perhaps someone could report on this for the p2p blog? Alejandro <[email protected]> Jun 23 06:31AM -0700 ^<?ui=2&view=bsp&ver=ohhl4rw8mbn4#130bcda4d7035656_digest_top> Hi All, I'm just cross posting this message from a few days ago, trying to spread awareness of the Lorea and N-1 projects - more explanation below! Hope it's of interest, and feel free to get in touch if you'd like to know more! Alejandro On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Alejandro <[email protected]> wrote: Hi, First of all, I think this is a great idea, and I wish I could go or send someone from this project! I'd like to invite you all to join one of the various Lorea seeds you can find at http://lorea.cc/ To explain this cryptic language, Lorea means "Flower" in Basque, and it is a set of plugins for the php based open source social network Elgg. They extend it alongside, and beyond the aims of Diaspora, following the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari. It's main use is currently as the N-1 network ( https://n-1.cc/ ) - one of the coordination tools that is currently being used (besides regular online tools like twitter and facebook), by the assemblarian #15m movement based in Spain and beyond. It had been active for around a year, and many of the organisations that sprang to help out when word spread that the camps had started, were already using Lorea based networks as a shared non commercial space. It provides, as a basic set of services, chat, piratepads, a task system forums, wikis, groups, and ways to upload and link to different media, sharing it all on an internal microblogging wire which is now Ostatus enabled. https://bitbucket.org/rhizomatik There are various different lorea "seeds" - as in, implemented social network "confederates". Each one is a fully functional social network in many ways. The project comes from Sevilla mostly, but also now is being developed across the rest of Spain, and beyond. Together all these things provide ways to federate information between different social networks. There is now a moving "Hackaton" - a hacking marathon centred on improving N-1 - which saw an increase of about 10000 members in a week, and is growing rapidly. The hackaton just left Madrid, and has reached Barcelona, where it's taking place at the Barcelona Hackerspace, next stop Valencia later this week. The hackaton is based around creating a participative democracy toolkit, so that the various assembly acts being posted online can be shared in more intelligent ways, perhaps allowing different ways to show who voted for each proposal in any one assembly, or showing what different opinions are from one area to another. The participative democracy assemblies of all the city camps, which have now spread to the local neighbourhoods or "barrios" are run according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Hand_signals For each proposal brought to an assembly, there is twinkling of hands from the people who approve, followed by barred hands from those who disapprove, and to keep things moving when the chatter gets going, hands turn in a revolving to politely move things along. I think this all provides a rich experimental ground for development - there are many things we could be using or are in development, like geolocation, an RDF mapping for the democracy data, scalable high performance location awareness, there's room for everyone! :) Personally I would love to do something to do with mapping resource transactions - towards participative aspects to an economy as well. The 15m movement is to me a mass movement to reconsider democracy and see if we can get closer to a more direct, participative version of it. In doing it, there are lots of different ideas, that sometimes even disagree with each other. I think this is healthy, and I hope there will be interest from people here in starting new seeds, and working with us both in activism towards figuring out what "post capitalism" is and in making Lorea networks all the more open, positive ways to coordinate spontaneous social movements. Here is an interview with one of the developers on the Ostatus aspect: http://ostatus.org/2010/08/05/ostatus-interview-pablo-martin Thanks to all who are helping with this conference! Ale Fernandez -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens