Thank you to Janet Feldman, Kerry Santo, Jeff Buderer, Joy Tang, Franz
Nahrada, Algis Cibulskis, Lucas Gonzalez Santa Cruz, Ed Daniel, Chris
Messina and all for input regarding our requirements for a "peer-to-peer
social networking system".

I sketch out my vision. I invite our thoughts.

Our lab Minciu Sodas http://www.ms.lt serves and organizes independent
thinkers. We want to integrate them, and so our concern is to foster
them as leaders.

Generally, independent thinkers find themselves in the periphery, away
from the center. That is because the center is defined by those who are
quick to accomodate each other without genuine agreement.

Appreciating this, I wish to design a system where our energy is pointed
out towards our leaders, those independent thinkers who present clear,
mature, accountable, well developed alternatives to mainstream thinking.
By highlighting their initiative, we shift attention to many points on
the periphery, and open up space for more and more leaders, so that all
of us might act as leaders. We disintegrate our world as we know it.

Our networking system, as I imagine it, is defined by our wish to foster
leadership by independent thinkers. My experience is that we choose how
fully we wish to develop as independent thinkers. We might say there is
a "giraffe scale" of how high we stick out our necks. In talking with
people, I observe degrees to which we dare to stand as individuals:

- "A discussion group for independent thinkers? Yes, that sounds
interesting, please sign me up."
- "I value independent thinkers, I think we need more of them"
- "Yes, I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I am
glad to voice my opinion as needed"
- "Yes, I actually jot down my thoughts and sort through them and have
some techniques for developing my ideas, and I can share my personal
experience"
- "Yes, I want to get things done, and I'm glad when I can add momentum
for anybody's project as needed"
- "Yes, I want to know myself, and I appreciate all the help that I can
get so that I might grow as a person."
- "Yes, I'm able and willing to say what concept of all is deepest in my
life"
- "Yes, I love challenging myself as directly as possible with questions
that I don't know the answer to but will work to answer"
- "Yes, I will challenge others to grow so that we might engage each
other as equals because I would like their help in challenging myself"
- "Yes, I reach out to every person and try to understand where they are
at, and support them in their growth as an independent thinker, and that
helps me be active and grow wise and complete on all levels"
- "Yes, I make a special effort to seek out and connect with the people
who are most different from me and others I know, so that we might bring
together the widest variety of outlooks, and be able to truly show that
deep inside we are the same"
- "Yes, I reject this world, and I turn to an absolute vantage point
which you may call God that is greater than I and this world in every
way. I engage this vantage point so that I may be excellent at tuning in
to it, listening for it, and most importantly, listening to it, so that
I might be quick to step beyond myself, protect others from my own
meddling and be able to lead for us all"

I think we all have voices inside that whisper such thoughts.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that is ultimately crushing. It's a
great struggle to not get categorized into all kinds of boxes.
Typically, we're forced to hush up our dreams, sweep them under the rug,
suppress them, throw them away. Some of us, however, have managed to
stick our necks out quite far, and openly be ourselves. What we live
openly is what we can stand on. This is how we win our own reality.
That is why "working openly" is so important for independent thinkers.

Working openly, our lab is a space that is an equal to the world, an
alternative to it, and perhaps some day a replacement for it. We're
able to say and do openly whatever we need to. Also, working openly,
we're accountable for what we're getting done and how we're growing. So
there's not much point in stirring up others if we can't explain our own
values, or challenging others if we can't challenge ourselves. By
working openly we're all able to acknowledge where we are - how far
we're sticking our necks out now - and how farther we'd like to go.
We're also very grateful to have leaders who encourage us by their
example and show just how normal we are.

We're fostering leaders, and so in our system, each participant needs to
stand alone, however modestly. That is why we're developing a
"peer-to-peer" social networking system. Each of us should be able, as
much as possible, to host and maintain our own part of the system. Our
goal is that we each develop effective presences as online leaders. As
independent thinkers, our priority is to be who we are, and found and
integrated by anybody who might care, rather than to try to search and
guess who such people might be. We don't organize others except as it's
relevant for our own growth. However, we except that for each of us,
what starts out as a web page will grow into a community that overlaps
with many others.

We're focusing on our own work with our own thoughts, and so it makes
sense that we can do as much as possible offline. This is also very
relevant, for example, in Africa, where we have participants who spend
as much as $3 per hour and $300 per month on Internet access.

