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[Freedombox-discuss] objectives



> On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 12:17:50PM -0600, Bdale Garbee wrote:
>> Catching up on recent list traffic, it's clear to me that we're
>> suffering from the fact that "freedombox" means so many different things
>> to different people.  As a member of the foundation's board and chair of
>> the technical advisory committee, I've spent a lot of time thinking
>> about what it is that we're actually trying to do, and pondering how to
>> get from where we are to a useful reference implementation.  To that
>> end, I think it's time to articulate a roadmap, starting with a
>> statement of objectives for the core that consolidates our shared values
>> and vision, and provides a framework for turning our is/is-not thinking
>> in to a manifest of software components to be included in a system
>> image.
>>
>> As my own thinking has evolved, I now believe we are pursuing two
>> related but different top-level objectives.  One derives from Eben's
>> early articulation of motivation that many of us responded to a year or
>> more ago, the other is driven largely by our collective reaction to
>> recent global circumstances.
>>
>>   We want to provide a way for people to share with others narrowly or
>>   broadly a set of thoughts and media objects hosted on infrastructure
>>   they own themselves and thus have ultimate control over, as an
>>   attractive alternative to such sharing via popular existing services
>>   that provide little control.
>
> "On infrastructure they own", or owned by trusted peers, i.e someone could
> run a jabber node and share it with some firends while using another
> service hosted by one of its peers.
>
>>   We want to provide a way for people to communicate with each other
>>   privately, minimizing their dependence on service providers, and
>>   hopefully providing some resiliency in the face of service outages.
>
> It doesn't seem incompatible to the first point I believe, and is often
> something to think at the beginning of a project, so that choices are made
> correctly. Eben talked about people helping chinese or iranian people in
> his talk, so I think it's part of the project as much as the first point.
>
> Censorship circumvention and getting rid of the cloudy services were the
> two main points of Eben's talks I think, and they should shape the
> freedombox project. They are a lot related. After all it's all about
> freedom of speech on the internet. :)
>
> bert.

I agree the two "goals" are both things that can be achieved with the one
project. The original speech that I heard was more about keeping control
of your own data and not giving it away to third parties, providing a way
to communicate between people and that seems to be met with the "goals"
that we are discussing. We can have both.

Alan




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