[P2P-F] Fwd: Give Thimbl The Open Web Award!

Wed Feb 2 14:00:40 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. <dk at telekommunisten.net>
Date: Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 7:00 PM
Subject: Give Thimbl The Open Web Award!
To: "Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. Subscriber" <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

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////////////////////////////////////////////////
http://www.thimbl.net/award.html

# Why Thimbl should win the Transmediale/Mozilla Foundation Open Web Award

The Telekommunisten Collective thinks that people should finger each other
often as possible. Maybe even several times a day, hell, why not once an
hour?
As often as you like!

People thrive on interaction with other people. Mutual stimulation is a
deeply
felt human need, a key characteristic of what makes us human. Imagine that
instead of reading your status updates on Twitter or Facebook, your friends
would just finger you instead.

The Finger protocol was originally developed in the 1970s as a way to
publish
user and status information, such as who you are, what you're working on,
and
what you're doing now. This is how the relatively few folks with access to
networks posted pithy personal bios. From when colourful polyester pants
were
still groovy until the 90s people used to Finger each other all the time!

Finger evolved into a completely decentralized system, where any user could
finger any other user as long as they were both on the Internet. There were
no
big companies in the middle to control these users, or monitor them, or try
to
turn their personal data into money. Fingering was a personal matter between
users, direct and unmediated, and nobody really knew exactly who was
fingering
who. Promiscuous, right?

Sadly, these heady days of open relationships slowly came to an end. Finger
software was developed before the Internet had many users, and before
development was driven by commercial interests. The idea was bold, but the
software was primitive.

Capitalists and their desire for profit have no interest in such freedom and
promiscuity and chose to instead fund centrally controlled systems, in which
they are intermediaries. Investors wanted control, so that they can
commodify
and monetize these relationships. Instead of users fingering each other with
reckless abandon, people are now stuck with centralized, privately owned
services like Facebook; chaperoning their relationships, imposing user
policies
on them, and monitoring and monetizing their conversation.

Back in June 2010, Telekommunisten had had enough! "People must be freed
from
these puritanical, controlling, consumerist, profit-seeking cults", they
thought. If witchcraft, wet shaving, rocker hair and skinny jeans could make
comebacks, why not Finger?

The Thimbl project was born, and immediately started working on giving the
project an online identity and releasing tools to create a microblogging
platform built on Finger, that groovy 70s protocol.

In October, Telekommunisten received the news that Thimbl was one of three
projects nominated for Transmediale/Mozilla Foundation Open Web Award and
almost immediately, Thimbl broke on Hacker News and the project started to
attract significant interest.

Thimbl started popping up all over the place: P2Pfoundation, ecopolis,
alt1040,
O'Reilly Radar, OneThingWell, Ecrans, reboot.fm... Evan Prodromou from
competing service identi.ca even took a playful swipe at us! Finger was
becoming cool again. The masses were longing to finger each other!

In a few short months, without much in the way of a marketing strategy and
with
a budget that could be stored in a matchbox, Thimbl has managed to gather
over
250 followers on Twitter - the very service it someday hopes to compete with
-
and has been the subject of hundreds and hundreds of tweets. Thimbl even has
a
small following on identi.ca, which is closer to the heart of Thimbl than
the
service with birds and whales.

The thimbl.net website has over 300 'Likes' with its Facebook button and the
Telekommunisten Facebook fan page is abuzz with talk of Thimbl. The project
has
even gathered over 100 votes on the Drumbeat platform. Not bad for a project
that was completely unknown to all but a handful of people when the award
nominations where announced!

Still, the problem remains: Capital will not fund free platforms like
Thimbl.
Even with the buzz Thimbl has, building a community big enough to actually
create a viable platform without financing is a major challenge.

Wouldn't it be great if Thimbl could actually win the Open Web award? The
endorsement of Transmediale and the Mozilla Foundation would be a tremendous
boost for the project, perhaps enough to give the community the needed
escape
velocity to break free from centralized social media like Twitter and
Facebook
and make Finger the once and future king of personal status updates!

Transmediale and The Mozilla Foundation had a great idea: instead of having
a
jury decide the winner of the award, present three projects to a community
engaged with the open web and its technical, political and artistic
dimensions.
Mozilla had recently launched the Drumbeat project, just for this purpose,
as a
hub for projects that embrace the open web to get support and find
contributors. So it made perfect sense for Drumbeat to host the voting for
the
award.

Drumbeat is a fantastic initiative from Mozilla and has a really promising
future. However, Drumbeat is a relatively new platform. As a result none of
the
projects received much attention from existing Drumbeat users or from the
Transmediale community jumping on to Drumbeat to participate. The idea that
an
impartial community would consider the three projects and select a winner
didn't quite work out. Instead, it has become a competition to rally the
existing supporters of the three projects to sign up to Drumbeat and vote
for
them specifically, without genuinely considering voting for the others. This
means that, honestly, the vote count is about as impartially meaningful as a
Florida election run by Diebold.

Thimbl is up against two cool projects as candidates for the Open Web Award;
Booki, the book publishing platform behind FLOSSManuals and many great book
writing sprints, and Graffiti Markup Language, a project to enable analysis
and
archiving of graffiti writing which has the support of many awesome, large
and
active communities like F.A.T. Lab and eyebeam.

If the open web award is really meant to give well-earned support to
existing,
successful projects like Booki and GML, then we will celebrate their success
with them at the award ceremony in a few days. We readily concede that
Thimbl
has not yet achieved anywhere near what these projects have and that our
community is much, much smaller and far less known.

Unless we succeed in our desperate bid to convince Lady Gaga to dump
Polaroid
and instead dedicate her star power to the cause of ushering in a new golden
age of rampant fingering, we are very unlikely to win based on Drumbeat vote
count.

But if Open Web Award aspires to "clearly demonstrate the unbound potential
of
the open web in ways that can spark new thinking and practices," as stated,
then, damn it, Thimbl is the most about the open web!

We live and breathe the open web, directly addressing the technical and
social
issues facing the open web in every aspect of the project, in the code, and
in
our manifestos. We talk to anyone who will listen about how the open web is
not
just critical to the future of the Internet, but to society itself. And
people
are beginning to take notice.

Selecting Thimbl for the Open Web Award at Transmediale would be one heck of
a
powerful spark. Igniting the new thinking and practice that led to the idea
of
Thimbl with a clear and bold statement of support for an open web that is
truly
open! The multitudes are trapped and frustrated, clinging to their social
interactions within sterile, commercial platforms, longing for wanton,
unbridled realms of contact.

Join us in inscribing upon on our banners the revolutionary slogan, "Don't
be a
Twit, it feels good to be fingered!"

Give Thimbl the Open Web Award!

With Kind Regards, Your Telekommunisten.

http://www.thimbl.net
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

(psst... pass it on)

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