[P2P-F] an update on the tav/espra projects in London

Fri Mar 18 10:42:15 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: tav <tav at espians.com>
Date: 11 March 2011 15:13
Subject: [esp] Exciting news!!
To: Espians <esp at googlegroups.com>, openkollab at googlegroups.com, Espians <
espians at googlegroups.com>

Over the coming months we are going to be launching not one, but half
a dozen ventures: togethr.at, Social Startup Labs, Future Hacker, Git
Review, Hub Make Lab and Ampify/Espra!!

# togethr.at

Following the recent Place Station
<http://www.theplacestation.org.uk/> work that we jointly delivered
with 00:/, Indy's company, we've now setup a 50/50 joint venture
called togethr.at. This will be a sort of Kickstarter meets Foursquare
serving that exciting space where the physical meets the virtual. The
heart of the site will be a place and topic-based social marketplace
built around a novel system of offers and claims.

Some example uses:

* Community activists will find the tools necessary to organise
everything from street parties to social startups.

* Local authorities will be able to partake in the Neighbourhood
Challenge funds and make use of their underused assets.

* Developers (like Tesco) will be able to engage in consultation re:
development and invest in community efforts.

We've already got £15k of investment into togethr.at — half of which
goes towards the development budget. The aim is to get together a
total dev budget of £64k so as to launch a drool-worthy alpha at
SOCAP/Europe <http://europe.socialcapitalmarkets.net/> and a beta in
September!

# Social Startup Labs

Another joint venture, Social Startup Labs will be a vehicle to scale
up the awesome work
<
http://wiki.socialstartuplabs.com/private/social-startup-labs-social-franchise.low-res.pdf
>
that Sofia, Mamading and co. have been doing on the ground in
Lambeth/London. Also launching at SOCAP/Europe as a sister site to
together.at, the socialstartuplabs.com site will provide tools to:

* Digitally capture the needs, assets and opportunities in local
communities.

* Support the various social processes that social startup labs brings
together.

* Enable new social startups to collaborate and support each other.

The launch will also kick off a super innovative social franchising
model that we've come up with — for which we've already got one
Canadian firm committed and interested franchisees in the Bay Area,
Houston and Brussels!

# Future Hacker

A sort of Hacker News meets IRC, the futurehacker.org site will be
about serving the startup/hacker types in both keeping up with deeply
technical developments
<http://al3x.net/2011/02/22/solving-the-hacker-news-problem.html> as
well as providing the collaboration tools to support open projects
(incl. GitHub integration).

In an effort to start going beyond the usual tech topics, Future
Hacker will also be supporting emergent domains like open
manufacturing, diy bio, open synthetic genomics, etc.

# Git Review

The traditional software development process with version numbers and
releases is pretty much broken and needs a significant overhaul. Git
Review, a sister site to Future Hacker, will be offering a novel
approach that integrates best practices like code review, testing,
etc. with decentralised (forked) "project" planning and issue tracking
supporting continuous deployment setups.

# Hub Make Lab

Not a joint venture, Hub Make Lab is a project by 00:/ that will be
both "rebooting" the original Hub at Islington and setting up a new
12,000 square foot space on Haymarket! With such a potent location,
right next to Trafalgar Square and Parliament, and 24 hour access, we
will be looking to manifest the most vibrant and happening space in
the whole of London!

I'm currently engaged in dialogue with 00:/ about abandoning the
horribly flawed Hub model of sub-renting desk space and moving to the
Trust and Pecus-based Riva model. Not sure if they are ready for such
a leap yet, but in any case, starting May (and publicly September), we
will have a new base of operations in the centre of town!!

# Ampify

In a similar manner to how Ruby on Rails was originally developed to
create Basecamp, Ampify will be developed further so as to support all
the above ventures. And it being decentralised means that all of these
sites will all be able to talk to each other!! No more closed silos!!!

We will be leaving aside the more Espra-esque developments like Naaga,
our programming language, and AmpBrowser with augmented interfaces to
later, but will be focusing on the decentralised identity, datastore
and messaging architecture at this stage.

# Espra

All of these developments should mean that come late September we
should be in a really good position — in terms of reputation, finance
and technological development — to kick off the grander Espian/Espra
vision to the world. =)

Anyway, hope that's a good enough update for now. What do you all
think? Are you excited yet?

And, oh, if you are interested in joining in on any of this, do drop
by the IRC channel — #esp on irc.freenode.net

--
Cya soon, love, tav

plex:espians/tav | tav at espians.com | +44 (0) 7809 569 369
http://tav.espians.com | http://twitter.com/tav | skype:tavespian

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