Distributing, Distribution, Decentralisation

by ekes

03 Jan 2008

Some thoughts, and things I've been doing, about getting information shared as well as decentralised.

A short while back I went to the Federating Social Networks workshop at Mediamatic. It was in it's way inspiring - I think for the main thrust everyone I work with is in their marginal case. We are the 'twenty percent'! For us privacy is more than sharing more information across platforms with definable groups. Defining groups is a huge step forward from the present emphasis on sharing absolutely everything with 'your friends'. Being able to move your postings over platforms is really interesting. To do this the Mediamatic event focused on the use of XMMP, I suppose the presence, enthusiasm, and cool ideas of Blaine may just have had something to do with this.

Then a few days ago in Dries Drupal predictions for 2008 he talks about Object Relational Mapping. Now that's an exciting idea for anything above and more!

And then the bigger picture bit of the Indymedia CMS discussion start to clarify some ideas about a the idea of a 'distributed cms' they are looking at ICE middleware for the by the way.

So my brain explodes :-) but for now lets say there are some cool ideas about for facilitation of distribution, distributing and decentralisation.

What worries me about the Indymedia plan, although I'm sure someone will explain it to me otherwise, is that it will require a certain amount of centralised 'tech resources'. The presently developing codebases (drupal and oscalit) are a set of small crashes waiting to happen under load, but are more importantly empowering for those involved.

That's where the XMPP PubSub came in and sounded so interesting. Why not just subscribe to channels of content as appropriate. Lots of sites, sharing what is of interest, and providing content from elsewhere similarly. Big sites, with all above (and more) architecture, that can provide reliable portals, probably without absolutely everything on them.

It's also easy to start patching into the systems we have already, so starting an involvement curve. It maybe not XMPP anyone of the other maybe more developed alternatives. But I started playing with XMPP and Drupal, it's shockingly easy to get started too. There is a basic XMPP module, setting up your own XMPP server is really easy too, so PubSub investigation is next!