A new book More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook by New York Times writer Jim Dwyer tells the story of the development of diaspora – a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. The effort was originally inspired by an ISOC-NY event “Freedom in the Cloud” in February 2010. Four NY students decided to spend their summer following up and, after briefing ISOC-NY, took to Kickstarter to raise some funds. Since this happened to coincide with a major “privacy lurch” from facebook they ended up with $200k. Read the book to find out what happened next!
The Village Voice’s online version of this week’s cover story Rise of the Facebook-Killers begins by quoting Eben Moglen’s presentation at ISOC-NY’s Feb 2010 “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing</a>†event, but omits to mention ISOC-NY or link to the source. It then goes on to detail the subsequent diaspora project and the newly minted Federated General Assembly, without providing links to those either. Meanwhile the article is peppered with internal VV links. Way to engage your readers VV!
While Moglen gets the last word, his own Freedom Box project – which is mounting a major hackfest in NYC this coming weekend – doesn’t even get a mention.
In a Wired interview, facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that he supports the diaspora project to make an open source facebook alternative, and even donated money.
I think it is cool people are trying to do it. I see a little of myself in them. It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, “We should try to do it.â€
On Feb 5 2010 Eben Moglen challenged the tech community to liberate the world from the shackles of social media conglomerates by developing the “freedom box” – a distributed peer-to-peer equivalent. On Apr 22 2010 four NYU students briefed ISOC-NY on their response to Moglen’s challenge – diaspora – a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”. The project went live on kickstarter the next day.