Part 1 – Links and Nodes

Spatial Collaboration in a Geo-Nodal Social Trust Network and The Geography of Information Flows | Links and Nodes White Paper ~January 2014.

A Geo-Nodal Social Network – Making a platform of platforms within a trust network. Add one or more replicating distributed server nodes; combine with realtime peer-to-peer network and communications applications and templates; connect local and network storage devices for archival robustness, layer on top the geo-spatial information systems (GIS) oriented interfaces; now you have self-perpetuating and self-healing information and organization system (information is dutifully and efficiently replicated across networked server nodes when nodes are added or removed from the system); the purpose of which is for people in community to communicate in realtime with information / various data-types that are representative of the environment (people, places, things), enabling visualization of information flows, secure and trusted collaboration, and real-time decision making that was impossible or impractical previously.

Key Goals:

· To Depict diverse information flows (links, nodes, relationships, data) to allow individuals to connect with their environment, discover information, organize networks and make decisions

· To Allow individuals to establish relationships and exchange value within trusted networks based on collaborative social, artistic, and economic interactions

·  To Explore new economy entrepreneurship through incorporating emerging technologies that discover the value in relationship, information, and resource based economies (barter, trade, gift economics, social capital, diverse value evaluating systems, etc.)

· To Promote citizen journalism, information sharing, and community participation through tools that facilitate organization and collaboration (visual search, active filtering, network formation, nodal analysis, construction and sharing of overlays, polling and form functions, event and participation beacons, social-environmental awareness beacons, issue tracking, participant democracy, and more).

“To create an open and expanding universe of information flows (social, ideological, media, technological, financial, environment), which allows user to both own and participate in next-gen networks by establishing a node, organizing their own networks and content, while interacting with an analyst’s assortment of social and GIS tools”

Links = (meta)Relationships

Nodes = People, Places, Things in the network (virtual/semantic/material)

Spokes = Relationship Factors that Bind the Nodes and Hubs / Clusters

Hubs / Clusters = Collections of Highly Connected Nodes

Participatory GIS = An open framework for information sharing within geo-contextual information Spaces (text, media, sensor data, metadata, 3D physics, CAD) that can by systematically queried, analyzed, visualized, transposed, archived, replicated, and distributed.

This solutions oriented framework intends to scale the nature of information interactions, relationship visualization (context), and social collaboration through a participatory geospatial information platform, enabling localized knowledge and social-environmental contexts. Loosely defined as a Geo-Nodal Social Trust Network, the overarching purpose of Links and Nodes is to allow people to connect with their environment and make decisions though the interaction with and organization of information flows.

While drawing inspiration from virtual worlds and massive multiplayer online games, as well as social networks, information technology solutions, and intelligence communities, the goal of this platform is to combine Public Participation GIS, Search and Visualization of Multi-Media, Information Flows, Nodal Analysis, Social Networking, and Project Organization into a peer-based distributed and collaborative information platform that can be infinitely forked and repurposed.

“Critics of GIS have raised numerous concerns regarding the potential for GIS to exclude vast swaths of the public from access to geographic information while simultaneously giving the privileged few a powerful tool to undertake surveillance and control (Pickles 1995; Curry 1998). The diffusion of GIS therefore sets up a barrier to full participation in society by creating a dual tier or multi-tier structure for access to geographic information”

Adams 2009

Currently, there are few personal (self-owned and self-hosted) networking/organization tools which allow self-directed discovery with the vast information landscapes all around us via custom maps, layouts, and physics based visualization. Individuals can take charge of their own [meta] data, and map out the critical nodes in their environment and communities, while also becoming an information resource for others. With such information tools currently only accessible to a privileged few, the combining of Trust Networks, Public Participation GIS, and Visual Collaboration is a compelling solution to allow individuals the ability to participate and leverage contextual environmental information together with social and economic value chains alike. 

What is needed in society generally is “a technology that can better accommodate a world of disagreement, passion, complexity, and redundancy”.

Sieber 2004 27-29

An openly accessible meta-platform of platforms can be designed to remove barriers to participation, while immersing individuals in a virtual earth environment with the tools to create and share their own information scapes; participants should be able to:

• search/build/interact with nodal networks (relevant point of interest data and relationships)
• visualize social/environmental relationships fuzed with GIS contextual data (depict connectivity, association, collaboration insights, issue tracking)
• communicate (transmit/receive) and display activities, events, and multi-media feeds of information
• conduct geo-contextual project management (“manager/analyst console”)
• develop trusted networks to share and disseminate information (tiered visibility based on trust relationships)
• launch and foster idea webs (find consensus, initiate polls, collect form info, harness spatial searches)
• conduct logistical analysis (physical-virtual) and many more user initiated applications …

“The GIS Process could be made accessible to social movements, activist non-profits, and citizens’ groups with ‘a technology that can better accommodate a world of disagreement, passion, complexity, and redundancy’ (Sieber 2004)” (Adams 2009).

