Differences between N-1/Lorea/Elgg and Kune/Apache Wave

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

We have received several times questions asking us to compare Kune with another federated social network: N-1/Lorea/Elgg. This comparison would also be valid with several other PHP-based social networks.

Both projects felt very identified with each others’ aims and with the 15M movement in Spain. N-1 (a node of Lorea, which is an adaptation of Elgg) became rather popular and increased its use in the wake of these protests, where multiple assemblies used it to coordinated themselves. By then, Kune was not yet ready for massive use (although it coined a release of this period “15M”).

Technically and functionally these two platforms differ in several aspects:

  • Lorea is PHP-based static multi-page, while Kune is a GWT-developed, AJAX-powered, single-page “rich internet application“.
  • Lorea, as many other social networks, focus on communication/sharing, while Kune focuses on collaboration/creation of contents. The approach is different, and thus the functionalities and priorities.
  • In Lorea you can write real-time docs using pads which are just plain text. On the other hand, all contents within Kune are waves that allow multiple users to collaborate simultaneously writing a hypertext document with rich media (videos, images, maps, polls, blackboards, etc), gadgets and bots.
  • Lorea can be extended through modules (modifying the codebase) while Kune can be extended through both modules (as in Lorea) and gadgets (running on top of Kune) and bots (robot-participants in a wave that can perform actions). Gadgets behave similar to Facebook apps or iGoogle gadgets: they are independent from the codebase, and very easy to create. They can be programmed in Java, JavaScript or Python.
  • Lorea implements OpenID to allow inhabitants from several Lorea-seeds (servers) move from one to other. Content is also federated by OStatus to replicate it in several networks. On the other hand, Kune implements the Wave Federation Protocol. The idea is that you would have one account in one Kune, and collaborate with anyone in any Kune server (or wave-powered server)… from your Kune inbox (the same way yo do with emails). The Wave Fed. Protocol federates all contents (docs, maps, videos, polls, anything) within each Kune group, allowing anything to be syncrhonized in real time among servers.
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Status of kune translations

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

Here is the status of the translations of kune: http://kune.cc/?locale=es#kune.docs.12.1910

LANGUAGE PERCENTAGE
English 100
Spanish 100
French 100
Catalan 95.3
Italian 30.8
German 10.3 10.3
Russian 3.1
Quechua 2.2
Arabic 1
Esperanto 0.3

If you want to help with some translation, here we explain how:
http://ourproject.org/moin/Contributors#Kune_translation

(*) Note for techies, this is calculated in kune.demo.beta.iepala.es with:

select count(*) from globalize_translations g where g.language_id=1819 into @i18nTotal;

select l.english_name, count(*)*100/(@i18nTotal) AS percentage from globalize_translations g, globalize_languages l where g.language_id=l.id and text!="" group by language_id ORDER BY percentage DESC

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New release & website launch Kune.cc!

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

We are proud to announce a new version of Kune, together with the launch of our production site! You can try it out in http://kune.cc

Moreover, if you are a techie you can install it locally using simply a .deb package (in Debian, Ubuntu, etc) following these instructions. If you are not, you can still encourage your institution (university, company, lab, etc) to use it for communication & collaboration of its members. Remember all kunes are “federated”, that is, they are completely interoperable with each other (as in email, where you can send emails to anyone regardless of where do they have their email account).

Kune has lots of improvements and new features:

  • Increased stability, speed and usability
  • Drag&Drop for sharing contents, add users to a doc, change roles, delete contents, etc
  • Real-time collaborative group calendar (with ical export)
  • New group tools (lists, tasks)
  • Email notifications
  • Tutorials for each tool
  • Home stats
  • Shortcuts
  • Improvements from Apache Wave (waves import, SSL, etc)
  • Deb packaging

You can see many of these features in the screenshots & screencasts. We took a while to make this new release, but this will be the last slow release. We are moving to a rapid release development cycle, so users will be able to receive improvements much faster.

