The parallel revolution: live in the Red

Internet and social networks transform our world every day: sometimes expanding and accelerating, sometimes making it close. In this sense, there is widespread belief that the great revolutions are brewing on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. But citizens are the real actors of the process? ¿Adoos Web 2.0 or are we simply your guests? Probably in places like Lorea and N-1 where change is occurring rea l.

In a botanical metaphor, "for a plant to grow strong and lush must spread their seeds evenly across the field at our disposal and water them regularly." And that is precisely the concept of emerging Lorea (flower in Basque), a pool of free and open digital communities born in Spain. Its most promising seed, the social network N-1 , already has more than 37,000 inhabitants. The terminology is not accidental. The platform chosen precisely "inhabitants" of the active connotation that the word implies, and discarded the use of other, as users or members.

Agitation, mobilization, revolution, participation, self-management, direct assembly ... any of these concepts could give life to the initiative, which emerged three years ago in our country under the influence of hacker philosophy , the free software movement and citizen-based digital .

Marta, one of those cyber that allow the seeds to grow and expand Lorea, explains the need to make the Internet a free space for dialogue, free and, above all, public, like the squares and streets of our city . "We are people who consciously inhabit a space on the Internet, a meeting place. We are not a service but we are people who, above all social groups involved in or planning for social transformation, "he says.

Organisation and participants

So Lorea is a network of networks. It aims to create a unique and exclusive global community. Although his ideas "federal", shared with other alternative communities as Diaspora , StatusNet or Crabgrass among others, the key to their growth are individual participants and privacy.

Its members can work in multiple proposals in a secure, independent and free. They argue that collaboration does not need names or personal data, that the spontaneous creativity, the free flow of information is better protected with nicks. Thus, for a secure network, the platform does not store any data. So only need an email address to access and, in any case, urged the participants to record their real name.

These points are, well, a declaration of intent within a movement linked to libertarian ideas to the marketing of the "person" who popularized Zuckerberg, Dorsey Hoffman, among others.

"We do not reject people use social networking business," he qualifies Martha, "just say it is absurd to believe in a change of economic model while giving money to these people," referring to the main investors of Twitter, Facebook or Myspace from Goldman Sachs to Telefónica .

Model changes

In this light, it is people who make change possible. A change towards a social, political and economic more responsible and fair.

It may, indeed, the Internet does not produce demonstrations. That revolution is never tuiteada . That, as in many other human tools, after the face of that kind and friendly Web hiding other faces darker and fearsome. But as we remember Manuel Castells :

"When you fire the internet is difficult to contain."

Maybe that's why, precisely, the real revolution in this digital revolution is to ensure free participation, honest and responsible; provide the technical tools to facilitate the emergence of active networks, interconnected and focused on social change, from the bottom up ... or as they say in Lorea, "that people learn to live in the Red".

This post is a collaborative TcBlog post, written by hand and hand neuron to neuron with José Luis Rodríguez , Social Media Strategist at Creative Territory and specializes in corporate communications and marketing public.

Image mosaic of images of George Cornet , Henry PF , Doki hawk , Sergio Rus , Furlin and THERKD on Flickr