PLANET
PLANET is an open project to design a cooperating system for the collaborative, regenerative economy.
The project is a collective effort to design and build the protocols, infrastructure and network needed for cooperation to flourish – and is open to contributions from anyone who wants to see a world where people and planet come before profit.
What are we building?
PLANET - The Protocols
A set of open standards that enable decentralized collaboration and coordination across platforms and networks within the regenerative economy. These include:
- A new axiom about how the world works and the nature of reality.
- A shared purpose and principles on which PLANET operates.
- A Membership Agreement which defines the responsibilities, obligations and rights of the Members of PLANET and acts as a semi-permeable membrane to protect the PLANET commons from exploitation.
- Murmurations, an open data protocol for interoperability between groups.
- Additional protocols as required for exchange and transparent governance.
PLANET - The Infrastructure
We have already built Murmurations to provide the foundations for simple data sharing across platforms and networks – now we’re focussing on building a set of hosted tools to facilitate collaboration between groups. The tools are being designed so that other Admins can easily create new instances to host other groups, which will interoperate across the PLANET network.
See the live development plan where we’re priortising features into phases.
PLANET - The Network
The PLANET Network refers to the decentralized federation of groups and organizations that have adopted the PLANET protocols. The network aims to support local action and global coordination, enabling members to benefit from access to a much wider pool of collective knowledge and resources, without losing their independence. Any group or organisation can join the PLANET network by adopting the protocols – they don’t have to use the PLANET infrastructure, they roll their own tools or integrate existing platforms and networks via the Murmurations API.
For example, the map below shows just some of the 7,000 organisations that have created Murmurations profiles. You can search all the current data in the Index explorer. But static profiles are just the start – now we’re working on making Offers & Wants and other content interopable across the network.
If you’d like your organisation to show up on the map above, see the instructions in the Docs, or go to Tools, select the ‘organizations schema’ and follow the prompts.
HELP us make PLANET a reality
The PLANET project is a collaborative endeavour but, as you might appreciate, this is no small challenge! So, we need your help.
LATEST NEWS
PLANET history
The original PLANET concept was designed in 2004. We designed a series of screenshots and cartoon story to demonstrate how the concept would be used in practice.
The cartoon story was developed in 2004, but was set in 2010. The designs might look old now but bear in mind that Facebook did not exist until February 2004 and Google Earth was not launched until June 2005, so the screenshots were quite forward thinking at the time.
We updated the PLANET concept in January 2017, as an open source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy with a new series of phone-based screenshots to illustrate how the various concepts and ideas would work.
Like before, the purpose was to illustrate some of the key concepts of a collaborative economy and what it might be like to interact with this new economic system via PLANET.
PLANET was, and still is, envisioned as an open source project which is owned and controlled by its members, giving them complete control over how it works.
More recently we updated PLANET to describe the protocols which we envisage operating at each layer of the system, with detailed explanations of the features at each level, why they’re important and how they might work.
These protocols and features are not locked, they are being discussed and debated as part of the co-creation of the PLANET mvp.
Join us to have your say about how PLANET should work.