After a hectic summer, we can announce a new version of Kune 🙂 This happily coincides with the 6 month-anniversary of the kune.cc node, which has now more than 330 groups and more than 1600 users.
Kune 0.2.0 has as codename “Ostrom“, as a homage to Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize of Economics 2009. She demonstrated how the Commons can be managed by their communities in a better and more successful way than how the State and the Market manage them. She died last June, so let this serve as tribute to her work on boosting the Commons paradigm. Kune aims to contribute to this trend, trying to boost the Commons-based peer production by grassroot communities.
Why Kune? Today we give this as an argument: because all together we have built and maintained a free/open encyclopedia such as Wikipedia… but we cannot stop in an encyclopedia, we must aim for the complete free/open library. Thus, we need tools to build and maintain, all together, that whole distributed “network of libraries”: a free/open distributed ecosystem of resources, methods, designs, tools and knowledge that can enable a free/open society.
We have the theoretical tools (e.g. Ostrom works), we have the legal tools (e.g. Creative Commons), and with tools such as Kune we hope to contribute to have technical tools that promote real-time peer collaboration for building and maintaining Commons in every field.
Kune “Ostrom” has lots of improvements and new features, such as:
- Multi-lingual support of 12 languages! Now Kune is available in Arabic, Basque, Catalan, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.
- Multiple usability & interface improvements
- Several design changes, including a new set of icons
- Search was improved
- More informative interface for newbie users
More improvements, this time just for techies (sorry for the humans):
- Apache Wave integration within Kune has been sensibly improved
- Improved RTL support (for Arabic and similar languages)
- Now Kune works under proxies
- Improved performance
- …and many, many bug fixes
- On the developer side, we have moved to GIT and Gitorious repository:
https://github.com/comunes/kune
with aread-onlymirror in Github:
https://github.com/comunes/kune - The admin documentation, for those who want to have their own Kune node, has been significantly improved:
http://kune.cc/#!kune.docs.6810
We would like to invite anyone to join the development of Kune (or Apache Wave). Please spread the word among developers: we are doing this because we believe it is important to be done. It’s fun, it feels good, but especially we believe it’s important, in the complicated times we are living.
We want to thank the incredible work of Apache Wave developers, the Medialab-Prado Kune group for their useful advice, and the IEPALA Foundation for their support.