“This re-wiring or encoding of GIS software, to incorporate user defined elements and permit the uncoupling of its various software components, would be combined with the institutional frameworks to permit the incorporation of local and traditional knowledge in digital databases and social action oriented towards a reconstructed GIS (Sieber 2004: 31-3)” .

It is important to make the GIS and information dissemination process accessible to work force development initiatives, creatives, non-profits, and citizen networks operating in critical capacities, such as first responders, health sciences, and city planning.

User Interfaces and computing frameworks must be combined to create a Collaborative Social Network harnessing Deliberative Information Tools.

Additional Reading:

• A New GIS Architecture for Geographic Information Services: Article
• Paul Adams: Geography and Media of Communications (book)
• How Open Data Initiatives Can Improve City Life: Article
• Elinor Ostrum: Governing the Commons (book)

Assessing Functionality:
·  Intelligent search and visualization (story making-telling GIS)
·  3D mapping, imagery, GIS/cartography tools
·  Build nodes and network overlays with near-real time info feeds
·  Establish Connections and Relationships with other nodes
·  Track the money, a tool to visually show you where the money (associated resource) goes when it is spent/donated/transferred (local, states, internationally)
·  Blog (news feed, comments, sourcing, ) Functionality
· Local and network attached storage devices
·  E-commerce and New-commerce functionality
·  Organization and project management templates & tools (events, time, documents, spreadsheets, forms, note taking/recording/displaying/editing/sharing documents and media)
·  Render and save network overlays Create and manage events and calendars
·  Presentation mode and live video capture and conferencing
·  Analyst’s/Manager Info Console
·  Augmented/Enhanced Reality
·  IOS Beacons: 

Personalized Information Modules (the Templates of a Geo-Nodal Social Network):  
Build Next-Gen Collaborative classrooms
Participate in mind and body workout training
Facilitate a neighborhood watch
Conduct a scientific expedition
Organize a cooperative farm / agriculture development
Operate a mobile or static marketplace
Start a news channel with live broadcast
Perform a congressional inquiry
Execute a secure voting process
Build a regenerative city with a high functioning economy
Plant a forrest and create land-use plans
Manage an investor group
Visualize and allocate resources within an economic system

An Open and Pluggable Channel System Architecture and UI Toolkit Allows for New Approaches to Solve for Information Accessibility. Here are some examples of the varied approaches to community collaboration and communications (originally compiled in 2014).

• Waze: for depiction of the environment and user updated info feeds
• Task Rabbit: For helping people connect to others who will get stuff done
• Linkedin: For business networks and jobs
• Google Earth: Map APIs and database of nodes
• ArcGIS and FalconView: For map editing and data integration features
• Analysts Notebook (networking visualization tools, used by intel and CIA) 
• WoW, SIMs, Secondlife: For virtual environment visualization
• Tumblr: For blog and ubiquitous integration with other social networks
• Facebook: For feed, groups, marketplace, and calendaring/event functions
• Craigslist: For it’s local information streams
• Dolphin Social Networking suite (relationship filtering and matching)
• Hyperboria a global decentralized network of “nodes” running cjdns software. 
• Siri (voice assisted search and hands free operation)
• Evernote: Web and Personal Organization
• Flowing Data: Working with Line Maps, the Google Places API, and R
• Hootsuite: Social network management
• Press This: an applet that runs in a browser to take clippings of the web for wordpress
• Pearltrees Save everything on the web
• Culture Map: Event feeds
• Fortnite – Worldwide experiential content
• Diablo – Worldwide experiential collaboration
• NVidia Omniverse – AI based 3D World Simulation Engine
• Spline – 3D Design Tool
• G-Suite – Collaborative Productivity

In 2024, this list has become gargantuan with an ever evolving landscape of features; however, very few maintain a complete framework for unmitigated data ownership, ease of accessibility, real-time collaboration, visualization (simulation), real-world asset management, and secure self-governance.

Geographies of Media and Communication

Geographers mapping the information scapes, Participatory GIS as a process identifying value, communications, relationships, structures, meta information, and place.

