Libby's Barnraising Notes

Summary

Barnraising is a way of gathering people and reources together using the web and people's desire to help others to change the world. William's idea is to enable people who have the expertise, resources and desire to help others to coordinate using the web, regardless of their experience of using the Web. Barnraising is aimed at the individuals who cannot currently use the web to organise themselves.

Barnraising is a kickstarting mechanism for people who want to use the Web to organise but don't know how. Current thoughts are that it would be a time-limited communication mechanism for people to organise themselves into groups, and provide the information the groups need to create move to permenent routes of communication - Websites, mailing lists, calendars etc.

The main site would enable people to use simple, intuitive text input to define the groups they wish to find or create, and either start that group or point the person towards suitable groups that already exist. The resources for any one group provided by Barnraising (such as mailing list, Webpage) would be short-term. Routing people towards the groups would be long-term.

Requirements (William):

• Jan can use it
• no class of activities is excluded (save the whales/kill the whales)
• nothing harder than text to enter (simple use interface based on text input)
• free (not gnu free) [liability license?]
• trust/honouring schema, like eBay; exclude cases of payment
• means for the barn raiser to communicate with the fellow barn raisers (e-mail is very accessible, especially when available over the phone)
• take entering data (what people can do) and bootstrap that to make it simple.
• could be centralized (as one instance)
• like Napster in terms of its ease of use
• searching for things? people? centrally? P2P?

purpose (William)

• bring people together [synergies, searching ontologies...foaf...devolved]
• getting things top people at times. Doing things, not just talking about them.

2 aspects (libby)

1. comumincation and coordination of effort on a definite barnraising preoject (like getting milk to starving babies)
2. finding people to coordinate with

libby's notes on the train

• 'person napster'?

... different RDF queries of RDFWeb-liek thing. Instead of information about this person (with this email address), but 'contact information about people interested in forming an anti-scientology protest group in the south of England'
because of the privacy issue, requires some kind of privacy network, as well as a trust network. This applies not just to commercial spamming but also government asking the barnraising network 'get me contact addresses for all the people interested in the mayday protests in London'

both trust and privacy issues apply both to single-node search engines as well as distributed ones. (spamming issue is worse on a distributed system because (a) bigger? (b) possibilities for small-scale reputation effects are smaller.

spamming...

RDF profiling allows for very targetted spamming of individuals (potentially, if contact information is provided)

This need not be a bad thing - if people want to make this information availble to companies for this purpose; don't want a system designed for people to build like-minded networks to be spammable in this way.

Issues with governmental interference

• only be able to find people with an interest if you yourself really have that interest

we also need to make it costly to spoof that sort of information, i.e. pretend that you have interests you don't. So it isn't just a matter of matching your profile.

??? statistically my profile is similar enough? too complex and spoofable)

possible solution

• make your profile public
• match the profile as an RDF query
• never give out the mail addresses
• contact the recipients to see if they want to join the group. Never give out plaintext emails

• very concerned witrh simplicity
• a very clever user interface would be good ;-) what about one of those 'guess the actor things'?
• keep vocabularies used in RDF controlled; use thesauri, dictionaries to map terms intelligently processed and gathered from input to schemas.
• tie in the generatiom and searching of RDF closely.
• timing - information should time out

William and libby chatting Sunday am

• granularity is important - not - I'm interested in good things
• give each group a subdomain of barnraising
• links to other resources that might be useful to groups (e.g. congressional addresses, ways of finding out when the local council meets etc)
• advocacy and activism-centric. Not talking alone (things are availble for that already - mailing lists)

• whoever askes for the group in the first place is in charge.
• anonymity is important...
• mail adresses filtered through a trusted service
• collaborative filtering? you like whales, maybe also dolphins?
• asymetry - creating a group; joining a group
• AI can process the narratives from people into machine-understandable format.
• searching...Sergay's matching algotithm?
• time-limited resources such as mailing lists on the barnraising site itself.