PeerPoint

= The PeerPoint project is an open and collaborative effort to develop requirements, standards, and specifications for peer-to-peer internet technologies that will promote fair and sustainable societies.

URL = [1]

Description

Poor Richard:

"PeerPoint’s version of the sovereign individual is the peer. A peer is a critter of the bio-digital ecosystem. The bio-digital ecosystem includes nature, human culture, machine devices and the internet. The term "peer" can apply to a person or a machine, and either kind of peer can play different roles in various groups, networks, and communities. But there are no "second class" peers but trust relations between sovereign peers. A sovereign peer may choose to interact through any kind of network and with any entity whether it be a trusted equal or an untrusted corporate giant. A peer always retains an autonomy of agency to consent to or reject any relationship. There is no particular entity, group, or service in the “internets” that a sovereign peer can't go around or do without.

Arguably life on the internet is already like that and always has been. The problem is that for most internet users their agency, or sovereignty, is severely compromised. They submit to many relationships and services without really being informed. Is it their own fault? No, because the deck is stacked against them. Important facts and choices are unknown, withheld, or obfuscated. There are either insufficient alternatives or so many choices no human person has time to evaluate them all. Out of necessity we put our trust in proxies (others who make decisions for us), and that trust is very often betrayed.

The PeerPoint project is intended to serve several communities of interest from average internet users to social entrepreneurs and technology innovators. The project will need to present different faces and appropriate on-ramps to these different communities. This document is only a beginning."

Discussion

Poor Richard:

"PeerPoint is an evolving, crowdsourced design specification for a suite of integrated peer-to-peer (p2p) applications to include (but not limited to) social networking, real-time project collaboration, content management, distributed database management, voting, trust/reputation metrics, complementary currency, crowd funding, etc. The specification overlaps in places with existing p2p projects but also goes substantially beyond anything yet proposed, much less anything yet built.

The PeerPoint Design Specification is not meant to replace or supersede existing software and technology development efforts. It is intended to elicit and catalog the needs of the user community and to help inform and coordinate the work of the floss / p2p / hacker community to promote more rapid convergence towards common standards and interoperable solutions. It is intended to be an open P2P development roadmap, collectively designed by all the stakeholders in a free, democratic future for the internet and its users.

Members of p2p projects, interested programmers and designers, power users, activists, and others are encouraged to participate in the collaborative development of the PeerPoint design project. The initial scope consists of:

   establish the PeerPoint project’s collaboration platform and process
   survey the needs and desires of various categories of users and other stakeholders
   define a  taxonomy of  users and user requirements with weights and priorities
   survey the open/p2p technology ecosystem
   define a taxonomy of open/p2p solutions and create a comparison matrix
   identify best (or dominant) p2p standards, methods and solutions

All of these threads can be pursued in parallel with only a minimal amount of sequential dependencies." (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkAUpUxdfKGr_5Qio2SlZcnBu_sgnZWdoVTZuD_Regs/edit?pli=1#)

More Information

• PeerPoint, An Open P2P Requirements Definition and Design Specification Proposal [2]

• Identity Management, http://almanac2010.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/identity-management/