The name was inspired by the Borg with not much related to it. This is a simple demo for a concept of Grassroot Representative Networks I'll be speaking about at the Radical Networks Conference. http://radicalnetworks.org/about/index.html on October 25, 2015.
The code just demonstrates the simple P2P concept with each node acting as a client, server and a proxy (router/dispatcher). It is not yet there and might not be at all in time for the conference, but it's just a POF.
The idea is to explore a way of organizing grassroot communication using structured "amateur" networks to simulate political organizations to leverage information against a surveilling organization, dictator, authority or head of state. Instead of people electing representatives with political background and money to represent their voices, the representatives are dynamically elected based on information and group of people they have at hands.
The idea can also be applied to activists who want to organize and communicate with peers around a surveilling authority. The same idea of "dynamic" representatives apply here.
A Node is a self-contain unit consist of a client, server and a proxy (router/dispatcher) which anyone can implement on a machine (computer, Raspberry Pi, virtual machine).
- A node can connect to any peers in the organization.
- A node can opt-in or -out any time to store communication data.
- The organization dynamically elect a node with the highest number of connections as representative.
An Organization consists of several nodes (either locally or remotely connected to one another), with one node as an assigned leader or representative. An organization takes care of all the housework between its tenant nodes, including electing a new node as a representative when the former's connection is lost.
- Each node's client will be connected to a leader node
- Each node's server will start listening and broadcast the content between itself and the leader node to other prospective nodes to connect and vice versa.
- If a leader node's connection is lost, the Org will elect a second-tiered node with the most number of connections and promote it to a representative, rerouting all connections from the former rep to the new one, and vice versa until there is no more node left in any tier of communication.
Each connection at every tier should be encrypted or tunneled to prevent surveillance by the ISP's gateway keepers.
Data storage should be distributed along the nodes (representatives) in the same tier, but at any point there must be a mechanism for each node to opt-in or -out to store data in an Org locally. In such a way that when an Org is compromised:
- The representative may or may not have the information
- Some nodes may or may not have the information
- Information is copied to some connected representatives (No single point of vulnerability)
Also, instead of storing all data in the communication locally (in all or some nodes), there must be a way for any node to decide to securely upload to a decentralized, provider-independent cloud database, for instance, Tahoe-LAFS.