esp — An exchange of ideas and culture. “It occurs to me”, says Daniel Biddle, “that esp is like the shop Dharma bought in Dharma and Greg. Dharma for some reason bought a shop; she didn't know what she'd sell, but opened it anyway. People started coming in out of the rain, reading newspapers, etc. The guy who was reading a newspaper gave it to someone else to read. People started chatting and helping each other out in small ways. [At one point,] someone came in asking if she had the relevant permit, but couldn't figure out exactly what permit was needed.”

espian — That which pertains to esp. The people who are associated with esp, for example, are called espians.

iteration — Corresponds to a period of espian activity roughly being encompassed by a year, and structured in a particular way.

kalati — An implementation of the plexnet protocols.

metanational commons — The legal entity corresponding to what is colloquially called esp.

naaga — The native programming language of the plexnet that looks suspiciously similar to Python.

nima — An evolution of cafés, bars, schools, libraries, shops and venues into spaces that foster culture, expression, and local communities in a way that avoids being subjected to the problems brought on by the likes of Big Retail.

paleotoman — (Obsolete) An economic ecology based on trust networking and reputation management, to enable better distribution of goods, money, and services, with surplus going to the cultural commons. This was the nascent phase of the toman protocol.

pecu — An acronym: Personal EConomic Units. (Previously: Personal Economic Currency Units, Plex Economic Currency Units.)

plexchange — An alternative to advertising and other mediated forms of trade. Instead, within Plexchange, producers offer a public commission on their offerings (e.g. 10%) and when a consumer pays for the given offering, the commission is paid out to whoever is in the consumer's Trust Map for the particular contexts of that transaction. This creates a win-win-win scenario which benefits everyone involved unlike the spam (offline and online) we get due to advertising.

plexnet — A set of Open Web standards which builds upon many existing technologies to create a decentralised Internet OS.

protoplex — An experimental, and now obsolete, 2005 alpha version of the plexnet, with a very difficult installation procedure.

rdf — The espian motto: run, dance, frolic!

riva — The ideal living or working space — where sexy people gather and interesting things happen. The notion of the home and the office rearchitected into augmented spaces that enable collaboration, flow and merriment.

shaila — A pancontextual summary; for example the integration of ideas from irc channels, email threads, board meetings, discussions on street corners, etc.

shailar — Someone who writes a shaila. Shailars can be thought of as a cross between guides, teachers and pioneers — they serve humanity on the path towards enlightenment.

tavtime — An alternate calendar system which builds on the existing concepts of seconds and minutes into the larger blocks of kin (20 minutes), avi (18 kins), rael (20 avis). Tavtime was created to enable global collaboration without the hassles of time zones and its concept of yi time, which lasts for 21 kins every 5 raels, is meant to be “time out of time” — a sacred time in which people should focus on the pure pleasures of life. The 2nd June 2007 10:40 BST, for example, in the tavtime system is 2694.0.8.0.49.

toman — The constitution of the Metanational Commons. It defines a set of common socio-economic protocols so that all shall run, dance, and frolic!

wtf — An espian happening, coördinated with space for people to demonstrate ideas and systems, people to generally commune, and to get to know one another, with the possibility of recording using shailas.

xetre — A peer-to-peer network of underground vacuum tubes to transport room-sized pods (with people and goods) across the world. The sides of the tubes will be lined with specific materials to help transport basic necessities like sunlight, energy, clean water, fibre, and waste.

xnet — (Obsolete) Collaboration platform for people or organisations; groupware with modern social software features and support for multiple messaging methods.