Thanks Paul for the suggestions, as for the archive, my understanding it will remain active, but Kevin or Franco can confirm, I agree with you it is important, for the other issues, in a voluntary organisation, it all boils down to implementation .. this means that someone has to volunteer and say, "I will do it" and the community can then experiment with a particular new option, Michel On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:16 AM, Paul D. Fernhout < [email protected]> wrote:

I just saw the post here and the notes about the list moving:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-foundation-mailing-list-getting-the-wikile...

Sorry to see the problems.

I can wonder if this could be a good time to re-examine some of the p2p objectives and how people are going about pursuing them?

Some comments on that from a few different directions -- like the social semantic desktop, what could be built on email, tools for nutritional sensemaking and p2p health care, and the issue of living archives, and a plea for explicit licensing of contributions to the new list.

=== Breaking links?

I point people to stuff I posted at p2presearch all the time; examples:

"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/...

Referenced for example here: "On moving beyond money (Score:4, Interesting)" http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1512608&cid=30785106

Or:

"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and Catton)"

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/0...

Referenced for example here:

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/06/makes-you-think-in-america-we-real...

It will be sad to see all those links broken.

=== A possibility for better systems

I've talked about the possibility for better p2p tools beyond email in the past. :-)

Just one example: "[p2p-research] P2P platforms for wide ranging discussions beyond email? (was Re: The psychopath as peer?)"

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November... "In any case, what we may need is a better stigmergic platform than wikis or emails or web forums or Google Wave for creating public interlinked knowledge covering a wide variety of interrelated topics from a wide variety of perspectives, especially one that is interlinked with things like real time data acquisition, simulations, and digitized historical records."

Someone copied that here for if/when that link becomes broken: http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2009-November/006494.html

A similar post on the open manufacturing list (by me) in the context of problems the leader of the RepRap project was having with a mailing list (one I was posting to :-): "The need for better communication tools & a semantic web (was Re reprap-dev)"

http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f?hl=en "You may well be right in practice with email, but none-the-less I think this once again suggests the need for much better tools for communications than plain email. If we were using something like a social semantic desktop (or whatever) to create these open manufacturing systems, people could post whatever they wanted to a cloud of ideas and semantic tagging done by the community (including how hardware oriented some post was) would let items that Adrian was interested bubble up to some semantic-related queue he set up for himself, essentially as a form of topical moderation (but, where there was an infinite number of topics). At least, that's the hope. :-) For example, someone makes a post about ball bearings. That gets tagged later as "hardware" related. Or even more specifically, as about "bearings". Someone else posts about how some company or other does not get some aspect of a purported open source ethic. That post gets tagged as "social" or "business" or "ethics" or maybe all of those. Adrian sets up a filter so that only things tagged "hardware" come to his attention (although maybe once in a while he might look at a broader stream, from which he might decide to add some new tags). "

It's certainly thinkable to have better p2p systems, whatever they look like, and for practitioners to consider using them. :-)

And there are examples from the past like Groove or to some extent Google Wave. But ultimately, the future is some kind of social semantic desktop (perhaps with an email gateway just for some surface discussions to bring people to the desktop). I might like to see each post to a P2P community as an RDF document or a Pointrel transaction (or several perhaps, as they got moved around) that could potentially contain all sorts of content.

I tried, a little, aspiring to raise the bar to a p2p "Social Semantic Desktop" with a lot of tools for collective thinking. :-)

http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16... http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

But that is kind of back burner for a lot of reasons at the moment (time, money, focus, peers). I'd like to do this full-time, but my wife is the one working full-time now, and it would entail switching roles and bringing in something to support my work on that so we could continue to homeschool.

I may not be part of such a future effort for whatever reasons of priorities (including my own), but others have invested a bunch of time in that direction in the past, and certainly, ideally, they would be able to provide better tools at some point. Example: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/

At the very least, one could ask, what sort of communications system should a P2P Research Foundation ideally have? Just thinking through that might be an interesting exercise and come up with some interesting ideas. There might well be a system out there that already meets those ideals or which could be easily modified to do so.