We want to each stay independent. We don't want to lock ourselves into
systems hosted by our lab or by others. We also want to participate as
simply as possible, and invest ourselves as little as we can in the
technology. This suggests that our system make good use of humble
existing technologies such as home made HTML pages, some extra tags, and
RSS feeds. Certainly, there can be services that simplify the creation
of such pages, or host them, but the system should function without
depending on them.

Because we're working openly, it's essential that our functionality
declare and assume, by default, that content is in the Public Domain
except as noted otherwise, as at http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org
This will also help with our content flows. And wherever possible we
want to allow participation without registering or logging in.

I now list a variety of web functionality that I think mirror our growth
as independent thinkers. We might consider what they might mean should
we serve 50,000 students in India.

Monthly newsletter - I hope that all of the students will have email.
We would want to send out a monthly newsletter to all of the students to
alert them to how they can participate.

Gateways - At our lab we have all-purpose discussion groups in different
languages that are set up to introduce people to our work. These are
the groups that I sign people up for so as to introduce them to our lab.
We keep the traffic to an average of 5 letters per day or less.
Typically, we need several hundred people. I imagine that 10% of the
students might join, so we would want to set up 5 to 10 gateways in
various languages, and for various institutes or regions. It can take
several months for a person to feel ready to participate.

Personal archives - Once a person starts to write letters or make posts
somewhere on the web, then it is good if their writings can be found in
one place. I imagine that they can have an HTML page that uses
primitive mark up ("extensions" of HTML) such as <name>Andrius
Kulikauskas</name> and
<rss>http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/minciu_sodas_en/rss</rss> or
<group>minciu_sodas_EN@yahoogroups.com</group>. Such pages can be
generated and hosted with the help of an online wizard, or they can be
created by hand. This page would be registered or found and then any
community to which the person belonged might monitor the relevant RSS
feeds or mailing lists or wikis or websites, store the contents in their
database, perhaps also spidering the relevant pages, identify the
person's contributions, merge all of the letters and postings for that
person, and generate for them: a news feed with links to their latest
postings, an online database which they can search, and an archive which
they can download. In other words, by just maintaining a list of
venues, they are able to get the equivalent of a
website/blog/RSSfeed/database/archive. The community offers this as a
free service because the content is in the Public Domain and it can draw
on all of it in fostering connections. For example, the community is
able to map out who participates at which venues. Furthermore, for free
or for a fee they are able to set up a list of feeds, websites, etc.
that they want to monitor for changes, and this information they can
reviewed or downloaded as needed and read offline at their leisure.
This is the start of an independent thinker's web presence - to
encourage them to post their thoughts, and to archive them. Typically,
10% of our subscribers are active participants, so we might expect 500
such from India.

Profile for Projects - Once an independent thinker has a "face" and has
practice participating online, then they are ready to engage responsibly
in all manner of projects. This is done by adding more tags to their
web page, for example <skills>,<wants>,<thanks>,<praise>,<contact>, etc.
Again, this can be done by hand or, more typically, by making use of a
wizard. These are generally excerpts (paragraphs), often based on
letters or postings. (Note that they are not atomic, so for example,
<contact> might include all contact information, or <skills> might
include all programming languages known - searches for Python
programmers will return the entire excerpt). There is a form for
publishing the excerpts or posting new text, and categorizing them
(adding the tags). This information is kept on the one page, but as it
grows, it can expand into additional pages. The page is monitored by
the various communities to which the individual belongs (membership is
also given by tags and reciprocal linking). The tag information is
stored in a database and is presented as RSS feeds that can be
aggregated as needed. This is the information that is relevant for
global online and local offline community currencies. People will
naturally participate in several communities. A community can
facilitate discovery amongst its own participants and also reach out to
share information with other communities, especially as this is public
information. We share information about how people may be approached,
for example, their interest in physically meeting up, and schedule
topics for discussion at web chat channels (and send out invitations).
Note also (if email becomes a problem) that email contacts can be
replaced by not posting emails but instead pointing to channels (such as
forms, groups) for making initial engagements. The purpose here is for
independent thinkers to grow in applying their principles by
participating in a large number of small projects. This might be 250
students on whom we would focus our energies as networkers to facilitate
working together.

Notebook - The independent thinker then looks deeper into their own
values and also comprehensively, so as to take an interest in all
subjects and not overlook anything fundamental. It is at this point
that collecting URLs and organizing notes starts to have meaning as a
reflection of a person's sorting out their values and showing the
workings of their soul. The excerpts from above, and those created upon
collecting URLs, can be organized using a tool like Lucid. Similarly,
RSS feeds can be organized, generated and aggregated using such a tool.
This notebook makes it straightforward to monitor and engage a thinker.

