N2N Vision

Network of Networks
January 7, 2012

Vision
The Star we follow; our unwavering purpose

A global online network that supports our work in the world –– ecological and social restoration to bring about a just, peaceful and sustainable future for all.

Mission
The Mountain we climb; our big audacious goal

To build a platform that offers both individuals and institutions –– drawn from overlapping communities of purpose, place and practice –– a collaborative Network-of-Networks that supports more effective organizing and shared purposeful activity as global citizens.

Strategy & Tactics
The Playing Field we must traverse; our method of overcoming challenges

Initially deployed within a single system that will offer a foundational user experience with both world-class UI/UX, and trust-based user-centric data exchange, which will allow the network to begin to scale; the system will ultimately allow permission-based data exchange to fully interoperate across multiple independent systems.

The foundation of N2N must be structured meta-data that will make possible new and more coherent tools and services for:

The system will do so by allowing

To describe themselves and selectively share data across 5 Axes of Proximity

Data Axes will allow graphic visualization tools to display new Maps of the network across any combination of orthogonal axes.

Structured permission-based meta-data exchange allows the creation of a Trusted Discovery Network.

With a trusted network entities can orient themselves in relation to each other by seeing themselves and each other in a new kind of Mirror. This will allow all entities to self-organize and cooperate around shared purposeful activity through more coherent Messaging and emergent Media. Ultimately, Money is a one-dimensional substitute for insufficient information in a system of exchange. This too can evolve in a more transparent and information-rich environment.

N2N: The Network of Networks

What is the big compelling vision for the Network of Networks? This is the question that Planetwork has been grappling with and seeking to articulate for well over a decade.
(see Background History)

If civil society –– NGO’s and the vast overlapping network of individuals whose interests they represent –– were able to more coherently self-organize through an online network, it would transform the world.

If social media were designed to support deeper purposeful activity, beyond merely frivolous distractions and mundane activities such as getting a job, getting a date, or sharing pictures of your puppy, but evolved to also provide functional tools to allow global citizens to shape our shared destiny together, we could transform the world.

The scope and complexity of the real challenges we face in the world now go far beyond simply deciding when to show up in a square together to protest and overthrow a despot.

To intelligently shape our collective understanding of meaningful issues, and see our shared opinion about those issues reflected back to us, will require far more sophisticated and purposeful tools and services than we have so far seen in what is called social media. To fulfill the potential that we have just begun to see emerge will require an online platform that is intentionally attuned to such goals and outcomes.

What specifically could we do differently from what has already happened by accident with existing on-line social media if we intentionally set out to do it?

There are many possible answers, but with the emergence of Facebook and other social media, it has now become much easier for many people to feel that they viscerally understand the answers.

For any social media platform to ultimately be effective it must do several things:

As a platform for online organizing Facebook appears at first to have already won on point 1, but is actually far from appropriate for many needs on point 2, and has already proven itself evil on point 3. In contrast, Google Plus promises to do better on point 2, but seems determined to antagonize the early adopter community on point 3, while seeking to vie with Facebook on point 1.

Linkedin is a closed system making it far from what is needed by communities to adopt as the basis of their own system, while Twitter is so limited in its functionality as to be irrelevant as a core platform for identity-based online-community.

Thus, there is a clear opening for something else, for something new, that can build its core foundation on Trust, allow a cadre of developers to contribute to a steadily expanding pool of apps and modules to extend genuine functionality, while scaling toward critical mass, initially among a core self-selecting population.

To be relevant as a core platform for on-line community, a system will need to fulfill a number of functions. Those should transcend the limited activities currently possible on Facebook, and include a wide spectrum of other potential activities and services relevant to any group engaged in purposeful organized activity together, from an ad hoc group, to a club, to an NGO, to a company or corporation.

Collaborative tools are actually a universal need for any working group. To make it possible to build and deploy tools and services, certain types of core data structure will be necessary.
More challenging, to fulfill the need for Trust, based on genuine privacy and both individual and institutional control of shared data, the foundational architecture of the system will need to fulfill certain minimal design criteria. Individuals must control access, distribution and sharing of their own profile data on the system. In other words, the system will need to offer each individual “user-centric” control of their own data.

In the highest long-term vision N2N will need to be distributed across multiple systems. That means that unlike Facebook, N2N cannot ultimately only live inside one centrally controlled system, but must instead, like the Internet itself, be distributed across an infinite number of independent but interoperating systems.

This leads to the hard problem –– the system must ultimately offer user-centric data, permissions and access control across that entire network of systems. This has recently come to be called the Federated Social Web, and has its roots in the ASN White Paper. asn.planetwork.net

The problem for any single entity attempting to create a viable online community by itself has been that no platform will be interesting and compelling enough to draw many individuals to adopt it as their primary interface unless it has utility and relevance across a wide spectrum of their interests and activities. But, unless users do embrace that platform as a primary interface, it will not be tightly integrated enough into their lives to make it relevant and effective for daily activity. Thus, most people have been forced to use the system that has achieved dominant scale, namely Facebook.

The question becomes how to design and implement an effective strategy for building an initial version of N2N under the conditions that we face in the world now.

Background History
August 30, 2002

What could the potential positive impacts on the world be if a vast network of people sharing ecological and social justice values could come together, and come to see themselves as a whole, using the Internet?

What kind of information technology might help to facilitate, and even catalyze, the emergence of an electronically mediated "chaordic" network on a global scale?

These questions played a central role in the genesis of Planetwork NGO, Inc. a California 501(c)(3) first founded in 1998. They also were the core of the motivation behind the first invitational held in July 1999, as well as the international Planetwork Conference held at the Presidio in May 2000. Soon after that conference an informal group calling itself the Webcabal started meeting to discuss various possibilities and potential implementation strategies. In 2001 this process became LinkTank, operating as a fiscal project of Planetwork NGO, Inc. LinkTank is officially a network of twenty-three voting participants, from a variety of professional backgrounds, largely in the Bay Area and New York, with a nine-member board. However, the conversation expanded to include participation by more than fifty people spanning many organizations in several counties. The Link Tank process distilled the following statement of purpose:

We are dedicated to the creation and maintenance of a digital communications platform, operated as a public interest utility, that will strengthen civil society by enabling people to connect, communicate, make transactions, and self-organize in a manner that is consistent with the highest principles of democracy and reflects an enlightened understanding of the fragile beauty of our planet. We will bring together, develop, promote, and hold as a global public commons, software tools and infrastructure that facilitate the emergence, growth, and vitality of networks of individuals and organizations who share ecological and social justice values, as articulated in the Earth Charter.

Many organizations, and even networks of networks, are now represented in online databases, but each remains largely an island unto itself. Many sites have sought to be "the" portal to the larger whole, but this approach only insured that none could ever succeed. The LinkTank Principles were articulated in response:

Any solution must appeal to the perceived objectives of existing constituent entities.

Any solution must facilitate the creation of an "interoperable" network of networks.

Any larger "meta-network" must be an emergent property, an epiphenomenon of many individual decisions and actions.

There must be no specific center to the network; its center must be everywhere and nowhere.

The most effective approach will be to facilitate the development of tools that will allow organizations to better interact with their own memberships. Then, by virtue of many people in many overlapping networks using interoperable tools, a very large virtual network can be formed – a vast array of databases representing individuals and their relationships as if in a virtual peer-to-peer network.

http://www.planetwork.net/consortium/textpages/background.html

N2N Vision 1.0a updated 1/7/12