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The Global Square

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Members of the Occupy movement are building a “Facebook for protesters” called The Global Square. It will be open-source, respectful of privacy, and controlled by users.

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[edit] Lorea/Ellg

[edit] Diaspora*

Diaspora* is an open-source social network that helped inspire the concept of a Global Square where privacy issues would be taken seriously. A group launched a Kickstarter campaign for a distributed social network they called Diaspora*. Instead of routing all exchanges through a central clearinghouse, Diaspora* users would set up their own nodes, storing their information locally. Diaspora* can function as a social aggregator, bringing together feeds from various other platforms.

[edit] Global Square

Ed Knutson, a software developer from Milwaukee, engaged with Occupy Wall Street when the movement first started last fall. As the movement spread, Knutson traveled to several East Coast occupations and met with teams to discuss the technology needs by the movement. In October, a loose team of coders from across the country began collaborating to build a new platform.

Knutson was also in touch with members of the Indignados. Together, they began to imagine a network that would leap national boundaries and allow different movements to share information, plans, and expertise. The resulting project, Global Square, overlaps significantly with a more Occupy-specific project called the Federated General Assembly—run largely out of New York by a team coordinated by Sam Boyer. The Federated General Assembly is based on the open-source content-management framework Drupal and should roll out in March 2012.

On February 14, 2012 a document called "TheGlobalSquare: Call for coders" was released. The Global Square was described as "the first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet". The document identified various parameters for the project:

[edit] Structure: Organizing humanity in a single collective

The Global Square is to be an easy to use social and work platform for individuals and groups. One of the main goals is that it should have very low barriers of entry for inexperienced users. Another goal is that the Global Square be expandable to allow global coordinated and efficient work in every system. The Global Square recognizes the principles of personal privacy as a basic right of individuals and transparency to all users as an obligation for public systems.

[edit] The Global Square is not exclusively for activists.

Although the structure is designed for organization and coordination of personal relationships, assemblies and action, the platform is also conceived for independent work systems. An example of this is the News Commons, which will be a source of verified, crowd sourced and peer reviewed news on all topics.

Other early basic systems to be created on the Global Square are the Global Market for establishing new methods of exchange and the Renaissance and Evolution Forums for testing principles for governance and law. Future systems could include topics such as communications, healing, food, arts, sports, sciences, trade, housing, and energy.

[edit] P2P based

With the support of Delft University of Technology, The Global Square will mainly be developed based on the existing peer to peer technology provided by the file sharing software Tribler. By using this particular existing P2P technology it becomes virtually impossible to break or censor the network. The content files are not centralized in any physical server, so the network belongs to its users - a basic principle of participatory democracy applied to the on-line space.

[edit] Open system

The Global Square will include authentication mechanisms, relational schema and communication protocols. There will be a blend of network protocols, web services, data stores, P2P clients etc. .

[edit] Approach

Build something, get a real-world community to use it, and ask how it can be improved.

The goal is to have a functional prototype by March 2012. The Global Square will be a featured project at the Berlin Bienale from April 27, 2012 until July 1, 2012. Starting with a simple PC app, the first feature to be created is an operational skeleton for an attack resilient social network. This first prototype should already have robust security and use Elyptic Key Crypto to secure all communication.

[edit] Features after the March release

Using the Agile method the development team will focus on one feature or module for a few weeks, conduct tests, do a release and then focus on the next feature.

A goal is to have a smartphone app later in the year plus a standalone app with a usable GUI. Once the basic prototype is up and running, the team can add features beyond social networking, for instance, Squares, Task Groups or Events with communication systems. Once that is up and running the focus could be on "distributed decision making and voting" and the various Systems such as News Commons.

The project will use a Tribler kernel based on Python.


[edit] The Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative

You can make changes to Drupal.org yourself, too! In fact, thanks to the voting site, you have a list of people who also want to see your thing happen. Get in touch with them, form up a team, get set up with a sandbox, and start crankin’!

The Drupal Association will be holding “Drupal.org office hours” every Monday at 11:00 - 12:00 PT to support volunteers working on their own community initiatives.

[edit] GlobalSquare

GlobalSquare is a series of online and physical meetings and assemblies whose participants and organisers are individuals linked to the 15M, Occupy, Student Movements, Yo Soy 132!, Tharek, Idle No More!, VIA22 as well as other movements. The objective is to prepare a lively open space for physical contact and exchange during the World Social Forum (WSF) which will take place from 26-30 March 2013 in Tunisia where the flames of the global intifada first sparked in January 2011. We are hoping to enhance collaborations and exchange among citizens and activists who are linked to various movements in different continents by organizing collective events and actions towards, around and beyond the WSF.[1]

[edit] Resources

[edit] Related

[edit] References