Anyway, I feel the potential must be there, just barely, for someone to really make a great p2p system and to use it to continue to move forward. Something beyond diaspora and beyond email and beyond Wave and beyond Groove. It's amazing how quickly Diaspora got funded, but also in some ways it was sad how low the bar was that they set for themselves. Something like Diaspora or Facebook could just be an application on top of something much bigger and deeper.

The p2presearch mailing list as a choke point for p2p research based on the arbitrary decision of one commercial provider is of course pretty ironic. :-)

Still, email is p2p itself. The web archives or server may be going, but people have their own copies of stuff. So, a central server is really is not a choke point so much as an inconvenience. Email itself is not a bad choice in many ways for communications, excepting, as I say at the post above, it really does not (yet) have support for a lot of flexibility in having tools above it or dealing with a wide variety of content in a way that does not cause objections (given the social convention of "staying on topic" just to try to fit a mechanical limitation related to filtering and categorizing).

The obvious thing that bothers me most about the change (not being on the list at the moment, in part just to keep myself from spending a lot of time posting more stuff when I'm supposed to be doing other things :-) is potentially broken links to old content. But this bigger picture issue I raised, of wanting better tools for p2p research, remains, even at a new host. Anyway, that's just kibitzing from the sidelines at his point, granted. :-)

=== Email does have good p2p features

There remain good things about mailing lists. Redundancy is why I prefer to post stuff to lists that to, say, my own blog -- even if they are long, for distributed copies. So, the centralized web pages are presumably going down soon, but people still have their copies. However, because, I'll admit, email is not well suited as a social medium to long posts, that did cause problems and complaints. Also, email is not well suited to complex interwoven discussions.

Still, it might be possible to use email as a sort of carrier for anything, although email has other problems (spam) that it's a toss up if one would build better tools on it or just have a new infrastructure. Still, I have thought, for example, that one could just send emails with attachments that were RDF files or Pointrel transactions, and then people's email clients (a Thunderbird add on?) would then use these attachments to update some kind of dynamic local database of shared P2P content (with structured arguments, complex interwoven threads, revision histories of shared documents, long documents that are essentially hidden except for summaries, posts that are modded up and down after they are sent, fixes sent for typos to previous documents that appear merged into the original, and so forth).

And it could include eventually general aspects of Doug Englebart's (and others) visions: http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html "My hypothesis is that ever-more effective "Dynamic Knowledge Repositories" (DKRs) will be central to improving a community's Collective IQ – essentially the capability, in dealing with a complex problem, for providing the best, up-to-date understanding of the current state of both the problem and of its solution efforts. Our Tool Systems would be endowed with Open Hyper Tools specifically designed to rapidly improve our collective process, and especially the ongoing organic emergence and utility of comprehensive DKRs out of that process. Specially trained teams will be involved, for instance to ingest the ongoing dialog, help in adapting to the relevant ontological shifts, help monitor and solidify the "argument structures" involved in seeking coherence and plausibility, etc. And also for providing correctly associated "views" of the knowledge structure to facilitate learning – probably different such viewing forms for different categories of learners."

=== Other applications

Here is an example of someone's (an ex-CIA person's) attempt to build a "public intelligence blog" and involve a lot of people in it. http://www.phibetaiota.net/

But, what kind of "choke point" is that to do it as a web site? I've though of contacting them about some of the things I'm interested in with Pointrel and FOSS tools for intelligence systems, but so far have not.

I'm doing things like researching for myself about iodine and health at the moment (also I've been thinking about cholesterol and health, vitamin D and health, the "pleasure trap", the sociology of peer pressure to eat poorly, etc.). I have been posting to a members-only forum at Dr. Fuhrman's site. Unfortunately, it's not open (or distributed), and I'm sad about that. I'm sad that all my posts there on topics for future wellness research areas are essentially lost to the public or at least I can't reference them in other settings, and I'm hoping to put them elsewhere at some point. I don't know how much longer I'll continue all that specific health exploration (or posting there) -- excepting that I'd like better tools for doing nutritional research in general, too. :-) Related, from one post I made there and put in a public place: "Open tools for nutritional research example (Score:2)" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1897006&cid=34459370<http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1897006&cid=34459370>

So, better P2P tools with layers of analysis tools have all sorts of potential applications in different areas, especially I feel, research about P2P (meta), nutrition, economics, politics, community infrastructure design, open manufacturing, and in general the softer sciences where there is a lot of controversy or there are a lot of complex interwoven factors that need to be discussed. And ideally people should be able to pick their level of openness, with the default being fairly open.