Why Kune? Kune aims to replace your use (and your groups) of Google Docs, Google/Yahoo/MSN Groups, Google Calendar, Facebook, and eventually Dropbox, Blogger and even emails. Many of these tools are used for work (like Fb) when they are not prepared for that. Especially, emails are not prepared for the horrible amount of discussion, decision-making, agreements, etc we use them for. Kune, using Apache Wave, aims to solve this issue. For more info and doubts check our FAQ.

Kune 0.1.0 has as codename “99%” as a tribute to the Occupy social movement.

We want to invite anyone to join the development of Kune (or Apache Wave). Also, if you are a student and need a final project or master/phd thesis, feel free to embrace Kune and adapt it to your needs.

We want to thank the incredible work of Apache Wave developers, the Medialab-Prado Kune group for the useful advice, and the Iepala Foundation for their continuous and encouraging support.

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New functionalities for a collaborative agenda in kune

Posted on March 29, 2012 by and

We’ve updated kune.cc and the Kune demo with some improvements such as the calendar/events functionalities. Now we can export each group’s calendar to other calendar apps that you can use in your mobile, Thunderbird, Google Calendar, or similar apps.

If you think about it, you may say “Well, it’s something more or less common”… but remember, all these events are groups events (a collaborative agenda) that can be updated in real time by several people (same as Google Docs), and can be decentralized (same as email). It’s not a simple static email or post with an event.

Remember that typically, the group decides on an event, and each individual must be notified to update their individual agendas with the event. In Kune, this would be done automatically in the moment a group member posts the event.

This can help a lot in the mobilization of groups because in the end, they tend to use email, Twitter, Facebook, etc to do so, and well, it doesn’t work very well. This feature facilitates the building of common agendas and avoid repeating efforts.

Many future work can be done in this direction:

  • Make the current code more scalable (improve the cache of events).
  • Improve the user calendar (with all its personal and groups events) with follow/unfollow of events.
  • Develop more the private/public events visibility and permissions.
  • Create new event gadgets. Now our main event gadget (massmob) has been improved a lot, but we can develop/adapt other event capable gadgets, like decentralized doodles, etc.

Thus, we can keep moving towards a decentralized Google Calendar, Doodle, etc  infrastructure.

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Our presentation at @conexoesglobais & @medialabprado

Posted on February 15, 2012 by and

Our presentation (in Spanish) at Conexoes Globais (Porto Alegre, Brasil) @conexoesglobais & Medialab-Prado (Madrid) @medialabprado

Use mouse buttons (left & right click) and/or cursor (left/right arrows) to move forwards/backwards in the presentation. Best viewed in free/open browsers and systems:

UPDATE: We have now the video of the whole presentation in Medialab (also Spanish), for those who prefer to listen to the explanation based on the previous slides:

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Presenting the Status of Kune development (Jan 2012)

Posted on January 17, 2012 by , and

Every January since a few years, we have been reviewing our progress with Kune. It’s nice now to have a look backwards to measure our progress in this big project.
Snapshot of Kune in Jan 2011
After big changes in our code dependencies (integrating Apache Wave, user interface, etc), in January 2011 we were in a rather heartbreaking state (see snapshot)…

…especially  seeing that in January 2009, there seemed to be much more progress (although without integrating Apache Wave, which still did not exist):
http://kune.ourproject.org/2009/01/status-jan09/
or even in January 2008:
http://kune.ourproject.org/2008/01/status-jan08/

Nowadays, we are closer and closer to a big release, entering finally in production stage. Today we can say Kune is a reality and, from our point of view, a game-changer. You can see Kune in action in this video:

Furthermore, nowadays you can try it, experiment with it, or install it in your own server. There are already three active instances of Kune:

What do you think about it? Please, drop your impression in the comments below! You can also contact us if you would like to collaborate in this project. In case you prefer to do an economic contribution rather that collaboration, feel free to donate to the project: Kune is a project supported by just a small community, with no sources of funding.

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Presentations in Contact (New York) & Free Culture Forum (Barcelona)

Posted on November 22, 2011 by and

During the last weeks, we have been moving around presenting Kune in several contexts, together with our other project Move Commons, now in a crowdfunding campaign.

