabadello, Project Danube.
• Us Now - Video: about networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of governments. By Ivo Gormley.
• Ocean cities as "startup countries" - Video: about experimental new governments. By Patri Friedman, The Seasteading Institute.
• Why Iceland Should Be in the News But Is Not - Iceland's first step towards participatory government with the help of social media. By Deena Stryker.

About Us

• People - OMPlanet co-founders, research and development team
• Hamaspyur Foundation - The non-profit foundation to support OMPlanet initiative

Contact

Contact e-mail: infoATTomplanetDOTnet

External Links

• www.omplanet.net - The official web site