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The Global Square
Description
A platform to perpetuate the creative and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform them into lasting forms of social organization.
Network
Website theglobalsquare.org
IRC channel globalsquare /irc.freenode.net
Forum forum.theglobalsquare.org
General contact info@theglobalsquare.org
Wiki inquiries wiki@theglobalsquare.org
Twitter @globalsq

Welcome to TheGlobalSquare Wiki!

This is the repository of the ideas we agree to as we collectively build this global and common tool for social coordination and interaction - this is the best place to be informed about the project. If you have ideas participate in our Communication Channels. Let's make it all together!

Participate
If you are interested in joining the project, read our message to the Internet Community and choose how you want to take part. We are open for collaboration in many ways. Consider joining one of our Teams and help build the Global Square!
What is the Global Square?
Our goal is to perpetuate the creative and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform them into lasting forms of social organization. Don't know exactly what all this means? Read a summary of what all this project is about!
Donate and support
Consider helping the project also in a financial way. Money and services are needed in many fields of our project and the initiative depends on it to launch the project. Maybe you or your organization are willing to help?

Contents

Design Philosophy

TheGlobalSquare is a global, decentralized social and organizational environment which respects privacy for individuals and transparency for public organizations and actions. As a social environment we will facilitate open communication while retaining individual control over privacy. We support the right of individuals to assemble, associate and collaborate and to choose the manner of doing so. We support the right of individuals to share information in order to further our education and progress. We support individual participation in the actions and organizations which affect them.

As a working environment, our goal is to create working structures that allow collaboration on a massive scale. We strive to eliminate coercive hierarchical structures and centralized authority while also respecting individual and local autonomy and producing work of the highest quality. We encourage the use of transparency as communication, Stigmergy and Concentric User Groups as organizational structures, and Epistemic Communities to provide the highest level of expertise. We encourage working groups that are task and information driven, not personality driven. We support a worker's right to autonomy, mastery and control over their own work.

TheGlobalSquare will consist of P2P user profiles which will allow communication throughout a variety of social mediums and will enable global networking between local assemblies, task groups or events. TheGlobalSquare will work to create secure, global communications infrastructure and hardware and make this widely available. TheGlobalSquare will allow for the creation of global Systems for mass collaboration on topics of global interest.


Read more on TheGlobalSquare Concepts. These are some of the Features that may be included in the TheGlobalSquare.

Working streams

TGS P2P

Goal: making a social networking app for smartphones which is hardened against all known (government) sniffing, sabotage, fraud and legal attacks.

TheGlobalSquare will be developed starting with the existing peer to peer technology developed by TU Delft for the renowned file sharing software Tribler. Tribler is a project focused on decentralized social networks with years of expertise in peer-to-peer communication. By using this particular existing P2P technology it becomes virtually impossible to break or censor our network. The content files are not centralized in any physical server, so the network belongs to its users - a basic principle of participatory democracy applied to the on-line space. It encourages input from users from countries with censorship and blocking; with an 'unblockable' space to share all kinds of information and work collaboratively. It has been proven that WEB, as we know it, each day is more closed and subject to arbitrary and illegal blocking. A step beyond it is more than needed.

  • P2P System for Coders Everything about the android app and other parts of the P2P system including links to current code, design specifications, documentation and more.

Android-TGSMain.png

TGS Global Protocol

Goal: Establish a global protocol and data exchange vocabulary in order to connect every free social network initiative and project, gathering all of them into a common chain so they will be able to communicate easily and freely among each other. For that, events and coding effort take place supported by our project which provides a space of individuals and projects to exchange knowledge and experience as well as work together on building a worldwide language for social networks.

Events

Development

  • Open system TheGlobalSquare will include authentication mechanisms, relational schema and communication protocols. Authentication and communications are up to whoever implements this specification to build a system. That will allow a project to be "TheGlobalSquare compatible" while supporting semantic data, currently visualized as XML/RDF.
  • TheGlobalSquare XML/RDF Global Square "packet" looks like a GUID and 140-char text, a mechanism to attach larger pieces of data, like a long text field or an image, magnet link can contain both a hash code and a "backup" URL where a copy of the file is stored on the web.

TGS Systems

Goal: Using our new home to build new Systems. Each system is international but relates to local Task Groups and Events by providing expertise, reducing redundancy and allowing global collaboration on the parts of the system which are of global interest. Tasks will be created and completed by Stigmergy, and Concentric User Groups with Epistemic Communities to allow for expertise to be valued and used. Communication will be effected by transparency, any User can see the inner workings of all systems at every level. News feeds, forums, alerts and other communication methods will be made available between Systems and Users as needed. The structure of the Global Square is set up to encourage collaboration and cooperation between individuals but to discourage groups from acting as individuals and individuals from acting as groups, and to eliminate the need for this.


