=== Top of the Swiki === Attachments ===

architecture

(This is a work in progress).

Now we've finalised our first constitution, many questions are appearing...



This document is an attempt on my part to pull together many ideas I've read about or infered from about 10,000 messages that have floated around since January.

A progression has been made from this theoretical document, to the key elements document which outlines the core components of our nation1 system.


Some introductory notes:



What kind of things should Nation1 do?




These are just some of the ideas I have noticed about specific applications Nation1 could be used for. It is by no means all the things it could be used for. Even if we sat down and brainstormed for 25 hours I do not think we could come up with all the possible applications... there are too many.

However, all the above are basically about one thing: Relationships.

They are about the relationship between an the author and context of an article, and the readers. They are about matching creating relationships between people who hold similar interests, or have similar problems (or about creating a relationship between someone with a problem and someone with a solution).

As with all relationships, online or offline -- the more knowledge you have on each object or person the better the likelyhood they will match. For instance, if you're trying to buy a present for someone it's easier if you know what kind of books they like, and if you've read a lot of books recently - then you can decide which is the best book.

Similarly, having something (a characteristic) in common certainly helps find a match. If you see a book on the bestseller list that has "Baby" in the title, and you also know that the friend you are buying the present for has recently become a mother -- then it would be more likely that you would buy the book.

A mutual friend can also be a connector. You're more likely to get along with a friend of a friend, instead of a stranger you meet on the street. You know your friend, and therefore know the kind of person he/she is friends with (afterall, you yourself are one of them).

Computer relationships are just the same: the more the computer knows about something, the easier it is for it to link it to something else. The more information you give a search engine about what you want to find (ie. you type in more words) the better, or more correct the results it returns will be.

So, we've established something. Nation1, will be all about relationships. And good relationships (and therefore a good Nation1) will depend on having information.

In New Rules for the New Economy Kevin Kelly writes:

Distribute knowledge. Use the minimal amount of data to keep all parts of a system aware of one another. If you operate a parts warehouse, for example, your systems needs to be knowledgable of each part's location every minute. That's done by barcoding everything. But it needs to go further. Those parts need to be aware of what the system knows. The location of parts in a warehouse should shift depending on how well they sell, what kind of a backlog a vendor forecasts, how their substitutes are selling. The fastest-moving items (which will be a dynamically changing list) may want to be posititioned for easier picking and shipping. The items move in response to the outside - if there is a system to spread the info.

Get machines to talk to one another diretly. Information should flow laterally and not just into a center, but out and between as well. The question to ask is, "How much do our products/services know about our business?". How nuch current knowledge flows back into the edges? How well do we inform the perimeter, because the perimeter is the center of action.

In Nation1, our plan will be to link up young people, to make small projects and individual people which may have seem lost and insignificant when you consider the world as a whole, more important. Imagine an ant. One individual ant by itself is basically pathetic and helpless. However, if you look at a swarm of ants you think: power!. Together those ants can dig out an ant nes: shelter to live in, or they can store enough food for themselves for winter. If you've seen the Disney movie, "A bug's life", you would have seen how powerful the ants were when the worked together.

So, Nation1 should empowers young people to be like ants. But we already knew that... we can do that by putting people on mailing lists where they can write to each other, or giving them polling tools... or whatever.

But what makes Nation1 really powerful will be that each individual aspect of Nation1, will have a knowledge of the others, and the users. Just like Kevin Kelly's products know how well they are selling, and subsequently move around on the shelves to make it more convienient for the people who have to pack them into boxes and ship them off, Nation1's discussion forums should know what languages each of the users speak, and change the default language depending to the most common. Similarly, the Nation1 discussion forum system on Dogs, should be aware of a articles that appear about pets in the online news system, and invite the journalists involved to join the discussion forum.

Summarising, we've decided Nation1 is about two things:


The computer system should constantly gather knowledge from the Nation1 users that will help it build relationships.

I can identify two generations of relationship building systems:

First Generation: Your average database.

Key characteristics: Static, Centralised, Unable to learn, information is useful for a specific example of relationship building only.

Within Nation1, an example of this might be a simple database that locates non-profit organisations in the United States. Each organisation would enter information in the database according to predefined fields (which would be set up by the system operator). These might include "name", "telephone", "website address", "upcoming event". Each time the organisation wanted to change the information, say about a new upcoming event, they would need to go a specific web address and manually fill out a form, which would change the entry in the database.

If a user wanted to find out about an event hosted by a non-profit in their local area they would have to go and fill in a form (about where they live, their interests, and the date etc etc) and then they would be returned with a list of the events listed.

Second Generation: Decentralised & Intelligent database
Key characteristics: Interrelated to other databases, easily expandable, non-prescribed fields, ability of users to moderate content more directly

Here, the database would be much more invisible. There would still of course be a database of non-profit groups & specifically, groups that utilse the Nation1 Action Group system -- but it would be integrated. Groups will not need to specifically update numerous databases with their information -- it will just be stored in one place and referenced around the community. For instance, when an event is organised by a group, a group might add it into their Events listing via the Action Group ministry. This would automatically be forwarded to the PR ministry to promote to the wider community (often automatically as well). If the event required funds to host, the relevant information (including information pulled from the Group's previously stored database records) would be forwarded to the Finance ministry.

Further, the Action Projects Ministry database, and the Citizen ministry database would share information, and an alert would be sent out via e-mail to all citizens who may be interested (ie. people living in the area of the event, members of the non-profit org, members of the group of interested related to the event etc).

Simultaneosly notice of the event would be automatically sent to the Media Ministry, which would locate a local correspondent that could go the event and provide media coverage from a young person's perspective. after the events end-date, the Media Ministry computer might follow up to ensure it receives the story.

The Key difference is that the 2nd Generation system proactively automatically organises much of the administration and builds concrete networks, which would be impossible offline, and exceedingly difficult even on the Internet otherwise. Nation1, will create tight relationships between groups which means the number of people needed to make a critical mass, from which people might attend an event, or help a fundraising cause is much easier to find.

Therefore, I think it is fair to say the the most important function Nation1 will play will be providing the framework in which this networking happens, but not the actual content. In doing so, we must be careful not to prescribe the way content must run either. When people invented the Internet, it was a way of connecting diverse groups -- but they did not specify in the underlining technology how the WWW must work, or how HTML would be recognised on each browser system: they left that flexibility up to the users, because that was the most powerful route.

Nation1 should provide a similar backbone, a protocol allowing computers to intelligently share information about the users and what they do or want -- but ensuring that this information can then be leveraged by each independant system as they wish, and then once again shared with the whole.

What I am advocating is not an anarchistic computer system. My primary message is to make sure databases for youth are themselves networking, automatically leveraging the enormous relationship building information they have together -- to connect youth to make a difference; rather than providing scattered information which youth themselves must piece together to find meaning and make action. Being an active citizen of Nation1, and participating in the youth movement must be easy.

Rely on youth to supply the information, and design the computer system to provide the indexing, cross referencing and connecting - in short, we are designing a system which churns raw data (be that e-mail messages, chat discussions, news articles, event listings or financial reports) and makes intelligent relationships between the lot.

You can e-mail me at nick@nation1.net