24 weeks

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24 weeks to deliver Espra, a tool for entertainment, communication and collaboration. Espra is an evolutionary platform offering shared services and resources enabling communities to communicate and work together. We started on the 18th May, and we are currently in week10.

Take part in the experience of creating it.

Contents

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Espra - an Evolutionary Tool

Fifteen years ago, Tim Berners-Lee designed the basic platform upon which the internet as we know it has come into being. There have been attempts to redesign it, with web2.0 and web semantics, but the mechanism of implementation has been elusive, it’s almost like trying to alter the trajectory of the Gulf Stream. Tav Ino believes he and his team have the skills to design a new platform, "a parallel public infrastructure" in his words, and if that wasn't hard enough, they've set themselves the rather extraordinary task of establishing it within 24 weeks! By the end of this period, all the elements of the Espra system will be coded, informed by the design requirements of a 1,000,000 user base. We believe this is the critical mass for the system to propagate across the entire net, completely transforming the internet within three years and substantially influencing global culture for a further decade. To explain how this might happen is a conceptually challenging task, the experience of making it happen slightly easier. At it's heart, 24weeks is a learning experience.

ESPRA will incorporate a number of unique features as follows:

  • A scalable, internationalized tool to enable non-managed collaboration.
  • Trust maps for enabling a whole range of capabilities including social search and information filtering.
  • Reputation-based currencies for incentivising productive and/or creative activity fueling commons-based peer production.
  • Unimessaging which combines blogs, forums, wikis and multi-user chat.

The principle is to transpose the new forms of collaboration we are starting to see on the net (eg programmers and open-source projects, eg contributors to wikipedia), into regular, real-life, every-day practice. Essentially, it's about helping us get together, not only to share interests, but to effect change more effectively. At the heart of it is non-managed collaboration. For example, we have found that premature agreement on final objectives inhibits proper collaboration; it is far wiser to keep options open and evolve parallel developments similutaneously. Hence, proper collaboration enables a flexible response to conditions that arise. more...

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Chronology of Project

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Background

24 Weeks was created as a successor to 24 Days, which itself had been conceived of in 2004 from the successful 24 hours project. From this lisppaste, it appears that 24 Days and 24 Weeks were once planned to take place in 2006. 24 Days, as it turns out, didn't seem to happen, and 24 Weeks had to wait until 2007.

So the 24 Weeks project may initially have been born from the 24 Days project, which was still being discussed as a project in early 2007: "24 days of creativity, chaos and collaboration. 24 days in which 24 people will be situated in a biosphere-esque live-work space — big brother style. they will be working on and launching espra — a freely accessible collaborative media platform integrated with innovative economic/organisational models that allows most people to do what they want and still make a good living".

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Future Projections

Because of the complexity of producing ESPRA, we are currently working on a series of games which starts with the kernal of ESPRA and expands to a fully integrated, fully functional version by the end of 24weeks.

We have pencilled in an online/offline open-space event at Rich Mix at the end of 24weeks. It's your opportunity to network with 1000 of the most sensitive cultural creatives -- and if you are wondering if you are one, you are because someone invited you in, and now you are reading this! An offline event will run simultaneously, with the expected 10,000 user base of the Espra system. New applications shall be launched, and indeed used, during the event, such as the tracking of people and constructing visual representations of trust-maps. It's called WTF 7.1, and it stands for What The Future (in case you were guessing...).

If you want to get involved, we are looking for people to

  • get involved in the run-up to it (process, networking, funding)
  • develop applications running on the ESPRA platform
  • collaborate during the open-space event and propose a session
  • help organise the day (technically, greeter, musicians/artists...)

"Make contact!" and ask for what you'd like to see... after all, without you, it won't happen :)

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Resources

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