We just started a new project, all help is welcome

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 programme.

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

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

Program

1 Introductory talks by Joris van Hoboken on regulation by/in/on searchengines and Michel Bauwens (p2p foundation) on p2p epistemologies in relation to searching.
2 Introduction of our project
3 Brainstorm about political impact, ideology, etc…
4 break
5 Brainstorm information architecture