Structure

The Planetwork Consortium is by design a loose affiliation of participating individuals and constituent entities, which seeks to increase mutual awareness, cooperation and collaboration among many efforts. The Consortium seeks to structure itself out of the interaction of participating entities.

Our favorite metaphor for the Planetwork Consortium is a empty table on which everyone can lay out their pieces of the puzzle and turn them face up so that everyone can begin to see how they fit together. When the pieces have all self-assembled what we will see will be the image of the puzzle as a whole, not the surface of the table.

Among the core founding partners are:

CHI, Commons Holdings Inc, a chaordic organization whose purpose is to assure user control of their own identity data. The Planetwork Consortium is a member of CHI and as such affirms its principles and purpose. The Planetwork Consortium affirms the CHI purpose as our first principle of online identity.

Venture Collective, a not-for-profit social purpose investment fund founded by Brad DeGraf. The Planetwork Consortium will work with the Venture Collective to distribute funds raised through a variety of directed channels representing enabling social purpose network software, identity software, independent media and news distribution, alternative finance and commerce, and digital diversity and online access to underserved communities around the world, and on a variety of terms, from outright grants, to loans and directed investments through a revolving fund mechanism.

Friendly Favors, the largest and perhaps oldest example of a social network software system, founded by Sergio Lub and built by Victor Grey, Favors has over 12,000 core Cultural Creatives on the system. The Favors system is hosting both the Planetwork Consortium participants and the Venture Collective membership databases, as well as those of many other organizations.

The Berkana Institute is a scientific, educational, and research foundation (a 501-c3 public foundation). Since 1992, Berkana has worked with people around the world to discover new organizational forms, processes, and leadership that affirm rather than destroy life. It uses an understanding of living systems to determine how to organize in ways that are interdependent, generous and self-organizing. Berkana believes that it is possible to use technology to increase this capacity for self-organizing Ð and that weÕre all in the middle of a grand experiment in making that possibility a reality.

The Planetwork.net site will offer links to demonstrate, and where appropriate download, tools offered by all participating entities. To participate in the Consortium, each entity (company, working group, independent developer) must affirm its alignment with the ecological restoration and social justice objectives articulated in the Earth Charter, as well as the purpose and principles of CHI and agree to strive to achieve greater interoperability among software by implementing as many of the five software principles as possible.

We strive to operate by cooperative working consensus, rather than by an adversarial democratic process. As a functional model we take our inspiration from the IETF RFC process and we aspire to emulate that process for emergent social network standards.

updated: August 31 12:53am CET