Two posts by me with links on how fundamentally broken profit-driven hierarchical "science" is right now: "More links on research problems (Score:2)" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740048 "Links on problems with peer review (Score:3)" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740098

So, this is another broad issue for p2p.

=== An example from p2presearch history about living archives

Or, for another example from a different direction, I just found out about this idea: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychological-solution-bullying/201011/r...

which really validates what Stan Rhodes and Andy Robinson (why I CC'd them) said in this thread I started:

"[p2p-research] The psychopath as peer?"

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November...

Andy's insightful reply:

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November...

And one of Stan's informative comments:

http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November...

Izzy Kalman's point at Bullies to Buddies, echoing Andy's and Stan's points, is how situational aspects as well as individual responses lead to cycles of teasing escalating into bullying and what can be done about it fairly easily (rather than more laws which he says makes things worse). And then institutional labeling of someone as a "bully" or a "victim" adds another layer of a problem to all that.

I can wonder how our p2p or other technical systems might potentially encourage psychopathic or sociopathic seeming behavior somehow? :-) I know people have talked about some of the general issues of anonymity, pseudonimity, group think effects (Shirky), and so on (and pros and cons of various approaches).

In any case, given how we normally use email or email archives, we don't commonly use the kind of p2p systems where it would be easy to interlink new information into discussions from more than a year ago. I could post a link about it to the list, sure, but I can't make it easy to be sure someone looking at the old discussion could find it. So, I found that link a month or so ago, but did not have something easy to do with it. We also don't commonly use systems where it would be easy to summarize or rewrite key points to have new documents emerge (either technical systems or legal systems).

Yes, there is also the P2P Foundation wiki, but that's not really a discussion system, even if you can have discussions on it, and then we have two different systems maintained in different ways. And you need permissions to work on the wiki in any case, so another choke point.

Anyway, so there is a whole big issue about archives, what they are for, and even if they are "archives" if they continue to motivate us to find new information that we want to link back to the old information to help it grow in interesting and informative and useful ways.

=== Dealing with content from different perspectives and assumptions

Also, because people have different perspectives, there is the problem of content disappearing from systems when people with various perspectives want to just vanish the old stuff. That happened with me and Wikipedia, when all the stuff I added to the Jobless Recovery article got deleted. I since put it up here: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

But dealing with multiple perspectives is not really something Wikipedia was set up to do, again suggesting a need for better tools and better ways to archive things than wikis.

My wife's (free) attempt in that direction in the past (we spend much of our home equity a year or so ago on funding her time for that. :-) http://www.rakontu.org/

But, like anything, now she sees how it could be better, as she wrote here: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html

=== P2P Health Care Research

Thanks to all the great health information peers have put up on the web, after some rough starts, and also with Ryan's helpful pointers, I've been able to learn a lot about health and how to avoid most doctors and sick care with better diet. It's been suggested that 70% or more of health interventions are eating related to eating refined and processed foods and excessive animal products. Related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A62FuxV8PY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830wtUvyOC0 http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html

http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insa... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--NqqB2nhBE http://www.iodine4health.com/

So, the "Google Health Plan" has really helped me, in the end, but it is more than Google, it is search plus essentially p2p provided content:

http://www.ginside.com/2007/830/comics-dilbert-to-provide-google-health-plan...

(I'm not saying an informed doctor ordering various blood tests etc. would not be a good partner for all that, but they are hard to find. Unfortunately, when my wife and I moved to New York to help take care of my elderly parents, who were covered by four different sick care plans, we could no longer afford to pay for sick care insurance as the rates doubled, and rates just went up from there as we worked to pay back what we had borrowed to finish our free garden simulator.)