Dialogues - The independent thinker is interested to know themselves,
find themselves. (Perhaps 100 students). They accept help from others,
emulate good examples, seek absolutes, principles, an absolute vantage
point. We have tools for engaging them and each other. These include
one-on-one chats for which we save and share the transcripts. We also
have one-on-one phone conversations and conference calls which we tape
and share through an Internet radio channel (through archive.org) These
are the key people that we invest ourselves in. We invite them to
participate at Open Leader Biz in our work-on-tap programs so that they
have work for themselves as needed (typically 10 hours per week). This
is where we generate our income - up to 100 x $10,000 equals $1,000,000
per year in wages for the students - and presumably that means another
$1,000,000 per year in high paying work and mark up for our network's
leaders. (Note that we don't charge for education - we offer free
education - and the institutes don't take a cut - we have free
relationships with the students - and they have self-selected
themselves, we do not turn anyone away. And that these promising
students may very well stay in our network, in one way or another, for
their entire lives. Also, these are the "independent thinking" students
who have demonstrated that they "work for free" to help various
projects, and who, without us, might be frustrated, discouraged,
depressed, crushed, warped, stunted. Also, the key contacts here - I,
Ed Daniel, etc. - would each be positioned to earn, I imagine, $50,000
to $100,000 per year depending on our roles.)

Working Groups - The independent thinker recognizes the key concept that
they have found for themselves at the heart of all others. It is the
concept that most completely expresses all of their concerns in life.
It is the window onto their soul. They foster their intuition by living
this concept. We help them name and brand this concept. Ultimately, we
organize a working group for them around their concept where they can
grow as a leader, an investigator. But first we may have their activity
be hosted at an existing working group so that they might build
relationships with others, develop as an investigator, and build
critical mass for their projects. They also set up a set of RSS feeds
that reflect their key concept and the information they monitor for that
(and others might to learn about it).

Wiki Spaces - The independent thinker grows as an Investigatorius by
investigating a question which clarifies their key concept in some way.
It should be one for which they don't know the answer, but intend to
discover, perhaps in six months to two years. We set up a wiki space
within one of our wikis so that they might develop their world view and
pursue their investigations. The leader for that wiki helps them grow
as an investigator. The wiki space is intimately connected to their
Lucid tool for organizing excerpts and also to their RSS feeds, etc.
Special databases are developed as needed for collecting examples,
patterns and relating them to other databases, such as the sets of
strategies, problems, values collected by the Union of International
Associations http://www.uia.org We might have 50 investigations.

Galleries - The independent thinker who reaches out to others can lead
and organize a gallery space that showcases the many individuals, groups
and projects that circle around their core concept.

Sorting Piles - The independent thinker who reaches out, coaches and
mentors others is generally overworked. The load on them is too large.
So the thought is to have a way for them to offload the incoming
requests they receive. We would set up sorting piles for each of our
working groups (based on key concepts). Then they would be served by
global teams that would have secretarial authority to go through the
piles and respond. The team members would thereby grow in connections
and experience and would receive typically community currency. They
would also build their brand (for example, One Village might have teams)
and the tasks would be noted, leaving a record that could be shown to
current or potential funders. This will also relate back to the Profiles
for Projects. In responding, the team members would encourage the
private correspondents to participate publicly, especially through the
working groups. Meanwhile, the leader would be free to spend more
energy as a mentor and Direktorius, helping the team members grow as
Investigatorius. I would like to set this system up for Janet Feldman,
Franz Nahrada, Kerry Santo and others. Perhaps we will find 5 or 10
students who are exceptional leaders and might play such a role.

Glossaries - The independent thinker, in rooting themselves in a greater
perspective, will want to write out a glossary of their private
language. This helps them open up and make clear the language by which
they interpret their understanding of the Absolute. In time, it makes
sense to keep relating such glossaries as self-checks on one's thinking.

This is quite a wide system and there is a lot left to specify. But
much of it can be built with quite humble technology. My strategy is to
focus on the needs of our key people such as Franz and Janet and
multiply their effectiveness by spreading out their load and involving
so many more of us in the important work that comes to them. In a
similar pattern, our leaders who find large work projects will be able
to share paid work.

I think that many aspects and the general outlook is quite novel.
However, it's certainly helpful to consider what technologies are
available, what initiatives are compatible, and who might be interested
in working together. It's very exciting to consider how CivicSpace
might be adapted to serve many of our needs, and especially, how it
might serve as a "community name server" for interacting with pages
distributed across the web.

I look forward to our thoughts!

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Direktorius
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@...
+370 (5) 264 5950
Vilnius, Lithuania