Mission and Principles

Your valuable comments and feedback on our Mission and Principles statement are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated as we strive to grow together as an open-source community by currently developing foundational documents on DSNP governance. Please write directly to: dsnpfeedback@projectliberty.io

Our Vision and Mission

Our1 vision for the Internet is an ethical, human-centered online space that brings shared economic and social benefits to all, now and in the future.

Our belief is that appropriate technical infrastructure choices can facilitate the emergence of an online space for human interaction. Our approach is to develop technology elements that allow and support open and competitive innovation in the applications that provide this space. The current concentration of control over that space by large actors that provide centralized solutions under their exclusive control does not allow those who share our vision full scope to collaborate in creating a better user experience.

Our mission is to facilitate the production of, development of, and validation of good practices for the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). In service of the mission, our objective in the governance working group is to create a structure that allows the participants to produce high-quality, relevant technical documents that support the development of DSNP as well as related protocols with the same ethical purpose. All documentation is intended to influence the way people and organizations design, use, and manage the social web. These documents include protocol standards, current best practices, and informational documents of various kinds.

Our Guiding Principles

Ethics: Our participants are motivated by the goal of equitable social and economic benefits to all.

Independence: We value the development of solutions independent from capture by private interests. We strive to have stakeholders around the table and recognise that each participant is different, and realize that pragmatic and scalable solutions in the common interest are needed to build a better web for a better world.

Diversity: We aim to have participating organizations and individuals who come from a wide range of entities from around the world and plan to conduct outreach to underrepresented groups worldwide. We are committed to working in a decentralized way with transparency as an essential value: all decisions and processes are documented publicly to facilitate participation. Our engagement with organizations and individuals is consultative; we embrace bottom-up innovations and initiatives.

Timeliness and technical relevance: DSNP will be relevant only to the extent that it rests firmly upon our collective technical knowledge and experience. We adhere rigorously to Internet engineering and management principles based upon common shared experiences, collaboration, and rough consensus.

Interoperability and openness: We care about collaboration and cooperation with other groups developing technical approaches that are motivated by a vision that we hold in common. We seek to design DSNP in a way that encourages similar efforts to join and benefit from the platform and processes for their development. We also strive for interoperability with other technical fora, protocols, and applications by design, to enhance the prospects of wide adoption of DSNP. People should be able to choose their online experience that should not preclude communicating with those who have chosen to have their experience in a different form.

Open source: DSNP is developed with a commitment to being a technology built for the common good. DSNP is dedicated to the public interest. Its software and specifications are maintained with open public licenses, allowing anyone to obtain and modify DSNP’s code, which publicly lives on and is maintained openly on GitHub.

1 “Our” involves Project Liberty Institute as the first steward of DSNP governance, then a broader community of governors.