But it took years to get pointed towards better health, mistakes along the way (even some deficiencies like maybe iodine from not supplementing or eating enough seaweed) and I still have a lot to learn. And it would help to have better open tools would help with all that. This is an area that may save trillions of dollars a year in expenses and ideally should get a lot of support for people developing better p2p systems that relate to health and nutrition, as well as broader wellness areas. Broader aspects: http://www.bluezones.com/ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692444&cid=32644166 http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm

So, while mainstream medicine and sick care insurance companies basically tortured to death both my parents and one of my sisters at a hefty profit, I can credit p2p research and a long period of little access to sick care for hopefully saving me from a similar fate. :-) That said, yes, mainstream medicine is good at some things (that 30% or whatever of the time where it really does work miracles, like dealing with car accidents and so on).

And I can hope p2p research through DIY-Bio enthusiasts will build on this work to make regular nutritional-related testing essentially free for everyone so people have an easier time at figuring out where they are or what might be a problem with their diet: "George Whitesides: A lab the size of a postage stamp"

http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp...

So, I'm expecting p2p to become more-and-more the dominant force for wellness in our often otherwise dysfunctional global society. Although, one can ask how we can improve on that, where Google does not know someone's every health issue? Also, for most people, having someone to hold their hand going through that is a great thing, so, we may well see new links between p2p and professional practices (include new professional to professional networks, too). So, I'd suggest a focus on tools for p2p health care might yield a lot of low-hanging fruit...

=== Moving beyond collateral damage; p2presearch on a p2p platform?

When I saw the p2presearch list was down, because links I was posting to it were not working, I was immediately thinking, oh, Wikileaks collateral damage... Then the archives went back up in a day or so. But, the damage still is ongoing in creating a hassle and breaking all the old links.

Anyway, we've had this conversation before, about whether the P2P Foundation would want to privilege or endorse one p2p system that it blessed or invested in (especially a bleeding edge system that might well fail to deliver, given "Software is Hard"). http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html "Scott Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."

I can see the argument for the P2P Foundation to stay "platform neutral" in that sense. Of course, the P2P Foundation is privileging email and mailman in a sense... And of course, the foundation is separate from the list itself it seems. So, there are at least a couple of interwoven or overlapping communities.

=== A plea for some explicit licensing

I don't have any immediate plans to work with the previous p2presearch content, but I have mused about that in the past, and I can wonder if there would likely be substantial objections if in the future I was to take the contents of the old list and put it in some new distributed form (like on top of the Pointrel system)? But, it's not clear who would even approve of that. The way copyright works, if the situation is unclear, I really should get the explicit permission of each contributor to the list to put their posts into any new format, which, while theoretically possible, generally seems impractical (especially as people may change emails or not respond to requests that get lost in spam).

I guess it's not completely clear to me what license the list content is under. If there is one thing I would suggest about the new list, it is to make clear from the start that everything posted is under some free license of some sort. Doesn't even have to allow modification of the text -- just allowing ability to put it in new contexts as is would be a great thing, although a Creative Commons license similar to Wikipedia would be a good thing -- with the notion that anything copied into post was "fair use" and future users of the material would have to make their own judgments about that.

Anyway, at the very least, reexamining the licensing status of information and what people consider to be reasonable norms for its reuse would be good. With the Pointrel system, I had hoped to integrate licensing permission granting seamlessly into how it was used to promote sharing and reduce chilling effects.

=== Thanks for reading this far

In any case, it would be great if the old archive links stayed up, but I presume they will be going away?

Anyway, even with all the above, I'll still once again restate Manuel De Landa's point: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

So, the P2P Foundation and other overlapping communities need to find whatever mix of technologies and approaches work well for them, and they indeed may not be pure "p2p". So, the mailing list approach indeed may well be "good enough" even with some central choke point that is inconvenient, but not impossible, to work around when problems come up. Archives can get remade, who looks at old posts, web pages with links can get update, there is archive.org to find old content, and so on. So, I don't want to sound too alarmist, even if I think we could have better tools. We do have tools, they work, we try to use them and often succeed and have productive interactions. So, that's all good progress. Can it be better? One can hope, and one would hope that comes out of "p2p research" at some point.

(Feel free to forward to interested parties. And consider this under a CC 3.0 BY-SA Unported license.)

--Paul Fernhout http://www.pdfernhout.net/ ==== The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI