OMPlanet/Description

The Planetary System

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

Here, the nodes that constitute the network are the OMPlanet platforms, represented by the planets. Each user, organization or a community can have its own hosted planet and it will belong to its community. On 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 as well as with users of other planets. Planets have 1 to 12 different dimensions of interaction that include social networking, file sharing, offering services, banking, etc. Users can also interact across different dimensions of interaction, wherever such interoperability is possible.

The advantages of the OMPlanet planetary system is that it is community-centric - each group of users controls its own planet with its data and services, it is poly-centric - all the ecosystem is federated between different communities, and interoperable - there are agreements between different dimensions of interaction within and between the planets and there are neutral bodies that help create such agreements.

This approach will make possible an alternative trend of evolution for the global Internet ecosystem which is now threatened to become a government censured and corporate owned oligopolistic market dominated by few key service providers (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc.). And with the emerging cloud computing models all the personal user data, applications and services are being increasingly swallowed into the clouds. Millions of users will be reduced into powerless clients unable to do their own computing and completely dependent on commercial cloud service providers. In contrast we offer new models of distributed local/personal clouds each one managed and owned by its community members.

Achieving the interoperability of such complex community-based ICT platforms is a complicated process that involves various actors and challenges far beyond technical issues. The right approach will be to 1) create the environment and conditions for such initiatives to start 1) keep the space open for experimentation and 2) invest in creating stronger and neutral coordination and standardization bodies within the ecosystem and externally (e.g. W3C, ISO, etc).

In the analogy with the planetary system, the standardisation body is the sun. The sun holds all the planets in the system in right orbits (provides the standards and common protocols of interaction). Just as the sun is only giving and not taking, whoever has power in decision-making and creates rules should not be the one who benefits from it. (In contrast the rules of existing major social networking or cloud computing services are made differently for each service provider by itself and competing companies are not motivated by the creation of rules that are beneficial for all parties, they rather create closed markets with rules for their own benefit).

• 12 Dimensions - The technical description of the 12 dimensions of the OMPlanet platform