I’m pleased to introduce Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking as a free digital book, and to invite public and private feedback on its further development.

For years, I’ve been looking beyond the technical and economic limits which we’ve developed during our fast few decades of personal computing and digital networking. I’ve looked at co-creative potentials envisioned by Internet pioneers, and added ideas on the basic nature of communication and community. This book reflects all of that research– but in most ways, it’s just a beginning.

Co- creating tech and culture

We can rebuild communications technologies (tools, techniques and systems) to foster the emergence of communities and inter-communities of autonomous peers. It’s an immense challenge, however, because we must displace corporations which marry communities to software platforms based on financially extractive models.

We can foster just and effective dialogue between tech and culture with these open tech goals:

1. All globally valuable communications software should be, or become, freely available to diverse digital networks.

2. Network participants should be able to use any software which meets systemic specifications for protocols or APIs.

Humanity first

I believe that p2p networking technology is crucial to a sustainable future. However, it won’t get anyone out of the creative and social work we need to do together.

Communication and collaboration are deeply human. People must share ideas and activities to discover common interests, to plan and work fairly together, and to develop true community.

Putting humanity first, we won’t predetermine social tools and techniques according to currently usable software, including our evolving programming languages. However, we’ll always need to refine tools and techniques through shared experiences with usable software.

Software applications and functions

Many processes described in Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking could be integrated into a small set of signaling and storage applications. However, they’ll probably be explored in various networks before they’re fully realized anywhere. Also, complex projects require coordinating functions which my book doesn’t yet mention. For instance, I’m developing a fractal process management system for objectives with unlimited levels of complexity.

I’m drafting a new paper on the open ecosystem of tools and techniques we need to support p2p organizing, including essential systems such as notifications, scheduling and calendars. Designers can directly integrate such systems with this book’s networking models.

Coordinated Goals

I’ll openly develop Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking based on feedback, and I’ll use Agreement-Based Organization to help build co-authored versions of its networking models. Ideally, participation will be open to all sincerely interested people, via distributive network management principles.

Agreement-Based Organization will always be separately available, and both documents will always be licensed for sharing and adaptation. However, I believe that some form of agreement-based organization will receive increased attention as a component within a co-authored p2p networking model.

I’ll coordinate my goals with harmonious efforts in existing projects and communities such as Value Flows. We’ll only need a small fraction of our co-creative resources to develop open technologies for all people.

How you can help

I want and need feedback on Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking. I’d especially appreciate if feedback reflects these framing questions:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

Maybe you have ideas I haven’t encountered before! Feel free to comment directly on the document or email me, and share your thoughts on how we can emerge into an Information Age.