[P2P-F] Regarding P2P Foundation mailing list getting the Wikileaks treatment...

Thu Jan 6 07:46:32 CET 2011

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 <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

> I just saw the post here and the notes about the list moving:
>
>
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-foundation-mailing-list-getting-the-wikileaks-treatment-from-belgian-firm-alfahosting/2010/12/06
>
> 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/005379.html
>
> 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/004130.html
>
> Referenced for example here:
>
> http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/06/makes-you-think-in-america-we-realize-that-our-children-will-do-worse-than-their-parents/
>
> 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/005520.html
> "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/4cd369bdf16a346f
>  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&amp;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/rational-alternative-the-national-school-anti-bullying-p/comments#comment-134733
>
> 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/thread.html#5499
>
> Andy's insightful reply:
>
>
> http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005506.html
>
> And one of Stan's informative comments:
>
>
> http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005502.html
>
> 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-insane.html
>  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.html
>
> 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.
>

-- 
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