We’ve been showing Kune in the intensive 1-day unconference Contact, in New York City. Contact was about building the next internet: “the net of the future will not be fueled by ads, but by people solving real problems through distributed, peer-to-peer solutions”. We had there a session on colaborative software tools in which we had some interesting discussions on the needs to boost community-driven collaboration. You can see the Kune flyer we distributed in that hectic event. Still, the best part of the trip was outside the conference, getting an insight of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We had some fantastic meetings with the people in the Free/Libre/Open-source Solutions Working Group of OWS, and they are very interested in using Kune. We don’t think of a better use of Kune than to be used by a decentralized social movement like this one.

Contact Unconference

Contact Unconference. Photo by Divergence

We have been also in Barcelona, in the Free Culture Forum, an “international space in which to build and coordinate a global framework for action and a common agenda for issues related to free culture and access to knowledge”. There we presented several projects of the Comunes collective, and of course Kune (and the justifications for it) took the most time in the presentation. We have the slides we used, which provide a pretty good overview of Comunes projects and the reasons for Kune. The project was very well received in the FCForum, and a direct result was to meet the Lorea / n-1 people. We now plan to have online meetings with them, in order to coordinate efforts on building federated social networks.

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Kune 0.0.9 published (codename “15M”)

Posted on August 4, 2011 by , and

What we have seen these days in the movement 15M in the Spanish cities (and extensible to the Arab revolutions), has been a similar scenario to what we have lived all these years in ourproject.org, but condensed in a few days.

When a person or collective needs to have a space in internet:

  • Either they depend on economic resources to hire the creation and management of these spaces… If they don’t have such resources, this option is not feasible.
  • Either they have technical volunteers to perform these tasks. In this case, the people without Internet technical knowledge depend on the technicians, that suffer a lot of demand and are frequently a bottleneck (there are not enough geeks per square meter). In such cases:
    • These geeks use free/libre tools that are old and difficult to use for the general non-geek public (mailman, etherpad, wikis, irc, etc)
    • The geeks focus their efforts in teaching to use these tools to the users. The result is typically the frustration of both groups, as only a small percentage of the users manage to handle successfully in those complex environments
    • There are issues with certain tools that demand too many resources (bandwidth, hard disk, management) such as the email, as it’s complicated to fulfill the demand of so many people for such a service (using free alternatives)
  • When the geek community cannot fulfill all their demands, or when the people/collectives cannot afford these dependencies, these users end up using proprietary tools (groups, emails and chat of google/yahoo/microsoft [1][2][3], blogs in blogspot or wordpress.com [4][5][6][7], flickr [8][9], google-docs [10][11][12], facebook [13][14][15], etc) that due to their usability and simplicity they can manage by themselves. This implies:
    • use of proprietary and centralized software, controlled by multinational for-profit corporations
    • problems of privacy, selling our private data
    • blocking of services, accounts or documents with political implications
    • loss of independency
    • forced to comply with foreign law
    • etc
  • In the worst case, they use tools that they know how to use (Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, etc) and they send each by email different versions of the created documents… communicating through long chain emails and/or without any netiquette.
  • …or simply they cannot manage to have any presence in the internet, as they find it too complicated, turning into mere consumers (non-producers) of information.

In Kune we try to take benefit from our experience these years in ourproject.org in order to facilitate the creation of self-manageable web & communication spaces, for any person or collective, independently of their technical knowledge or economic resources.

That’s why this new version is codenamed 15M. Among other things, we have tried to integrate certain additional tools thinking of the needs observed these days. In fact, what can we do with Kune? Kune offers users and collectives services such as:

  • Email service of new generation, hosted in the Kune server of your trusted collective
  • Chat compatible with gmail and others: person-to-person or group conversations
  • Allows the call for online assemblies with the members of your group/project/initiative and taking minutes (editing them all at once)
  • Collaborative and simultaneous edition of documents (similar to Google Docs) thanks to Apache Wave
  • Social network: management of personal and collective contacts with different levels of privacy
  • Multimedia space: for sharing videos, photos, maps, twitter…
  • Extensions useful for collectives: allows call and development of meetings, decision-making, translation of documents, sharing task lists…
  • …and everything is free/libre software, usable and decentralized, that can be adapted and improved by anyone

You can try Kune in our demo here, and if you think it’s worth it, check how you can help!

