Planetwork Consortium Principles

Participants in the Consortium affirm their common purpose and agree to the following principles:

First Principle

User control of one's own Identity and Relationship data - we take our first principle from the purpose of Commons Holdings. Individual control of one's own identity is the foundation of online social networking, indeed it may also represent the basis for an "online bill of rights."

General Principles

Noncommercial - the core network is a noncommercial commons where individuals meet and interact as Citizens of the Earth rather than consumers.

Transparent, decentralized and collaborative democratic governance - to the extent that the consortium exists as an institution, it is the shared intention of those participating that its governance be conducted in a manner that is transparent, decentralized and collaborative.

Chaordic structure - this is a new word, combining chaos and order, coined by Dee Hoc, founder of VISA, to describe a new kind of decentralized organizational structure. We all like the idea and acknowledge that nobody really knows how to do it yet.

Software Principles

Software Consortium partners endorse the Earth Charter, become a member of Commons Holdings, and agree to strive to achieve greater interoperability in the software they make available through the Consortium Software Pool by implementing as many as possible of these five software principles starting from the top of the stack.

  1. Open, nonproprietary file formats and protocols
  2. Cross platform implementation
  3. Decentralized and distributed servers and databases
  4. Open API's
  5. Open Source

We take our inspiration from the IETF RFC process and we aspire to emulate that process for emergent social network standards.

 

updated: Aug 28, 2002 - 11:30 am PDT