[wsfii-discuss] Confusion on Hive and Spontaneous Networking.

Thu Jul 13 08:39:28 UTC 2006

As I said the other day, I dumped many things which were on my brain, 
taking lessons on our experiences and visions about the Spontaneous 
Networking.
Now is time to think twice on that, discussion, better elaborate some 
concepts. The goal is to make it clear, if not, you know, just more 
smoke on the field.

Please I will appreciate comments on the following. By googling saw 
"hive networks" I've got the impression that some of the people related 
to wsfii (Julian, etc...) have been using this vocabulary earlier. I 
just want to be consistent and not provide more confusion if there are 
already some adopted definitions.

The real goal must be helping en everyone's projects roadmap, certainly 
at least does in what we're doing at guifi, so help us to evolve the 
concepts we've working on in the last months.

I'm sorry, but I saw the expression "hive networking" just two days ago. 
Since that I was thinking on that expression because might help a lot in 
defining some of the concepts we need to describe for vertebrating 
networks. A "hive" could mean something which provides robustness to the 
local communities, solving density and critical mass problems, I mean, 
Spontaneous Networking is not only about scalability, more than this is 
about the ability to supply resources to the new "hives" in order to 
give them more chances for survival when they are in their critical 
path, and as long as they mature and get established, create new paths 
for creating new ones to boost enhance the others. That is a concept, 
and said in this way, very complementary to the spontaneous networking.

But by googling "hive networks" I just have discovered that in this case 
is not a new concept and some of you have already worked on this. There 
is also a wiki site hivenetworks.net! But by my first (diagonal) look 
into this, I'm not sure that the term is being used in the same way as 
understanding it. I.e. at hivenetworks.net I've got the impression that 
after talking about a very abstract concept ("hive blobs"), goes 
straight to talk about a very "gadget" oriented things (firmwares, 
packages, etc....). Gadgets for sure are needed, are basic! However I 
don't see what's really new on this, there is just a need to keep going 
on with them and getting better, we might have dozens now and we might 
have hundreds in the future, some could get unsused, new ones might 
appear...

So I miss something there. The hive/spontaneous approach have to be 
something else than just describing resources, is also about enabling 
the capabilities to them for spontaneously working together, that is 
building the hive. For sure anything pluggable into an IP network is 
already by definition able to extend something, but by having just that, 
isn't that only about just networking in general? what about solving the 
critical mass problems and building the hives?

Comments welcome :)