Re: [GMG-Devel] MediaGoblin enters the Knight News Challenge

[Marco Solieri]

Dear Chris and all the MediaGoblin developers,

On Wednesday March 19 2014 12:51:02 Chris wrote:
> I'm excited to say that GNU MediaGoblin has entered the Knight
> News Challenge [...] There's an easy way to help make it happen... you
> can leave a constructive comment or hit "applause" on the submission,
> which help

I am happy to read this, and hopeful for receiving their support!

I just posted an enthusiastic and heartfelt comment in the MediaGoblin 
submission page of Knight News Challenge [http://j.mp/1gnaIKq], to stress 
the importance I feel for the project, in particular with respect to civil 
rights and democratic freedoms and targeting a non-technical audience.

Please, find all my encouragement in the rest of the message.

Warm regards.

                              * *
                               *

Most of outstanding web services are offered for free, but such gratuity is 
only apparent. Indeed, users' data (emails, photos, videos...), when having 
a sufficiently large volume , constitute an incredibly precious resource 
for data analyses, so big web companies can simply monetize them, instead 
of asking their users to pay for the services. This makes the web getting 
more and more centralized and the web companies bigger and bigger.

If one can accept to have his/her data somehow sold to web companies, and 
to the advertisement companies which buy analyses from them, the danger of 
having centralized data is unacceptable. A commercial or governmental 
entity may easily access or manipulate private information, when they are 
owned by a few web companies, so they could easily menace people's civil 
and democratic freedoms with acts of censorship or mass media control. This 
scenario is already happening, to different extents, in various places of 
the world, including the United States.

Some of the technologies building our Internet services from the very 
beginning, such as the email or the web itself, were explicitly designed 
and standardized with decentralization in mind. The most recent ones, such 
as social network or media publishing platforms, have been designed and 
implemented by centralizing companies, and we still miss a complete and 
federated implementation for most of them.

MediaGoblin is an outstanding project having this precise direction -- 
creating a federated media publishing platform built with Pump.io, the 
emerging federated social networking protocol. Its freedom attention is 
twofold, because it is released with a free and open source software 
license, so that anyone can use it, study it, expand it and distribute it. 
Thus, it is a completely market-neutral solution allowing to implement 
media publishing in a safe way.

Development started about 3 years ago, and thanks to many volunteers lot of 
progress have been made since the first releases. But the platform lacks 
some crucial features, therefore a support to the project would boost the 
development.

Our freedom of media publishing can't wait the completion of MediaGoblin!

-- 
Marco Solieri

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.