Proposal to Develop GeoSocial Networking Program in Ghana Presented at ISDE5

p2p and ((Echo))MyPlace at ISDE 5 in Berkeley, CA

On Thursday June 7th, 2007 Mark Roest of oneVillage Foundation (OVF) and I did a presentation at the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth titled “Community-based GeoSocial Networking™ for Sustainable Development ” (Download PDF version).

The presentation highlighted both The Carbon Project’s ((Echo))My Place software and the Open Digital Villageconcept developed by OVF. Our focus was on innovative methods to deploy “ICT for sustainable development” tools and approaches in a highly integrated and holistic way to rapidly scale up the rate of sustainable economic development throughout the world. Some of the key concepts included - Becoming a Steward of Your Place, Connecting Communities of the Earth and Communities of Science, Making Local Connections, and more.

While the presentation venue was not quite what I expected, the conference was definitely worthwhile as a chance to meet some amazing people.

An ISDE 5 Village

To bring things down to 'Digital' Earth we used the example of forming an “ISDE5 Village” on the campus of UC Berkeley and sharing information among people at this place.

I found that most younger folks quickly understood the vision of becoming a “Steward of your Place” and decentralized, peer-to-peer (p2p) tools like ((Echo))MyPlace for creating and sharing local Knowledge Bases.

"So where is the server again?"

We also shared a booth with Microsoft Virtual Earth all week and there was a steady stream of folks interested in p2p Geosocial Networking. Some of the "older" folks had interesting reactions to the p2p technology, like, "So where is the server again?"