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The Project: The I Ching (Book of Change) is an ancient chinese book which is an implementation of a philosophical system called Bagua (eight symbols) which describes the harmonious flow of nature. This natural flow is named Tao in Chinese and Dharma in sanskrit. The book is a tool used for divination and study, its ultimate purpose is to bring peace and harmony to the world by allowing its users, who were usually those of royalty and power, to make harmonious decisions for the provinces they ruled. The Project is the ongoing implementation of this harmonious way within the many diverse contexts brought by the cultures and times.
Organic Design: Within the context of the informational age, the principles can be implemented in an interactive way which is easily accessible to all the people of any language from the grass roots level up. It's this modern informational implementation of the project which Organic Design has been set up to develop. It's not simply another translation of the I Ching's phrases and metaphors into modern archetypes, but rather the idea of logically defining the principles from which these archetypes were built. This definition is a new kind of computer programming methodology based on the semantic web paradigm which we call the nodal model on which a peer-to-peer collaborative applicational environment is being built.
What the philosophical principles offer to the informational environment is the means to run scalable and sustainable organisations. This is done by simplifying the defining and managing of systems and maximising re-use of resource and knowledge. This will allow us to move beyond the competitive, selfish growth model, which encourages centralisation and makes sharing difficult. Using such an interface, flexible, self-organising networks of people will be able to deliver effective and sustainable solutions.
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- This content still needs to be done...
Platform/Summary
A Sanctuary is a Platform which is specialised toward lifestyle and Self Organisation rather than being productivity driven. It still requires the structure and tools defined by Platform to manage its resources and roles effectively and to support the lifestyle-based goals defined by the members.
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| This summary describes an ideal of the project which is still in the early stages of research and development. |
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The nodal model is a distributed computing environment which has been designed for the project in accord with its philosophical foundations. These philosophies claim that all change in the universe, right down to the functionality of space and time, work in accord with a single unified principle. Distributed computing is a perfect context in which to work with these philosophies, because distributed computing is all about creating an actual real space and defining the laws that determine how its content changes.
In the nodal model, the philosophy is used to unify the runtime environment with the class hierarchy yielding a single global, self contained network of concepts (classes, prototypes, templates, forms) and their occurrences (instances), each a unique node. The physical resource aspect of this network is similarly unified; from RAM, file system and WAN, so all applications, data and their persistent storage are all part of a single changing space of nodes called the nodal network. The nodes play a similar role to object's in the common Object Oriented paradigm.
Any object is related to other associated objects (associations a.k.a key-value pairs, attributes, properties etc) which can represent active threads operating on a schedule. Active threads consume processing resource to manipulate various resources within their context in accord with their scheduled workflow. Processes at all levels are built from these workflow rules whether they're part of an application or a real world organisation.
This functionality which is common to all the objects of the nodal network is called the nodal reduction and is essentially a scheduler which replaces the traditional program flow system. Even though the nodal network is a complex application in terms of its functional requirements, it yet is able to be modelled completely as a nodally reducible structure of nodes, which means that any other applications or organisations can also be modelled in this way. In fact, the components of the nodal network are specifically designed as a re-usable universal template called generic organisation which can be extended and refined for the needs of any context.
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- This content still needs to be done...
We'll use the current XmlWiki environment as the basis of explaining what the new software is. The main differences are:
- WYSIWYG: There is no need for wikitext or HTML in the new environment
- OpenGL and Flash
- Developed collaborately
- Applicational content: Forms, widgets, scheduling, rules, algorithms are all content in the network
- No concept saving or loading, the RAM, filesystem and beyond are all unified into a single tree
- P2P: This tree is not bound to webservers, the content is distributed across all storage resource in the network
- Security: The current XmlWiki environment is only really a token gesture of security and permissions, the new one is real security.
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The current generation of peers are running wikid.pl which is not truly a peer as described above because it does not exhibit nodal reduction. Wikid.pl has been patched together from various code snipits developed for prototyping the nodal environment. The new generation still under development are running peerd.c which are running a true nodal reduction environment. Once the basic interface is functional the Flash version peer.as will be brought up to the same level of functionality so the application will be available as a standalone application or served within a browser.
The current wikid.pl-based peers have been "in the field" since about the end of 2005 and perform many jobs such as backing up and dsitributing data, checking POP boxes and updating DNS record when IP addresses change. They also give XmlWiki the ability to have features which would be very difficult to program in the request-response based PHP environment its programmed in, for instance the recent changes is able to display changes from other wiki's, websites and RSS feeds.
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We installed a Wiki to collaborate on development more effectively, a wiki was used rather than a CVS/SVN based solution because its non-specialist nature was more in accord with the project's principles and allowed all of us involved in all the different areas of the project to work together casually, but productively using Wiki workflow.
We developed XmlWiki to allow us to extend various features of our wiki environment as the needs arose, and that such extensions could be developed and collaborated on without having to leave the environment. We call this ability Self Containment which is an important foundation principle of the project. XmlWiki allows us to collaborate, develop and test all the aspects of the project which cover a variety of languages such as PERL, PHP, C, Flash and XML. Many features are lacking compared to more matured and specialised development environments, but we find the unified nature of this environment has far outweighed those problems.
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The decision to move to a wiki and to use MediaWiki was made by Rob on 17 May 2005 when he said
- ...I'm thinking of MediaWiki which is the one used by Wikipedia. Would you use one if I set it up?"
I like the Wikipedia project a lot so agreed that MediaWiki was a good choice even though MediaWiki is programmed in PHP which we didn't want to support due to the nodal development focussing on PERL, Flash and C. The Wikimedia Foundation's slogan is "Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. And we need your help." which is one of the main foundation principles of the project too, so were pleased to be able to become more familiar and tie in with the Wikipedia project.
We're not officially tied in with Wikimedia or its projects in any way, our XmlWiki components are not suitable for serious use and are totally unsupported. But we hope to help them a great deal in the near future by offering a new interface with which to access the Wikimedia projects and by using that interface to distribute their load into P2P space where it will be safer, more accessible and more cost-effective.
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Peerix is a UNIX-like operating system being developed specifically for the Nodal environment. It uses the set of GNU UNIX-like components for low-level hardware integration operations such as memory-management, and the GNU components in turn reflect the POSIX standard which defines what exactly "Unix-like" means. Peerix uses the nodal environment for high-level network and resource allocation layers, and to provide the user interface.
The source-based methodology used by the GNU linux community means that the operating system can work on a wide range of computer hardware available now and in the future. The PC (x86) and Mac (PPC) platforms are the most common, but many others are supported. It should be possible to have Peerix operating system work in a similar way on Mac, PC, Palm, even iPod and PSP.
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