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

Mon Apr 19 10:46:14 CEST 2010

copying sam, whose advice on this I trust 100%

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:38 PM, Pamela McLean <pam54321 at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Hi Franz and Michel (and Andy and Ryan)
>
> I am wondering if the work we have done (and plan to do) for
> www.dadamac.net is relevant to your needs. I have been working with Ryan
> and Andy on this, as resources have allowed, for the past year or so. We are
> designing and developing dadamac as the "online home" that is needed for the
> dadamac community.
>
> Our work may be relevant to you because, from the start I have been setting
> dadamac.net up to serve an existing network (which I now call the "dadamac
> community"). Like many networks it is not easy to define - but for the sake
> of this email all you need to know is the nature of the problem we are
> trying to address, and how far we have got. Then you can judge if our
> foundations are useful for you to build on.
>
> I need an online home for Dadamac for various reasons. We are involved in
> many things (which are scattered around online and on the ground). I need
> some way to bring them all together, make them more visible, make it easier
> for "outsiders" to get involved with us, provide a kind of one-stop-shop for
> all we are doing so that people can rummage around for themselves to see
> what interests them. At the same time I need spaces which are for private
> meetings etc. This is an oversimplification - there is much more - regarding
> action groups and so on. Also there is stuff which is working already but
> you cannot see as you are not a member of the relevant groups. In my mind I
> can see the information flows that I am trying to enable, and the
> relationships (people to people, people to information, information to
> information) that I am trying to enable.
>
> I needed to pull it all together, and I was not satisfied with what I
> understood to be available through eixisting things like Facebook and NING.
> If you visit Dadamac.net  you will only see it as far as it has got.  What
> you nee to see is what is in my mind (which is what I would like you to be
> able to have). But if we have the right conversation and involve Andy and
> Ryan, they can explain better what we are doing, and how, and you can decide
> if our foundations would be of use to you.
>
> Andy - you will recognise that this is partly about the "CKK/CCK" thing you
> and I have been talking about which I need to ask Ryan about implementing.
> Plus our existing visible Drupal stuff, and our invisible Moodle stuff and
> various things around the edges.
>
> I imagine that either people could copy our framework and put in their own
> info - or we could all do something using the existing framework.  I don't
> know exactly. I just know that it would be sad to waste effort duplicating
> things if the effort we have already put in would be useful to others.
>
> Pamela
>
>
>
>
> On 19 April 2010 07:17, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.orgourselves.
>>> 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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>>
>>
>>
>>  --
>> Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think
>> thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
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>>
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>>
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-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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