In the last nine months of planning the Contact Summit, I’ve come across a range of projects and initiatives building toward the “Next Net.” Though they vary in their stages of development and specific implementations, they fall under the common themes of enabling peer-to-peer communication and exchange, protecting personal freedom and privacy, and giving people more control over their data and identity on the web. Here’s list of just ten projects, many of which will be demoing at our exhibitor space at Contact on October 20th in New York City.

1. The Locker Project

The data that we generate on the web every day is being collected, stored and sold by third parties, but we are left unable to benefit from that value we create. The Locker Project is making it possible for people to access and aggregate their own personal data, so they can exchange and leverage it in valuable ways.

What it means: Step 1 is to create the lockers that allow people to collect all their data in one resource. Step 2 is to enable application developers to build products on top of that personal data, creating a whole new data marketplace.

2. Commotion Wireless Project

Commotion aims to build a new type of tool for democratic organizing: an open source “device-as-infrastructure” distributed communications platform that integrates users’ existing cell phones, WiFi-enabled computers, and other WiFi-capable personal devices to create a metro-scale peer-to-peer (mesh) communications network.

What it means: Democratic activists around the globe will gain access to a secure and reliable platform to ensure their communications cannot be controlled or cut off by authoritarian regimes.

3. Lantern

Lantern is a globally cooperative censorship circumvention tool build on the Little Shoot peer-to-peer platform. It lets people living in relatively uncensored countries to donate a small part of their bandwidth to help people living under censorship gain access to the open internet.

What it means: Kind of like how SETI@home lets you help search for extraterrestrial life, Lantern lets you contribute your computing power to solve global censorship.

4. FreedomBox

‘The FreedomBox is a project that combines the computing power of a smart phone with your wireless router to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy during daily life, maintain beachheads of free network access during times of political instability, and open lines of communication during natural disasters’.

What it means: Privacy protection from snooping governments, billionaires, thugs or gossipy neighbors. Anonymous communication, encrypted email, and resistance to internet shutdown included.

5. Diaspora

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where computers can connect to each other directly without surrendering privacy. Their mission is to build a social web that’s 100% owned and controlled by its users.

What it means: If you’re tired of privacy policy changes on Facebook or social networks selling your information to advertisers, you can switch to a place where you own your own data and it’s easy to share what you want with whom.

6. Project Byzantium

Project Byzantium aims to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. Their current approach is to investigate existing technologies that could support this system, such as mesh networking protocols, wireless networking technologies, and decentralized alternatives to internet addressing/naming systems such as DNS.

What it means: According to project wiki, this system would be useful if the internet became unavailable due to natural disaster, shutdown from central authority, or as a result of a zombie apocalypse.

7. Metacurrency Project

In our information economy, we need tools other than money that can help to guide the flows of our attention, trust, participation and value. The Metacurrency Project is developing the technology tools, protocols and platforms that will enable people to interact and transact directly with each other, beyond centralized control.

What it means: As new currencies and ways to measure and acknowledge value emerge, we’ll want ways for them to interact. Metacurrency aims to enable that interoperability.

8. Tor Project

‘Tor is free software and an open network that help you defend against a form of network surveillance ta threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. It protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world.’

What it means: Use Tor to prevent anyone from learning your location or browsing habits.

9. Bitcoin

‘Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is also the name of the open source software which enables the use of this currency.’

What it means: Bitcoin is an experiment to create a decentralized free monetary system that is frictionless, can process micropayments, and where transaction costs are driven to zero.

10. Community Forge

Using a LETS architecture coded into a Drupal platform, Community Forge enables real-world and virtual communities to use mutual credit currencies to build towards a more sustainable economy.

What it means: This open source mutual credit software, ideal for LETS and Time Banking communities, enables community members to express their wants and haves, and to begin exchanging value without the need of money.

Three bonus projects to watch:

11. MeshKit Bonfire

MeshKit is a social networking toolkit for building self-sustaining , ad-hoc and static wireless mesh communities, through intrinsic social gaming and a peer to peer economy. The aim is to meet the social goals of creating a community of reciprocity, trust and interdependence, while extending the community’s need for a mesh beyond the decentralized value.

What it means: Just like starting a community garden serves the purpose of providing food while fulfilling greater social aims of bringing people together, the Meshkit is an attempt to do the same thing, but with wireless mesh communities instead of gardens. So, should the internet get knocked out, you’ve got both a community of friends and a backup plan.

12. Free Network Foundation

Member of the FNF believe access to a free network is a human right and necessary tool for environment and social justice. Their vision is to steward a cooperatively owned global communications infrastructure that is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.

What it means: Instead of paying an Internet Service Provider, a local community would essentially form a co-op to own and operate their share of the network.

