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LibrePlanet 2010 came and went last month and I was lucky enough to attend. It was a nice little conference and I had a lot of great conversations with people about the issues we’ve been talking about here and the different tools people are building to address them. I want to take a moment to talk about a couple of the major themes I took away from those discussions before we get back to the Freedom Box posts.

(Dynamic) DNS is important

Every one of the interesting systems I learned about last weekend (Google’s webfinger, Mozilla’s Weave, GnuSipWitch, and GnuNet) is built around being able to find you through the public internet and every one relies on DNS for directions. For those of us who can’t rely on traditional DNS because our residential connections don’t have fixed public addresses, Dynamic DNS is our onramp to the social internet.

We need to think more about Dynamic DNS’s role in our social software stack. If we want people to try out all these new services we’re building, we’re going to need them to sign up with a dynamic dns service first, or we need to run our own and build our new services on top of it.

If users are going to be required to setup a Dynamic DNS account regardless of how we build our new tools, building them around the Dynamic DNS account reduces complexity for the user by centralizing account creation and management in one interface. It also simplifies deployment for our tools because we can make sure our Dynamic DNS service properly forwards whatever port or protocol our other tools use to the right place on users’ machines.

Whatever we decide about integration, we should keep in mind that most people are going to depend on someone’s Dynamic DNS service in order use our new social tools. The more successful our distributed social tools grow, the more likely it becomes that someone will try to control this central access point to the social web.

Practical And Ethical

Luis Villa gave a wonderful speech focusing on the second major theme of the weekend: building solutions that are both ethical and practical. It is not useful to rail against the the current system’s privacy problems when the only alternative we have to offer is withdrawing from all modern communication systems.

Luis compared it to the local food movement. People who are concerned with the dangers of pesticides and large corporate food manufacture aren’t told to go grow their own food. Conceptually it would be the ideal solution, but it is not a solution most of us have the space, time, or inclination to put into practice.

Instead, we can buy at Farmer’s markets, join a CSA or co-op, or look for certified organic foods at our existing stores. Wherever you live and however you shop, you can make practical choices to help deal with the dangers to our food system. We can make these choices because a generation of natural food advocates built the programs and distribution mechanisms that make them possible.

We can and should educate people about the dangers of our collective technological choices, but we will not succeed in reducing those dangers if our only solution is for people to “grow their own”. Next time we’ll look at how this idea can usefully shape the design of a Freedom Box.