[1] https://groups.google.com/group/asamblea-popular-vega-del-tajuna
[2] https://groups.google.com/group/reboot-uk
[3] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reforma_ley_electoral_15m_bcn/
[4] https://nadiaelawady.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/egypts-revolution-eyewitness-account-january-25-to-29/
[5] https://politicalargoplazoacampadasol.wordpress.com/
[6] http://tahyyes.blogspot.com/
[7] http://15maio.blogspot.com/
[8] http://www.flickr.com/groups/egypt_revolution_2011/
[9] http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacoboictus/5739566757/in/photostream/
[10] https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0Bw2kcVTiRhl5Njk5ZmNmMjYtYTQ2MC00YmRjLTgyMzMtMDBhODYzNmU0NjUx&hl=es
[11] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtUC5Tzt8MFudF9rYXRENEUzTnE0V1NLWGcwUXdJa0E&hl=en
[12] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt97P_GkYYBmPOKQ&hl=en#gid=0
[13] https://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed
[14] https://www.facebook.com/Syrian.Revolution
[15] https://www.facebook.com/acampadasol

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Kune usability report

Posted on August 2, 2011 by

Every feedback is welcome, and even more if it’s constructive and useful. This is the case of this one: The IEPALA Foundation [1] has prepared a usability report about Kune (in Spanish, although with understandable designs), in which it studies the usability of Kune and how to improve the issues found.

The report concludes that the general approach of Kune is correct. However, there are several issues with navigation and interaction that cause the user experience not to be completely satisfactory. Thus, the report proposes several changes and alternative designs to overcome these problems.

Nowadays, many of these suggestions are already implemented and will appear in the next release of Kune, while others which are more complex will be addressed later.

Have you tried the Kune demo? What do you think about it? Which things would you change? Every opinion counts and yours as a user even more.

[1] IEPALA is a non-governmental, non-profit organization that focuses its work on the analysis, studies and training in Latin America, Africa and the South, defending and promoting the right of peoples and human rights, and cooperation development of Third World peoples. Currently, IEPALA is fully supporting the development of Kune.

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Kune Sees the Light

Posted on May 13, 2011 by

After many efforts, delays, getting desperate and several collapses, we are proud and enthusiastic to announce the release of Kune.

Kune is free software (AGPLv3) that focuses on building free/libre contents collaboratively, focused on organization work and web content publishing.

Kune is very focused on free/libre culture while attempting to empower social movements. And Kune, today, is a reality (at least in a preliminary version). You can check out a summary about Kune goals in our new homepage, and at last, you can play with a demo.

Kune attempts to create a piece of software with new added value based on our experience with our initiative ourproject.org since 2002, with the support of IEPALA and their experiences in Red EuroSur and Gloobal, and under the frame of the Comunes Collective.

As stated in a previous post, Kune integrates the Apache Wave-In-A-Box project. With Kune, collectives can use waves to share and edit contents collaboratively in real time, while publishing their contents on the web and connecting with others. Besides, thanks to the Wave Federation Protocol, Kune is decentralized, allowing users of several instances of Kune in different servers to interoperate transparently.

Kune is supported by a pretty small community with few developers and resources. Thus, if by chance Kune sounds interesting to you, please don’t hesitate and consider participating!

On the other hand, if you want to spread the word around, you can freely use the widget of our homepage by inserting the following code into your blog posts:

<iframe
src="http://kune.ourproject.org/introd/kuneintro.html?locale=en"
width="721px" height="655px" width="721px" align="left"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Feedback, comments (and patches) are more than welcome 🙂

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