Open-search kick-off workshop

Who controls the information on the internet? While the internet itself is an open medium, getting access to the information is mostly controlled by search engines, operated by large multi-national companies such as Google and Microsoft. These companies have one primary goal: monetary profit. If this entails manipulating search results, censorship or disclosing user profiles to governments, they have no reason not to do so.

All of these problems stem from the fact that these search engines operate as centralized entities. We want to remedy this situation by creating a distributed, peer-to-peer (p2p) search engine. This new approach distributes the crawling agents over users' computers. Crawled data is indexed and stored in a distributed and redundant manner, to avoid single-point-of-failure and manipulation. Search queries are processed anonymously by the network, leaving no central log of whom searches for what.

This project is part of and funded by the digital pioneers program.

The kick-off workshop will start with an introduction to the project, and its political and ideological underpinnings. The second half will revolve around the technology needed to create such a distributed search engine. The results of this brainstorm session will form the input for a paid developer, who will describe the architecture and subsequently start to implement it. Follow-up workshops are already being planned.

We encourage everyone interested to take part in this workshop, either virtually or in person. This is a community project, a search engine by and for the people, not by the powers-that-be. See our website for more details, including how to get involved, chat with us or sign up to the mailing lists.

Time & Place

Tuesday 12-12-2006, 19h CET, 18h GMT, 13h EST, 20h EET, 8h HST, 11h MST

Virtual attendance:
The workshop can be attended in virtual form by audio/video stream and interaction through IRC chat via KickOffWorkshopVirtualAttendance

Physical attendance:

University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Travel directions: from Central Station you can take tram 16 or 25 and get out at Spui (check http://www.9292ov.nl/ for the schedule). There will be signs from that stop to the open-search workshop.

There will be sandwiches (free of charge). Soft-drinks and coffee available from vending machines.

Program

1. (19:30) Introduction of our project (slides ppt / odp)
2. (19:40) Introductory talks
   • Joris van Hoboken on regulation by/in/on searchengines (slides / ppt)
   • Michel Bauwens (p2p foundation) on p2p epistemologies in relation to searching ( slides / ppt - Michel didn't actually use these slides but sent them to us because they contain most of the ideas he mentioned in the workshop).
3. (20:20) Discussion and brainstorm about political/ideological/sociological consequences of an application like this. Led by Richard Rogers.
4. (20:40) Break
5. (20:55) Presentation of objectives and possible information architecture by our main developer Robin Gareus. (slides / pdf)
6. (21:10) Brainstorm information architecture
7. (21:45) End

Goal: a list of requirements for the architecture design phase.

Pictures of the workshop

• 1_joris_van_hoboken.JPG:
  

• 2_michel_bauwens_kickoff.JPG:
  

• 3_robin_gareus.JPG:
  

• 4_some_participants.JPG: