[p2p-research] [globalvillages] Ning eliminates free networks

Mon Apr 19 08:17:58 CEST 2010

Hi Franz,

if you want to know what the p2p network is trying to find as solutions, you
can talk to Sam, who had some proposals for us, and we're working on them,

Michel

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:13 AM, Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada at reflex.at> wrote:

> Hi Jeff, all!
> Also doing a crosspost from globalvillages to other lists, because the
> subject was brought up there also.
>
> The NING message really stroke me. Its not only the Global Villages
> Network (globalvillages.ning.com) thats heavily depending on NING, but
> also many other networks that I know of and many that I run myself. If I
> had to pay for all of them I would go broke. They are fine and useful,
> like the Transition Europe and Transition Austria Network and Power Down
> and many other sites. They have brought a lot of people together and are
> much more useful than Facebook. Facebook is good to attract people, but
> its to noise and crowded to do in-depth discussions, store files and do
> many other things.
>
> Yes, I think its another kind of wrong dependency of communities on
> corporate strategies. Corporate business is more and more depending on the
> utilisation and enabling catalyzation of community work and outreach. But
> this is happening in a Wild-West manner with Lasso and branding iron, not
> in a decent way. What is needed would be  a kind of transitory covenant
> for me, and we - the community world - will have to learn the hard way to
> only go with the ones that are dedicated and set up for trustworthiness.
>
> I was assuming that there would be a much smoother transition strategy and
> not such a "shock therapy " and most likely I will keep only Global
> Villages Network on NING if at all. Then we would have to set up
> donations. I had a talk with Les Squires today, the mastermind from
> Colorado that built so many Transition sites, and they already run
> Transition US at a paid base, for 25 $ per months to keep it ad-free. This
> is based on donations.
>
> Its also no problem if we are doing this for a commercial client. Then we
> can simply charge the costs from the client. I did a project in Mixxt and
> received some money for it, and its totally OK in this case to give a
> share to the provider. What is not OK is to treat all the cases equally.
> The originator of the Austrian constitution, Hans Kelsen, is said to have
> said: "you cannot treat unequal things equally". Here comes my critique on
> NING.
>
> I thought that the owner and founder
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen)  was more serious in his
> approach, having the financial resources to really do meaningful things
> and having supported meaningful non-primarily-profit projects like
> Netscape for some time. My trust was even reenforced when I tried to
> create my eleventh NING seing that there was a barrier of ten built in to
> avoid excess.
>
> I am also ready to pay for services that I value, that is not the
> question. I had a time I could afford to support Andrius and the Minciu
> Sodas Ecosystem, now the main parts of my resources and the social capital
> I can mobilize financewise are taken by Helmut Leitners Wikiservice for my
> Dorfwiki. (www.dorfwiki.org)
>
> Here comes the catch. I think that using the vendor-lock-in trick and not
> helping people to migrate elsewhere is a variant of blackmail. Helmuts
> Wikiservice also is befallen by the "Vendor Lock In Disease" but I suppose
> would be fair enough to provide users an exit solution (the raw content of
> a Hypertext system exported as textfile by the way is absolutely not
> useful, which I saw in the case of Gesunde Erde Gesunde Menschen, = a Wiki
> that Helmut turned off for the proponents did not raise resources to pay
> for = and they were not able to reconstruct it even when we offered them
> ProWiki hosting on our experimental server which for good reasons I do not
> want to activate yet).
>
> Of course in the NING case its absolutely clear that they will not provide
> any opportunity to port the content. Or at least that would be very
> unlikely. From a database programmers perspective providing portability
> also is a nightmare. And where should one go, by the way? To facebook?
> Unless another service comes up with a content grabber there will be no
> chance. And you have to ask people for permission. You would have had to
> think of it way ahead.
>
> Currently the resources to pay for all the online venues that we utilize
> are dwindling, and its getting harder year by year to support the
> respective standards. I am still trying to convince Helmut of the
> necessity of fair conditions and he is trying the same with me from his
> commercial point of view. We are still far from each other. But in a world
> of blind he seems like the one-eyed for me, and he really is passionate
> about our content and gives reliable support. I try to find an economic
> base together with him that would allow us to provide good and free
> services. I say good and free services, including reliability, empathy,
> stability and respect.
>
> But there is another side to all this.
>
> I think there comes a great deal of responsibility for hosting other
> peoples content, and this responsibility is a cultural one. Our tragedy is
> that capitalism is a system of organized irresponsibility on ALL sides,
> and we have to experience painfully the absence of truly meaningful
> solutions and cultural standards in an age of transition of value creation
> from the factory to the individual. We do not reward people for coworking,
> and very often they are not ready to pay when they are already thinking
> along. Les gave me the exampe of Adam Green who had a very vivid dBase2
> newsletter at a time with 10000 subscribers. When he wanted to charge for
> it only 3 people were willing to pay for it. Les thinks that 90% of the
> existing NING sites might just go under after the move to commercial.
> Consider the amount of human labor lost !!!
>
> Coming back to NING, there is an open question of migration that must be
> answered.
>
> I found some UNSATISFACTORY answers here:
>
> http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/the-best-most-reliable-and
>
> The author of that blog post, JP is hyping Spruz, but their advertising is
> horrible. I already did a test site.
>
> I think that our community could think allong what are the alternatives to
> construct a social network that is closed and open at the same time. If
> you want to help please meditate about the list given there and help us
> find out about commited providers.
>
> I also include neighboring lists like videobridgebuilders and p2p-research
>
> I dont really think that Facebook and Twitter are so necessary - they are
> like booths in front of the house, inviting people in, but there is yet an
> inside and an outside.
>
> Les suggests that we might think of Wiser Earth, and, for a very small
> financial contribution, to also consider meetup.com. Many groups are just
> meetups, not many have extensive online discussions, and they are very
> reasonable in user-fee ratio. 70% of Transition sites are mainly using
> NING as event announcer.
>
> There is a slight chance on the other hand that we will make a quantum
> leap and install one system of our choice on globalvillages.org ourselves.
> We have a yet unused server online with 1GB/sec connectivity!
>
> I also think of Andrius and his information ecosystem and wished he would
> make his standards of action more understandeable. I had a long discussion
> with him last night and it worries me how difficult it is to agree on
> terms of usage that make sense for all sides. Its hard to point to the
> Mornflake example when the goals of the campaigns were not reached,
> because of unrealistic expectations.
>
> I have worked out a whole plan for the Minciu Sodas Information Ecosystem
> with Andrius (I must say its one of the most complete maps of an
> Information Ecosystem ever conceived) , and some parts of this were
> depending on commercial services which is totally understandeable from the
> pragmatic point of view. This is still a yahoogroup and Andrius has found
> out tremendous ways of integrating an external view to yahoogroups that
> could easily be turned into a valuable million dollar service and yet be
> free to communities. But most likely Yahoo would prevent that. And Andrius
> would most likely not be interested in that either - because he wants
> everything that we do to directly foster a culture of independent
> thinkers. But I point to him as one of the people who have a lot of great
> capacities in the field. I wish someone would bail him out and they would
> be able to agree in a meaningful way to use this capacity by agreed
> standards.
>
> So here I am - still confused and thinking and trying to make sense and
> find ways.
>
> all the best
>
> Franz
>
>
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