First published on Medium December 15, 2017
Note: This essay continues from Developing P2P Networking and Nonlinear Dialogue: Part One. This text is openly licensed via Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. — Greg
This section describes the deep importance of modularity, ongoing dialogue and intercommunity in the development of p2p networking and nonlinear dialogue.
Deeply modular design is the keystone to effective, sustainable p2p networking and nonlinear dialogue.
That’s a big statement, and I might spend almost a lifetime defending it. We can approach it via the current entry for module in Modular Organization Terminology (MOT):
A module is a component which can be replaced by any valid alternative in a specific systemic context.
Each hyperlinked term above has its own MOT definition. Each definition is neither independent, nor entirely dependent on the others: they’re interdependent, as all terminology (and language) ultimately is.
A Basic Example of Modularity: Modularity is essential to all complex design work, and this is most clearly evident in physical systems.
For example, automobiles are deeply modular. The motor is a module which fulfills a car’s primary purpose: it makes it move. The motor is a key focal point of design, with its own dedicated engineering team(s). Individuals may spend their whole careers designing motors, or specific parts (components) of motors.
In each car design, the motor is effectively defined as a functional component with specific systemic interfaces, inputs and outputs. By defining interfaces, inputs and outputs in a reasonably strict way, we enable each component to become the focal point of deeply disciplined and skillful design work.
Modularity enables disciplined work, but it also allows systemic review and revision. For example, if an automaker wants to market an electric vehicle, they can redefine the motor and related systems in an existing gasoline-fueled vehicle. They may reuse many existing components. Each specific component of a modular system can be independently or interdependently refined, and potentially repurposed.
In our current (centralized, exploitative) economy, many modular design specifications are determined “in-house” by proprietary sources of goods and services. However, others become mutually supported standards across independent organizations. Such coordination has often been clearly compelling. (For contrast, imagine if each car make and model required a different type of fuel, or fuel dispensing nozzle!) Modular standardization eventually influences all major shared physical systems, including electrical and electronic components (light sockets, USB ports etc).
Modularity encourages creatively productive ongoing dialogue.
True dialogue — with sincere questions and answers, give and take — helps us to see beyond personal biases, and to subtract our biases from shared resources, goals and actions.
In a digitally p2p networked world, the tool of writing (and rewriting) is fully capable of expanding our dialogues instead of ending them with the establishment of canonical texts. The only things preventing this are (1) comfortably entrenched interests and (2) comfortlessly precarious — and thus fearful, conflict-averse! — designers.
As our true p2p networking potentials develop, we’ll learn to resist authoritatively authoring anything beyond our personal bodies and lives. We’ll subject shared ideas — including all rules and guidelines — to discussion and revision by communities of common interest. We’ll learn conversation for cooperation, common (consent-based!) action and context-sensitive (localized!) adaptation to diverse communities.
Of course, this will require a systematic reformatting of digital networking tools, techniques and content. However, our reformatted systems can be much simpler, more efficient and effective than our current conglomerations (and technical stacks) of overly separated, complicated and redundant systems. (More on that later.)
Minimal Investments: To enhance networking, dialogue and cooperative action between diverse people, we must all get better at the art of the minimum viable product (MVP). Instead of designing elaborate goals, products and services in sheltered spaces, we’ll design small, agile, rapidly iterated experiments which directly test our assumptions about what works, and why we personally want it to work.
The MVP concept emerged in ongoing product development by assigned teams. However, it can be generalized for use with most if not all social offers and requests. Minimum products enable smaller, safer investments.
Investment of resources, including our priceless personal time, is an important aspect of life. Major goals require planning and commitment. However, interpersonal or social investment rightfully relates to the development of trust, and that relationship has been corrupted or severed by modern organizing forms. Inflexibly convoluted organizations often compel us to invest in practically invisible, unaccountable projects and people we don’t know and shouldn’t trust. This is unhealthy organizing force.
To build an mutually responsible future, we must conscientiously decrease our reliance on investments and misplaced trust while increasing the role of clear open communication with open sources, open processes and open accounting. Open communication creates dynamically shared responsibility, instead of artificially induced faith in leaders and supposed “experts”.
Minimal investments play an especially crucial role in the potentials of our (disastrously misused) massive organizing forms such as national, international and transnational groups and governments. In large diverse groups of people, it’s clearly unreasonable to expect everyone to spend much time personally “vetting” social offers and proposals! While specialists can help large groups to analyze complex subjects, specialized roles should be rationally defined and limited. Specialists’ work should be clearly and simply described to larger groups, and accountable to other recognized specialists. With such safeguards in mind, specialized work can help goals and projects which intentionally minimize the interpersonal investments and trust we ask of our larger communities.
Minimized investments and trust will help us to build genuine intercommunity.
Intercommunity is basically the networking of communities. Like most deep concepts, its importance transcends the power of descriptive writing. I’ll try here to briefly hint at the transformative potential of intercommunity via p2p networking.