Arjun Appadurai, an Indian-American anthropologist on gobalization studies, came up with the concepts of “scapes”,  which recognizes communication flows as structures and as ways of knowing the world, permitting deeper analysis of virtualization, and globalization processes.

financescapes-  spaces and perspectives of global capital flows, such as Castells’ “space of flows” and the World City hypothesis

ethnoscapes- a dynamic in which place-based traditional collective identities are increasingly confronted with nonlocal ideas, images, technologies, capital flows, and attitudes (news, 

technoscapes- global configurations and flows of technology (physical and virtual)

mediascapes- global flows of images / videos / narratives about human lives, indicating possible and potential biographies

ideoscapes- ideologies such as freedom, welfare, rights, and sovereignty that are diffusing worldwide and encountering various barriers to diffusion

cyberplaces- make up a cyberspace. Like physical places in that they include and exclude (social relations), create place-like sensations (meaning), and are made of particular arrangements of matter and energy (nature) “

Tuan -1991 “Naming is Power, the creative power of being able to call something into being, to render the invisible visible”

Part 2 – What if? A Secure and Collaborative Operating System for Humanity

by Brandon Wallace, PLAN Systems

From my perspective, there is an urgent need to take the massive data generated by society writ-large out of “the cloud” and move from the model of commercial web-services & hosting-providers in favor of privacy oriented, open source and distributed platforms. The solutions needed for robust and secure integration of hosting private groups, sharing massive amounts of data in the form of messages, large video & audio files, web links, documents, and scaling and maintaining large group networks.

Elinor (Lin) Ostrom wrote the book on developing a principled framework for cooperative governance. She based her work on observable and repeatable human organization practices over long periods of time, and the principles are applicable to all manner of organizations and systems. Her framework helped PLAN Systems establish a set of values oriented Design Principles, which continually guides our development and decision making of the platform. 

Governing the Commons: https://archive.org/details/governingthecommons 

PLAN Design Principles: https://www.plan-systems.org/plan-technology-components/#design-principles (specific to protocol and interface level software infrastructure): 

I believe Ostrom’s framework is a tremendous gift to humanity, and an analytical tool for implementing successful and time-tested cooperative management practices. What she needed was an operating system to enshrine these best practices into a replicable governance and information visualization capability that extends into the realms of communications and the invisible meta-commons.

Network Operating Systems paired with community operating processes (ex. social participation, events, commerce, productivity, creativity, etc.) can provide sustainable social and economic opportunities with an innovation engine for humanity built in that can be multi-generational (passed to the next generation of people). In practice, the bar for secure and easy to use technology is very high. It’s never good enough to settle for that which we know will ultimately fail.

Visualizations of the Environment, Value Systems, and Data Flows are Inherently multi-dimensional, yet this information is usually presented in very limited two dimensional views or “windows” without context. Is it time to leave the windows, and move into Spaces?

As humanity expands into new mediums of expression, digital design, and methods of construction (EX. BIM, CAD, LiDAR, GIS, 3D engines, AI/ML, physics simulation, volumetric video, multi-spectral imagery, photogrammetry, gaussian splatting), we are starting to learn that most of the architecture the internet and modern operating systems rely on are just not constructed to sustain these new data types, formats, and sophisticated cyber weapons.

When a single line of code can bring down every Operating System that is centrally connected to an administrative authority — such as with the crowd strike outage of 2024 — causing widespread and cascading consequences for weeks, months, or possibly permanently, Houston we have a problem. Additionally, CAD is heavy. 4K videos and streaming media is heavy (in terms of file size, they are very large and come with bandwidth and storage constraints). Physics / AI / ML models can grow to be massive in their need for computing resources. Large files leads to long load times, down rez of media, impossible transfer speeds, de-prioritization of content, and many more problems.

The Web we use today is not private, reliable, or free from censorship. It lacks a way to preserve and access our digital records through time and space. Decentralization and p2p distributed systems offer resiliency and reliability, while 3D interfaces offer whole new modalities of interactive expression. By distributing data, processing, and hosting with no centralized control of data flows, a new Distributed Spatial Intranet has the potential to be truly open and accessible, empowering users around the globe to locally access, control, and protect intra-network communications and data much better than ever before.

In addition to privacy and accessibility, owning a platform is sometimes a difficult and intimidating undertaking: first there’s a learning curve of terms and processes, managing accounts and servers, ensuring continuous uptime, securing your files and communications, making backups, organizing data in meaningful and accessible ways. The rise of software services like CrowdStrike directly correlates with the innate human desire to want to stay as far away from obtuse technological processes as possible. However, we have become dependent on these systems to sustain everything from transportation and logistics, banks, banking, to telecommunication companies. THUS, whether it’s an app, game, website, intranet, emergency system, or AR/XR experience that brings your group together, if it’s built for people, that platform needs to be built on a robust foundation.

PLAN (noun) a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something.

