On Monday 30 May 2011 05:29:22 Tom Elovi Spruce wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm a CS student who is more into design and art than I am with technical 
> implementation.  (However, I can't help but get obsessed with technical 
> details when the project asks for it.)
> 
> Anyways, I've talked with sanity on reddit and it seems you need some UI 
> contributors: 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ehep2/why_do_wikileaks_supporters_propose_designing/c1wm4y5

Yes. I am toad. I do not have time to fix everything, although I have 
occasionally done UI work when nobody else is available and it's urgent and 
easy. However I am far from the ideal person to work on it. Mostly bugs get 
auto-assigned to me, don't worry about that, just dive in (but please do let us 
know what you're doing e.g. by commenting on the bug). Let me know if you need 
developer rights on the bug tracker (you'll need to tell me what your nick is).

Other people who are coding stuff that is at least a little UI-related:
- ArneBab: Honorable mention, he mostly works on themes (i.e. CSS), and mockups.
- operhiem1 has recently been working on the code related to choosing files on 
disk. (Freenet needs to be able to write downloads direct to disk, or read data 
to upload direct from disk, where possible, for various reasons; hence we 
support both the usual browser upload form and an HTML in-browser file 
browser). He will probably be working on friend-to-friend chat soon (we have 
the backend for this but the UI currently is very clumsy).
- pouyanster is hoping to be doing some work on moving our current hacky HTML 
generation to some sort of lightweight templating engine.
(IRC nicks, also are bugtracker names; amazingly the last two were summer of 
code students that due to our own clumsiness we didn't manage to assign mentors 
to early enough, but they've still done a load of work for us even though they 
won't get paid now)

You may have to work with all of these people to lesser or greater degrees. And 
of course with me and whoever else is interested in UI.
> 
> Now let me make something clear, my interest in this project is to work off 
> what you guys are doing and create an application that serves a utility to 
> the general public. I want to create utilities in order to aid you guys in 
> the deployment of a censorship-free publishing platform that you strive to 
> create. Pretty much, I'm more into the non-political aspects of your project, 
> but I see no harm in helping your free-speech endeavors. (it's not like the 
> Chinese government is going to hunt me down, right? right!?). Nonetheless, I 
> would like to see Freenet grow in popularity in the same light as bitcoin and 
> bittorrent. 
> 
> Moving on, I see two utilities with Freenet: 
> 
> 1. Utilizing a darknet for creating an internet among friends. I see this as 
> a stepping stone for getting people started with the opennet. People love to 
> share files among their friends, what Freenet can offer is an easy-to-use and 
> robust sharing platform. 

To clarify what VolodyA said:

The basic vision here is that in the long term Freenet will mostly operate in 
darknet (friend to friend) mode. However because different people have 
different friends, it should all connect up into one fairly large network 
(hopefully significantly larger than the 6000-20000 or so nodes we have now).

Right now most people use opennet - that is, they come across Freenet somehow, 
install it, and don't know anyone already using it, so they allow it to connect 
to opennet.

To get from where we are (mostly opennet) to where we want to be (mostly 
darknet), making it a lot easier for friends to share files locally would 
certainly be a good thing. This is partly a matter of core changes (we support 
transferring files to our friends, but the code doesn't support restarting them 
when the node restarts; and we should be able to tell our friends about our 
downloads and/or files in general, possibly not telling all our friends about 
any specific file based on trust levels, and possibly making them searchable), 
but mostly a matter of user interface. Ideally that user interface would be 
part of Freenet's web interface so it can be bundled and used immediately on 
installing it.

So anything you can do to provide more things to do with your Freenet friends 
will help build a global darknet. Which is a key goal of Freenet.
> 
> 2. Creating a free web publishing platform for everyone. This way, you can 
> convince people to be part of the opennet and get more nodes. Maybe this will 
> lead to having the opennet "feel" just as responsive as the typical 
> client-server platform of HTTP (I'm likely wrong on this; you guys know 
> better). In fact, this is what got me hooked on Freenet. This idea that you 
> have all these computers on the internet, why can't you utilize them to host 
> files instead of a client-server model? The hurdle I see with this is 
> convincing people that the information they will store on their computer will 
> not harm them or make them liable for the content they host for others. 

Yes, free unlimited hosting (with no bandwidth costs, at least bandwidth costs 
aren't dependant on visitor count) has always been an interesting aspect of it. 
Ideas on how to make this work better are welcome.
> 
> Now I will be busy this summer, I have plenty of responsibilities to address 
> to. The best I can do as of now is to keep studying your current 
> infrastructure and, on my free time, create and share mockups to receive some 
> feedback from y'all. 

Fair enough. Mockups are certainly welcome. You might even be able to get 
operhiem1 to implement some of them (e.g. friend to friend chat).
> 
> Looking forward to...well whatever happens by the time it gets dark: 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUvyUWhpRJY

If Freenet doesn't get dark first! :)
> 
> [insert valediction],
> iā¤computers

Hope you can help!

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