OMPlanet Project Draft
Contents
About
Principles
Factually OmPlanet itself is to be only a set of principles, agreements and protocls to co-create such an ecosystem by the community.
The members will obey its rules because it is out of their interest to keep the environment workable for all its members. Majority of the members will have a stake in preserving its order and supporting its sustainable growth. There can be also a set of incentive policies to encourage sharing and contribution.
Here are mentioned some of the primary principles that should be universal and be followed by everyone. Secondary principles, agreements and rules can be developed locally by its specific environment.
Freedom
OmPlanet environment and its softwares are to be free - having the four essential freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation, and all data and contents in the environment generated or imported by users are to be available to be used by their owners (share, copy, export, terminate) as they wish.
Independence
OmPlanet ecosystem has to be financially and politically independent and its administrative activity has to be self-financed by community contributions. All donations and financial transactions maid for the maintanace of the system are to be made transparent to the public. People willing to contribute money should be able to - 1. choose to what particular direction their donation should be used from the public list of described needs, 2. trace the usage which will be transparent, 3. remain anonymous contributor if they wish (exception to tranparency rule to encourage contribution).
The independence from monopolistic service providers can be achieved as the federated internet protocols and softwares will develop. Everyone should be allowed to choose his or her preferred serviced provider to access the services without being walled off from each-other.
Even the independence from Internet can be achieved by using special P2P network architectures - P2P networks can provide delay tolerant communication via all possible means that any one peace of hardwear can comunicate with any other peace of hardware (Internet, intranet, bluetooth, SMS, USB memory disk, etc.)
Federation/Decentralization
Federated networks are architected upon the same principles of confederation. In simple words: in federated environment there are many service providers from different domains for similar types of service (e.g. social networking) but they are all interconnected and it possible for the users to interact across the networks. Everyone will be able to choose his preferred platform to access his social network which is in turn connected to other social networks. In federated networks user has the freedom to change its service provider to the one it likes more without loosing personal data, files, or friends wherever they are.
One of the many benefits of the federation is that we can also have monopoly-free censorship-free social networks.
Transparency
There is a race right now to own the social graph by all social network giants. We must be aweare that such social services are so fundamental that they have to be fairly regulated and free from commercial or any other exploitation.
OmPlanet is to provide services and collaboration system not fallible to attempts of exploiting or manipulating it for personal benefits, attempts to centralize and misappropriate resources.
For the development and maintenance of the principal parts the members should accept transparent administration and mutual surveillance.
Security, Privacy
Servcies have to be publicly accesible as much as it dose not violet privacy issues.
"...Everyone — individuals, businesses, universities and non-profits — deserve to manage their own connection to the social web without sacrificing privacy, security and control." — Evan Prodromou, founder of StatusNet, Inc
"Diaspora lets you sort your connections into groups called aspects. Unique to Diaspora, aspects ensure that your photos, stories and jokes are shared only with the people you intend." Diaspora Project
Community Contribution/Collaboration
Community contribution - independent self-sustainability is possible through community contributions and collaborative efforts, the will of people will keep the project going forward as long as the project is useful.
Collaborative consumption - this is a term that includes many different ways people are saving money and reducing their consumption through creative collaboration, examples are P2P sharing, P2P renting, bartering, fractional ownership, crowdfunding, microinvestments, P2P transactions, and more.
Protocols
OmPlanet as a computer network environment provides protocols and public APIs (e.g. OpenSocial*) for different applications from different users to interact in the environment maintaining its concepts.
Common protocols to facilitate "multi-domain" networking, etc...
Architecture
The OmPlanet network ecosystem has 12 dimensions/spheres each of them representing specific dimension of human activity. All objects from all the dimensions are interacting and are in relation with each other - with objects from their own dimension as well with objects from all other dimensions.
OmPlanet 12 Dimensions
Federated Architecture
"We dream of a world where all social networks are connected and work together in a way similar to email. Our projects aims to define a language to bridge these networks and make it easy for social networks to join a bigger social web. You're invited to help make this a reality." OpenSocialWeb
P2P Architecture
Peer-to-peer model where people deliver services directly to each other instead of monopolized client-server models.
As follows from the Principles of OmPlanet interactions in the environment are preferably to be peer-to-peer and main services and data are to be decentralized. But generally peer-to-peer distributed systems have some important limitations: for example to make available global services such as unique ID generation, user authentication, offline messaging, sharing access to public/protected data, etc. is not possible without centralized public web services with centrilized data storage.
Considering benefits, limitations and complexities of P2P systems the OmPlanet architecutre is proposed in two development stages:
The first and less complex architecture is to have a centralized server-based system to provide all such necessary web services and databases on centrilized web servers transparently maintained by community volunteer efforts.
And the second stage is to gradually avoid concentration of all the responsibilities in one place. With federated architecture, complex P2P protocls and APIs the data storage and service hosting is to be distributed between federated peer servers. Explained in P2P logic there need to be enough super-peers that are willing to host some part of server functionality and light-weight peers who are only users in the environment (users e.g. accessing via mobile devices).
Multi Agent Architecture
The multiagent paradigm can be superimposed on a P2P architecture, where agents embody the principles of the environment, the collective behavior, and the interaction protocols of each peer.
Related Examples
Diaspora - "Diaspora is run on a network of connected servers, or "pods". To join Diaspora, user do not need to set up his/her own pod - it is possible to join an existing pod running the Diaspora software. The pod user can join could be run by a friend, a university, or official pod, run by the project's founders. All of the Diaspora pods communicate and make up the Diaspora Network."
OpenSocial - is a set of common APIs for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It provides universal standarts for public access APIs that many social networking sites are starting to support now including sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace, Orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning, and Yahoo! Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any of such social network system that supports OpenSocial.
Implementation Plan
There are many other projects already in this area making the first successful steps. Project OmPlanet is not competing with them but it tries to collaborate in a an open way. We understand that the realization of such kind of project is unrealistic considering the size and resources of the current OmPlant team alone, and without collaboration the endeavor will have only a creative entertainment purpose. But with the holistic view of all the problems and possible solutions in the area we will be capable of delivering new solutions to the community, however small but in tune with the right current.
Our development team has already started to play with the source codes and as a realistic implementation plan we intend to deliver a free software application for one of the 12 dimensions of OmPlanet - the Category:Sonar project is our start for the Travel dimension.
Related Endeavors
License
- GNU AGPL - The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software.
- The Open Web Foundation Agreements - The Open Web Foundation currently provides two agreements for specification development purposes, a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa).