The heart-beat of PLAN Systems has always been developing tools for collaboration, digital and real world asset management, information visualization, and storytelling the medium of immersive and interactive environment. The technical framework can be understood as a client-server model, and series of provisions for operating a community network over time and space, inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Award winning framework for Governing the Commons.

A platform at the intersection between distributed systems (DLT), and 3D interfaces.  

With PLAN core infrastructure (a lean distributed and pluggable server paired with 3D interface toolkit), PLAN Systems is inspiring the next-generation human operating systems.

• Serve ANYTHING – Files, Websites, 3D Experiences, Games,  sensor network 
• System Wide Flexible Crypto Hash tags
• Unlimited Cryptographic Naming and Tagging Power
• Billeting / CRM / flexible data structures
• Low latency UDP signal routing (RF, SATCOM)
• Secure E-Authentication & Pluggable Governance
• Spreadsheet visualization
• Predictive analytics for alerts and supply chain management
• Community-centric passwordless authentication 
• Trade in, buy back, resale, intelligent routing -> repurpose 
• Modern scheduler – planning transportation, production, and warehouse orchestration 
• Receive actions and alerts

Description

The proposed Network Operating System (NOS) for spatial collaboration, multimedia content, and 3D data visualization directly addresses the need for enhanced situational awareness, improved command and control capabilities at scale, resource distribution within economic systems, and advanced training applications to equip the workforce of the future. This solution aligns with community need for critical infrastructure and accessible connectivity.

Key features of the proposed NOS include:

• Integration of APIs, Data-Types, Formats, and Protocols for seamless incorporation into existing media combined with mission critical infrastructure
• Network and hardware agnostic ultra-lightweight distributed server | embedded or headless
• A fork button for easy platforming capabilities
• Modular and distributed architecture allowing integration of sensor inputs and data feeds
• Real-time 3D visualization of operational environments, supporting both GPS-enabled, GPS-denied scenarios, and off-grid, low power situations
• Multi-user support enabling distributed team collaboration in virtual and augmented reality
• Low-latency data transmission optimized for mesh network and p2p relay topologies
• AI/ML-powered environmental mapping and object recognition 

The NOS will enhance Community, Governance, and Economic capabilities by:

• Providing an immersive common operating environment for improved tactical decision-making
• Enabling rapid information sharing and collaboration across distributed teams
• Supporting mission planning and rehearsal in high-fidelity virtual environments
• Facilitating intuitive interaction with complex data sets and sensor feeds
• Enhancing situational awareness through 3D visualization of multi-source intelligence

This technology has immediate need in both private, emergency, non-profit, and commercial sectors, with applications ranging from tactical operations, creative multi-media, cultural preservation, to remote industrial collaboration for supply-chain sustainment. The proposed NOS represents a significant leap forward in collaborative technologies, directly supporting local and regional workforce modernization priorities while enhancing the capabilities of self-sustaining communities.

PLAN Systems sends out infinity mana and gratitude to technology initiatives like Linux, NOSTR, IPFS, Graphene OS, OwnCloud, Blender, OpenOffice, GoDot, Mastodon, Cesium, Hylo, Braid, Galène, and many others ensuring platforming technologies are available to empower the next-generation of creators, responders, decision makers, manufacturers, laborers, resource managers, and archivers alike. https://plan-systems.org | https://plan.tools

Framework for Network Operating System:

Total Data Ownership: Assured data accessibility + Data non-deniability + Data usability to ensure community / network boundaries are real and enforceable

Total Data Privacy: Only the designated owner(s) can delegate permissions authority and cryptographic access to the data in the community / network

Community-Centric Permissions: Create/Manage accounts + Local authority + Flexible (user-oriented) governance

Offline First: Data accessible, usable, updatable all without the Internet; Self-contained

Data Redundancy: Integrated data backup/replication and recovery. System is distributed and is designed to be fault tolerant.

Hardware Agnostic: No technical, legal, or arbitrary restrictions on the number or types of devices

Natively Pluggable and Extensible: Write applications, extend functionality natively. Designed and offered with the intent that others can freely grow, enhance, or fork the platform

Gatekeeperless: Full source code may be used, modified and distributed—commercially or non-commercially. No third-party needed to deploy, access, or manage data. No costs, fees, or significant dependencies.

Distributed Infrastructure: concurrency of components, lack of a global clock, and tolerates independent failure of components (Distributed Systems 3rd ed.)

Spatial Experiences and Environments (SEE): Integrated/full realtime 3D graphics capability with the full power of the workstation at your disposal designed or ease of use, novel visualization of data, and unconstrained environments for exploration and imagination

PLAN Systems – NOS Design Principles – 2018