free bitflows: the future of filesharing-darknet reloaded

janko roettgers (DE) a darknet full of friends
janko is talking about how he would like to see a social P2P network – where he knows the people – this is a world that is emerging with small groups of people sharing files with trusted group members. The problem with these groups is that the threshold for boredom or content drought is high – need regular injection of new content. However how do you have broader groups of users without risking exposure and their cover is blown or security is risked.
Janko points to friendster as an example of social networks – foaf. Suggests it as a model that could help to provide frameworks for P2P social networks. Also uses Orkut as another model. Particularly interested in the profile pages where you elect who gets to see information about you – these decisions are based on a radius of friends – ie. direct friends, secondary friends etc. It requires decisions to be made, risks to be assessed.
His main idea is that calculated risk is one way of attaining a mid point between closed darknets and exposed open networks of filesharers.

third speaker: ian clarke – the freenet project

freenetproject.org
Ian is speaking at notcon on sunday – so attend if you are interested. Will try and summarise here.

starts by talking about freenet: see www.freenetproject.org
goals for architecture:
allow practical one to many publishing of information
provide reasonable anonymity for producers and consumers of information
provide deniability for operators of nodes in the network
rely on no centralised control or network administration
be scalable from tens to hundreds of thousands of users
be robust against node failure or malicious attacks

interesting aspect of freenet is that reputation is attached to long obscure string of characters.

difficult to judge numbers however 200Million downloads of software. 5000 people subscribe to mailgroups.

free bitflows: organisational intelligence for independent producers

Reni Hofmueller (AT): Radio Syndication over the Internet
Reni is speaking on the organisational issues associated with undertaking something like community radio station.

1. Open Source software – she highlights that each radio station develops very tactical specific solutions for their needs. She suggests that a very pragmatic idea would be to share solutions with other community radion stations. This is so possible in the world of opensource particularly given that many use open/linux based solutions as their base. The other aspect is to think about the power of standards in order to develop commonality.

drifted a little but she grabbed my attention with a discussion about the audience needs and the identification of whether an audience even exists…she posits that occasional we can be guilty of broadcasting just because we can..without really thinking through whether their is an audience.

second speaker in german – ummm…sorry folks no idea. yay – he has swapped to english. I am really reminded how English the world is forced to be. This is a conference in Austria – yet this native Austrian has just been told by the organisers that he must speak English cos the dummest folks in the audience (that be me) only speak english.

anyway – he appears to be talking about …community radio software…sorry folks you are suffering from my profound ignorance on all things radio – oh wait – http://www.reboot.fm/ – he is talking about content management and workflow – you can’t get away from it :) by the looks of it is a meta management system that allows for independent radio stations, which are largely staffed by passionate individuals, to access a common tool to use air time to talk/play their passions. This allows for them to share the schedule, subject and the actual assets with their fellow station folks and other community radio stations.

third speaker: marco deseriis: is “interested in tactical grids development in order to hijack the dominant discourses”!! i like him already :)
He is from Italy – he introduces his talk with some background on the italian media landscape – really interesting and so intwined with politics – as in party politics care of Berlusconi.

Leads onto discussion on telestreet movement – 50 points of broadcast across Italy – each with varied schedules – some daily, weekly etc. Lots of different groups using telestreet ranging from “traditional” local community stations through to more radicalised groups.
mmm…must look at telestreet
terrestial for berlusconi and the satelitte for murdoch – quote
copyriot