P2P Resources

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives
P2P Foundation wiki

P2P Foundation blog

P2P Foundation ning social website

The P2P foundation is probably the best resource for information about the Peer-to-Peer movement. The wiki has articles covering many subjects such as Governance, Business, Design, Manufacturing, Production, Energy, Money, Politics, Spirituality, Technology.

WatchUsNow film
The WatchUsNow film is a documentary examining the impact of the social web on society. Couchsurfing is covered, along with P2P-related examples.

Life Inc.
Life Inc. The Movie is a short video version of the best selling book by Douglass Rushkoff. Great insights into the value of decentralization to our society.

Daemon: Bot-mediated reality talk
Daniel Suarez, author of the best selling techno-thriller Daemon gave an interesting talk at the Long Now Foundation. It makes us take decentralization and privacy seriously.

Ning
Ning is a ready-to-go professionally run (not open-source) site that provides the tools to quickly set up a fully-functional customizable social web site. It might be a good interim solution for communities who just want a quick alternative to the big sites.

Noserub
Noserub is an open-source social web site that can be set up on a single PC (configured as a server) or on a server. It aggregates user activity from any other Noserub sites or popular big social web sites that the user has an account on. Besides being convenient as an aggregator, it has a big privacy advantage in that the user has potentially much more control over his data (profile, messages, friend connections).

A demonstration (and practically useful) implementation of Noserub is Identoo. You can open an account there to test it's features.

A drawback is that Noserub doesn't yet have built-in groups, but they are in the works for future release. Noserub only has a handful of part-time developers, so progress can be slow.

RetroShare
RetroShare is an open-source P2P network with a strong emphasis on privacy. It's actually closer to F2F (Friend-to-Friend), meant to be very private.

Open-source file-sharing
We are not really interested in file sharing per se, but the file sharing community has led the way technically with P2P and privacy solutions, so we may be able to borrow some techniques. Here is a list of noteworthy examples:


 * eMule
 * OneSwarm
 * Anomos
 * Anonet
 * ANts
 * Gnunet
 * I2P
 * Lifesocial
 * Tahoe

Wuala
Wuala is not open-source, but has an advanced and professional-quality partly-P2P file storage system. It has some nice privacy and social features.

Portable apps
Portable Apps is an open-source solution which allows a user to take not only their data, but their applications with them when they travel on a USB stick. This has implications for P2P hospitality. Besides the general convenience for travelers, our proposed P2P trust network would probably have a private identity key. You could take not only the key, but the P2P trust network software itself on the road with you, making it easier to use from any PC.

Lupo PenSuite is another portability solution which has a long list of portable apps.

Popeye adaptive grid network
Popeye is an open-source product of academia supported by the EU. Over two years they developed a working demo. Computers in physical proximity automatically form a network which adapts to nodes moving, entering and leaving, while providing file sharing, messaging, voting, etc., services useful to a working group. Includes a video of a real-world demonstration.

Zembly
Zembly is a tool for creating widgets for some of the big social sites. Could help get hospitality-specific apps into them.

Overlay Weaver
Overlay Weaver is a tool for designing and testing overlay networks like Kademlia, which are used in many P2P systems.