Visual Collaboration Tools ⏣ The Founding of PLAN Systems

A Journey Towards

Resilient Communities

President

Brandon D. Wallace

Chief Engineer

Drew O'Meara

InspirationThe intrinsic value of community (and by extension an economy) grows from human relationships, along with the skills, resources, effort and time that is contributed. The global narrative that we see unfolding seems to be ignoring this key premise, while societies become increasingly reliant on the digital gate-keepers of services, systems, people, and communities.

Realization Over the past decade, the enormous utility of social platforms, as well as digital ledger technologies in banking, finance, and business transactions became crystal clear. Many early adopters and even speculators were able to cash in early on these game changing systems, creating new economies and possibilities for interaction along the way.

Perspective What if this is actually a story about community, relationships, local logistics planning, and information accessibility generally? With the stakes so high, how are values like privacy, consent, and data-ownership kept paramount in the systems we use, particularly any of global scale? What digital rights exist or are provisioned in the systems being built, if any?

Commitment PLAN Systems was established on April 26th, 2018. At this time, Former Naval submarine officer and software engineer Andrew O’Meara, and veteran USAF senior analyst Brandon D. Wallace initiated official development of PLAN; a community operating system modeled on human values and relationships, with a non-profit mission.

The word needs visual collaboration tools that are universally accessible and adaptable.

2018

PLAN is designed with a comprehensive data-model, and community oriented charter. Under the hood, PLAN’s open plugin architecture integrates p2p/decentralization, end-to-end encryption, and IRC inspired channels to allow diverse data management — all in a realtime 3D interface. The architecture of PLAN has direct value implications for organizations and communities that need reliable communications tools, even in low resource conditions. Areas of work include: designing a user-experience that facilitates collaboration; an implementation of the data-model that solves for Conflict Resolution of Data Types (i.e. data consistency, access control); cloud file interface integration; and distributed-ledger integration, to name a few.

On the surface, this may sound obscure and a little boring, but after just our first full year of development, PLAN's data-model gracefully satisfies the "CRDT problem" with locally governed and cryptographically secure communities. If it's not yet clear, this provides a high utility digital abstraction for collaborating and coordinating with others, independent of other hardware and software providers. In December 2018, PLAN Systems responded to a Request for Proposal from Protocol Labs (based out of San Francisco), along with engaging several other funding opportunities while continuing to work towards a prototype that demonstrates our technology.

2019

The coming year will bring a mature implementation of the data-model, a fully functioning command-line interface, and demonstration capable user interface prototype. Our long term vision is to bring together all the pillars of PLAN into an integrated and simplified user experience, powered by the Unity engine. We will be traveling to various cities throughout the year to connect with friends, collaborators, and potential partners; including to San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Washington DC, London, Berlin, and other locations to be determined in the coming months. At this time, the PLAN Systems team consists of the Board of Directors, Chief of Engineering, and a small team of valued volunteer administrators and consultants. If you would like to materially contribute to this effort, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.