Seems very promising and true to the VRM leaning towards avoiding any centralized authorities. Apologies if this has already swept the listserv and I'm late to the game.
The Respect Network (and the Extensible Data Interchange (XDI) standard) provides a hybrid solution for naming, addressing and communications topology
- Personal clouds (which may be self-hosted or CSP-hosted) communicate peer to peer with each other, and with business clouds
- Cloud addresses are decentralized, expressed as UUIDs in XDI syntax
- Cloud names are stored in an XDI registry to allow for opt-in discovery and for reputation management. You can have multiple and/or pseudonymous names. Multiple names shouldn't be corelatable by other members but we do maintain one reputation for a member's names.
- The architecture allows for multiple, distributed peer registries and reputation systems in the future.
In short, it looks and feels like Twitter, but you create and own your
own accounts, keys, and data. You can either host yourself or choose
a vendor to host your content with no lock-in. The hosting providers
are simply dumb http servers serving atom feeds via a rest API backed
by dumb storage.
This gives us a happy side-effect of being able to 'follow' all
existing RSS and Atom feeds, so there's a rich content ecosystem
out-of-the-box, and we leverage existing content workflows and
interop. You can get a taste here:
You can read more in one convenient place on our Knight News Challenge
entry -- please do click the little "Applause" button at the bottom of
that page if you like what we're doing.