Intercommunity already exists: many groups have unofficial relationships with each other, and some organizations use official alliances, hierarchies and federations. However, all official groups and relationships are (designed, artificial) tools — and like many tools, organizations often manufacture relationships, or overlook important relationships and problems.
To tap our true intercommunity relationships and potentials, I think we must develop community media networks with inclusive options for personal media access, participation, and distributed version control of media items, including consent-based agreements at all levels of organization of officially related goals, plans, activities, records and reports. We can also develop simple per-person agreements which flexibly granulate, aggregate and iterate official relationships across the boundaries of all official groups and networks. Such creative development will build our p2p networking, nonlinear dialogue and collective intelligence.
This section is about moving forward together.
To develop p2p networking and nonlinear dialogue, I think that our most important tool will be a broadly consistent and flexible Collective Resource Description Framework. However, any such tool(s) will require flexibly related tools and techniques, including resilient [distributed media hosting](https://github.com/gcassel/Modular-Organization-Terminology/blob/master/compound-terms/distributed media hosting.md) and network service provider standards.
Regardless, we must build shared understanding of the importance of specifications and standards, including communications protocols, as keystones of all sustainably modular and distributed systems. We must learn to cooperatively develop protocols not platforms, and to practice communication not control.
By developing compatible networking tools and techniques via shared specs and standards, we’ll foster increasingly effective intercommunity dialogue for all types of design and planning. We’ll build digital commons and genuinely free markets of ideas, tools and techniques.
In a genuinely open competition of ideas, tools and techniques, the development of all systemic components — and their relationships — will be thoroughly distinguished. For example, the (realistic!) design of systems should be mostly independent of efforts to automate systemic functions via software applications. Of course, such design efforts are complicated by a challenge which each person and project faces: to sustainably develop valuable work. This is an economic dilemma for many people, including me, in our deeply unstable transitional times. I believe however that effective p2p media networking, including practices such as Open Ongoing Crowdfunding, can greatly help well-meaning people to align their work with personal values and goals.
The most complex and technically difficult challenge of p2p media networking — in fact, one of our greatest frontiers as a species — is the development of productive nonlinear dialogue which is deeply inclusive for individuals and for the development of intentional community standards. Both individuals and communities need flexibly modular media networking options. For example, the development of tools to tag, rate, and comment on shared media — both new content and hyperlinks — should be clearly separated from communities’ ability to create customized recipes and rules for the types of tagging and rating which they support (and directly enable). Also, individual media contributors should be allowed to enable or disable community-supported media sharing and feedback options, unless their specific community prevents such personal freedom — presumably, for clearly defined and defensible reasons. We’ll need to work together on such creative challenges of intentional community-building.
Each community should be able to develop according to whichever collective ideas, information and intelligence emerge within it. However, inclusive communities will internetwork — and in our global network of networks, the most collectively intelligent recipes for media tag-types and rating-types will rise above. We can work now to lay their foundations and start building them. My P2P Networking Projects
Here are some of my main open source documents related to the concerns and goals I’ve outlined above. Some of them already have modular relationships with each other, and I plan to adapt them as modules within a distributed versioning system:
- Modular Organization Terminology
- Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking
- Agreement-Based Governance
- P2P Media Network Governance
- Open Intermedia Commons
- Semantic Corating
- Covalence Prototype
- Consensus Calculus
- Open Ongoing Crowdfunding
- Community Markup Language
- Resource Development and Support System
Also, I contribute gladly to Value Flows. VF is closely aligned with my design goals, but it’s strictly (and smartly) focused on economic networking.
I’m also the primary author of Enspiral’s Personal Conduct Agreement and Harassment and Abuse Policy, although I left the creative team before the official adoption of those agreements. I plan to adapt draft documents for use by diverse communities.
If much of this text resonates with you, I desire dialogue!
I welcome public commentary on the links I’ve shared above, for anyone who feels comfortable with that. Of course, comment threads are limited — and while I’m devoted to working for the public and mostly in public, you may have excellent reasons to privately share your ideas, questions or concerns. So feel free to email me, especially if you perceive compatibility in our work! I’ll explore descriptive info or links, and we’ll talk by voice too if we should.
If you want to directly collaborate on anything, let me know! Understand however that I’m deeply committed to consent-based decision process, including all major planning and investment of shared resources. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to read all of Agreement-Based Governance before proposing any (potentially lengthy) collaboration.
I’m committed to the long road here: just a brief bit of human history, perhaps, but a critically complex transition which will surely include creative tensions. My distinctively focused design goals may contradict some well-planned and well-designed projects. I want each individual to know that I respect all sincere creative effort, and I hope that no one takes any creative conflicts too personally. I’m just trying my best to help build sustainably distributed systems for all people.
Regardless of whether any of us coordinate or collaborate, no one can own or control the goals which I’ve described here — not even in part. As Bob Haugen from Value Flows says, we’re all working on the same project. I think it’s just a question of when we realize that! I wish you all well and I look forward to collaborating directly or indirectly, sooner or later. :)