13. Connect.me

Connect.me is a social vouching system for the web. It enables you to share your reputation, get recognized for your skills and passions, and demonstrate your expertise. By vouching for the people you respect, a stronger layer of trust on the web can emerge.

What it means: Instead of relying on an algorithm to make recommendations for who to follow and why, we rely on each other to develop a web of trust and reputation that each of us can stand behind.

 

About

ABOUT    PRESS    TEAM    CONTACT   

 

Sparked is the world's first Microvolunteering network.

"Easy, social, online volunteering for busy people."

WHY MICROVOLUNTEERING?

Most of us live incredibly busy lives. With 60 hour work-weeks, kids, running errands, and the stress of everything else, it's difficult to take an entire day off to volunteer. And yet, we do have spare time. But it comes in moments throughout our day. In fact, every single day, we spend nearly 400 million hours on Facebook and we watch over two billion Youtube videos. At Sparked, it's our goal to offer *convenient* online volunteerism to you. We're driven to fit volunteerism into the same kind of time that you might normally spend on Facebook, Farmville, or Twitter. It's volunteerism for the digital age. We call it microvolunteering.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Sparked is created and offered by The Extraordinaries, Inc., which was founded in July of 2008 as a for-profit social enterprise (and a certified B-Corp) with headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Through the tools built by The Extraordinaries, nearly 300,000 people have microvolunteered their time for nonprofits all over the world.

The investment team

Kapor Capital - Stephen DeBerry, Mitch Kapor, and Freada Kapor Klein
True Ventures - Puneet Agarwal
Alan Webber
James Currier
Stan Chudnovsky
Ariel Poler
Esther Dyson

Social enterprise support

Echoing Green
Knight Foundation
Ashoka Changemakers
WeMedia
Rolex Awards for Enterprise, Young Laureates Program
NetSquared
FACT
United Nations WYSA

 

 

Mission:

The Meta-Activism Project (MAP) is a non-traditional think tank that leverages the affordances of the digital network to better understand its effects on social power.

We pursue our mission by building human and informational infrastructure for the study of digital activism, which means weaving human networks of activists and scholars and creating informational resources. Our motivating question is: “How are we creating knowledge about digital activism and how can we do so more effectively?”

The ultimate goal of these activities is to make digital activism a more effective means of achieving a transparent, democratic, and participatory global society.

Micro-participation is a term that’s been discussed within open government circles as a way to make citizen engagement more convenient, effective, and scalable. The idea is to fit civic activity and involvement into the everyday lives of the public, resulting in more small ways to collaborate and communicate.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

[...]

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Ce qui manque aujourd’hui aux Européens, c’est un grand projet. On pourrait même dire une utopie. Les défis ne manquent pas : pacifier les relations internationales comme on a pacifié les relations européennes, être un acteur majeur du développement durable ou bâtir la grande économie solidaire de la connaissance de demain. Mais pour cela, il faudrait se secouer un peu.

At the heart of the problem is an unholy alliance between Russian law enforcement and the criminal world—a combination that over the last decade has created “an alloy of almost unbreakable force,” says lawyer Vladimir Pastukhov. Instead of enforcing the law, a large chunk of Russia’s police, secret police, and government bureaucrats spend their energies on looking out for vulnerable businesses that can be targeted for a corporate raid, Russian style. Unlike the Wall Street version, a Russian hostile takeover almost invariably involves a violent raid by armed and masked police using a warrant issued on flimsy charges, followed by the confiscation of company documents, computers, and archives with a view to stealing the business and intimidating its lawful owners. The pattern was established in 2003 when the Kremlin dismembered Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos, and jailed its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and a slew of executives and lawyers based on dubious evidence. “Russian bureaucrats figured, if Putin can do it, so can we,” says a lawyer connected to Yukos who is contractually forbidden from speaking to the press.

A group of 50 Young Global Leaders (YGLs) are about to launch the Paris Initiative for the G20 at an international roundtable under the High Patronage of the French President, which will take place in Paris on 29 and 30 June.

The objective is to set up a brainstorming by civil society actors to formulate recommendations for the forthcoming French presidency of the G20 in 2011. This group of young leaders – composed of several ministers and former ministers, NGO founders, corporate executives, university professors and journalists – along with Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, will gather in Paris on 29 and 30 June.

Il faut faire attention à comment les gens utilisent ces outils, où sont les opportunités… Si nous n'y prenons garde, nous finirons avec des lois qui limitent sévèrement l'accès des populations à l'utilisation d'internet partout dans le monde.

Rahaf Harfoush est responsable de la stratégie des médias sociaux au World Economic Forum, après avoir eu un rôle dans l'organisation de la campagne politique d'Obama sur le net. La question qu'elle adresse à l'assistance de Lift est simple : “Comment les réseaux sociaux transforment-ils notre interaction avec le monde politique ? Internet a-t-il un impact sur la façon dont les citoyens peuvent influencer la politique ?