  • News Commons: The privileged position held by the media in most democracies exists for one reason; in order to govern themselves, people need access to accurate and timely information on all topics relevant to their governance.
Once that information has been distributed, it is not sufficient for the readers to passively absorb it as a means of entertainment, or even education. In order for self governance to occur, that information must be acted upon to correct flaws in governance.
News Commons is a very dynamic, Twitter speed effort to distribute all important information and news (the news we require in order to govern ourselves). Users could then take that information, analyze it against existing knowledge on the topic, match that to relevant law etc., and create action to stop corruption. A combination of a new form of crowdsourced news platform and a new forum for citizen government.
Features:
  • News: micro-blogging news, can be streamed by tag, source or region. Users also have the ability to write and post articles (User profile add-on), videos, or live streaming.
  • Analysis: needs an interactive method to tie everything together and crosslink stories and information. It should act as a resource to find all relevant information on people, corporations, news stories, and relevant legal authorities.
  • Action: can be created as Events. Can include physical events with calendars, maps, etc or draft documents (affidavits and other legal material included).
  • Renaissance and Evolution Forums The epistemic community for law and governance. Possible topics would include individual rights, methods of governance, trade and the financial system, property ownership, the legal system and a just society, disarmament, and more. Because the underlying principles of law and governance should act as an unchanging foundation if law and governance is not to be arbitrary and unpredictable, it is best if principles are tested as a scientific hypothesis would be and first judged against all situations where they would be applied before they are adopted in a permanent form. An individual cannot enter into an informed social contract with a society without reliable underlying principles.
  • Anyone can propose a principle, as a very brief and basic statement. For example, under the topic Individual Rights, a principle may be No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
  • When that principle receives enough interest, it can be raised (opened) for debate.
  • Debate consists of a hypothesis testing style table, where any participant can link information and documents for or against the principle and discuss each document in a reddit style comment stream.
  • When a point cannot be strongly rebutted, it can be nominated as a point in favour or against the principle and raised to a table on the positive or negative side of the principle, with links to the discussion for the point.
  • Once a point has been raised, any participant can vote it up or down so we have an idea of the importance attached to each point.
  • Votes overall can be used to rate each principle.
No decisions are made by this process, this resource is to act as an international epistemic community only. Assemblies then use this resource to aid them in drawing up their own collaborative documents. For example, if an assembly decides to meet for two hours because they wish to draw up a document deciding what local currency they will use, they may not wish to start the discussion debating whether local currency should be used at all. They can just go to the forums, select "A local currency will be adopted" and be instantly linked to a table of all of the information regarding the consequences of that decision, and anyone in the community reviewing that document will also be able to see the previous (international) debate. Assemblies would assess the points raised and come to their own decision for their own locality.
  • Each principle will show what squares have adopted it to facilitate networking for common goals, etc.
  • Incompatible decisions cannot be selected (ie selecting both the right to life and the death penalty).
The Forums do not make decisions, they are a tool for gathering expertise and discussion so that local assemblies can have access to all available information and avoid overlooking important points or adopting principles with unforeseen consequences or adopting contradictory principles. The Forums act as the epistemic community for local law and governance decision making.
  • Global Market Will facilitate the exchange of goods and services and establish direct trade relationships as well as coordinate resource distribution among the Global Square community.

Future systems could include such topics as health, food, arts, sports, sciences, trade, housing, and energy.

TGS Communications Infrastructure

Goal: ensuring secure, global communications infrastructure and hardware.

Events

Coming events

Place: Berlin Biennale - Berlin, Germany
Activities: Conferences, talks, hackathon, presentations.

Past events

  • 2.26.2012 - Getting the hands dirty, meeting for coders
Place: IRC channel #globalsquare at irc.freenode.net
Time: 20.00 GMT
Activities: New coders getting the necessary knowledge to start coding. Solve doubts.
Subject: Welcome volunteers, please add the Skype screen-name theglobalsquare to your contacts.

Latest on media

Check the (still not) complete media coverage.


BBC covers The Global Square: a grassroots social network (RoarMag, 2/22/2012)

BBC Outriders (BBC Radio 5, 2/21/2012)

'Global Square': Wikileaks-Backed Activist Platform Launching in March (CommonDreams, 2/16/2012)

Activist-backed Online Collaboration Platform Due for Release in March (PC World, 2/15/2012)

Activist-backed collaboration platform set for March release (ComputerWorld, 2/15/2012)

Occupy Wall Street Captures the Web (Citizen K, 2/06/2012)

Occupy Wall Street Builds Facebook Alternative (Forbes, 1/03/2012)

Occupy Facebook: a social network for protesters (WaToday, 12,30,2011)

Occupy Facebook: Protesters Planning Their Own Social Network (Slate, 12/29/2011)

Would you join a Facebook-style Occupy social network? (CBC, 12/28/2011)

Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99% (Wired Magazine, 12/27/2011)

Links

TheGlobalSquare Affiliated projects

TheGlobalSquare Affinity groups

P2P Tools

  • guifi.net Open, Free and Neutral P2P network.
  • Tribler Decentralized P2P file-sharing project.
  • YaCy P2P Search Engine.
  • Dot-BIT Distributed DNS

Networking Tools

  • Diaspora* Distributed social network under AGPLv3.
  • Diasporg Public Pod for Diaspora*.
  • DSNP: Distributed Social Networking Protocol
  • InterFace Decentralized open source social network with encrypted chat and anonymous forums.
  • Lorea Distributed and federated nodal organization of entities with no geophysical territory. Largest network https://n-1.cc/ for activism and collaborative work.
  • I2P Anonymizing encrypted network.
  • Freenet Anonymous p2p network, with plugins for mercurial revisioning system, chat, forums, microblogging, bitcoin etc.

Python Resources

Related Projects and Interesting Initiatives

  • Federated General Assembly Project for a collaboration platform.
  • Kune Kune, A web tool to encourage collaboration, content sharing & free culture.
  • Propongo Open platform for taking of decision among individuals and assemblies in Spain.
  • VirtualPol Democratic voting/participation platform as part of 15-m/DRY movement
  • Uproot.it Collaborative media project including Friendica-based social network

Wiki Friends

  • occupy-dev For tech-related topics.
  • OccupyMediaWiki MediaWiki support and promotion.
  • Occupy.Net For general topics on the occupy movement, especially regarding the USA.
  • Occupy Research Distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether.
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