Dear IPFS community,
I’m here to present you a pre-project which would perfectly fit with the IPFS protocol.
The SPIN project – for SPIN is a Peer Idea Network – is the ambition to create a tool enabling a facilitated/accelerated innovation within the commons, the Libre movement.
SPIN would be a Libre plateforme, transparent & peer to peer allowing to connect together persons, ideas, places and means of productions.
To give a concrete example : a fish farmer in France encounters difficulties because a protected species feeds on his ponds. None of the existing solutions is functional. On SPIN, he expose his idea : sending randomly selected predators sounds via a library, enriched by a community. The material here is not the limiting factor. By procuring a Rpi, a speaker, a solar battery, a waterproof box, he already has his unit. What will prevent him to go further is his own limited knowledge in programming.
SPIN could let someone based in France or abroad to seize the idea to develop it and take it further. Perhaps could this person find a better solution than that proposed by our fish farmer.
The biggest project I know in Open Hardware are like the Open Source Vehicle, WikiHouse or The Global Village Construction Set. A lot of these projects juggle between tools like a wiki and a git, or other ; which has inevitably an impact on the productivity, but also on the accessibility.
This project does not come out of the blue : it come in part from the existing (git, shema.org, ipfs.io, duniter, and so on). Should it be a software overlay/integration or developed from scratch, SPIN is intended to be a user-friendly tool, made on the KISS principle.
Where would be the development of these already mentioned projects with such a tool ?
The progress, when it’s real (the last project sounds to be dead), is slow and remains rather non-transparent.
A lot of fields could be approach in this project : both in practice (blockchains security, digital currency, dedicated framework, semantic web) and in theory (integration of the commons thinking, open/Libre patent, definition of a social and economical doctrine with some form of an income for all).
As said before : this is a pre-project. We just launched it, and for now things are gowing very slowy. As we are by no means programmers, we tried a different way to go further. We wanted to introduce a project in the work from the very start. That’s why when we presented it in France during the Libre Software Meeting, it was all about making people realise what we wanted to do, without going into too much details, in order to build an unguided/unformatted exchange. We wanted to draw new ideas from all this. We wanted to know if we were going in the good direction, if this tools is relevant in the eyes of people from different backgrounds.
For that purpose, we had to create the identity of the project (the name, the graphic chart, some presentation elements) and put in place tools allowing a collaborative work (for now, we are working with a cloudron instance)
The exchanges were encouraging, but the encountered persons seemed to be confused. With nothing concrete to show, it was difficult for us to complete our goal : to begin the process of assembling a community of reflection and why not to begin its development.
It seems clear now that our method was not the usual way of doing things, and maybe we were heading in the wrong direction.
That’s why i’m writing here. We made a mockup in order to make things clearer (I hope).
We see the development of this tool by bricks, which is growing based on the needs of the community and on a stigmergy principle, or strong initiative.
Our goal is not necessary to earn a living from it, as we are looking to create a kind of fundation to support this project, but we definively want to be part of it by opening a modular space exploiting the synergy permitted by SPIN and allowing the innovation.
We still need advice on this project that has to be build together and all comments are very welcome. If you want to be part of it, we will be more than enthusiastic to share it with you !
Here is our website (dokuwiki) :
https://spin.community/en/home
Here is our mockup :
https://mockup.spin.community/