A distributed app that supports co-operation in a thousand places.
- many cooperation schemes right out of the box
- easily extendable, fully programmable
- 100% distributed. No one snoops your data!
- supports chat, but the topic is center stage
- actions for roles per context
Bring up the baby
Nowadays young parents really need all the help they can get. Grandparents, neighbours, friends and kindergarten nurses all co-operate, taking roles and shouldering responsibilities. They all contribute and have their say. With InPlace, they can co-ordinate their actions.
Celebrate a birthday!
A young child’s birthday party really is a co-operation. Mum sends invitations, Dad bakes a cake, parents buy presents and bring and collect their children. And then all those games! A wish list is really helpful, parents cross off items bought. But a regular chat about bringing rain clothes, or an early pick-up, comes in very handy, too!
Run a household together
A collective undertaking often requires some form of structured information, such as a cleaning rota, or a shopping list. For less recurring issues, chat is a perfect complement.
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InPlace explained
There is a time and place for everything. We’ve all experienced sometime or other the relaxed feeling of having everything in place. To have everything at hand, to have all information at your disposal, at your discretion!
This is what InPlace is about
InPlace is a new way of privately sharing information with others that lets you put everything in place. What place? A ‘Place’ is a context in which you and others have a role. Each can act accordingly. ‘Private’ means: no uninvited others have access to that Place. No company, no organization, no government. No software-bots crawl your Places. This is what privacy has always meant: a safe space, indoors, where no-one can intrude.
Being together in a single Place allows you to chat confidentially with each other, too.
There is a specific Place for everything. A Place for things and events involving your family. Another for your colleagues, yet another for friends, etc. These may be subdivided into more specific Places, such as a Place that you organize the care for your young children in; a Place to run a party in; a Place for that next city trip; etc.
Think of a Place as a conversation in a chat Application, if you like. But also picture a mini-app within that chat-App. InPlace will have hundreds of such apps, each specific for an event, a group, an ongoing concern. Whereas an App on your mobile usually is for personal use (a calculator, a clock, a health tracker), a Place supports co-operation by default. Co-operate with the friends, family members, colleagues and others that constitute your actual social context.
We’ll have lots of Places ready for you to inhabit and invite others into. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Roll your own! All it requires is an analytical mind and some effort to master the seven concepts that Places are built from. Share your invention and you might even make a little money (have a look at www.perspect.it for more information).
What kind of Places are available?
We will create many Places with the funds raised by this campaign. But you don’t have to rely exclusively on us. Everyone can create new kinds of Places and contribute them to the Places Repository.
Our initial target list is this:
- a dinner (for friends or family)
- a birthday party
- Christmas (and yes: Sinterklaas for our Dutch users)
- Taking care of the children (babysitting)
- Collectively taking care of a frail parent
- Splitting house cleaning tasks
- A collective student household
- A meeting
- Who Has The Car? Collectively owning or using a car
- A family member in hospital
- A city trip
- A creative course (drawing, music, painting)
- A reading circle
- Sporting together (cycle club, running club…)
- Collectively maintaining a garden
How do I find a specific Place?
We’ll establish a repository for Places (www.inplace.one). This you can search, using keywords. Perspect-IT will upload ten to twenty Places to start with and we will continue to develop Places. We also expect many contributions from the community! When someone invites you to a role in a Place she has created, your device will download the required model automatically. Alternatively, you can browse the repository in search of a kind of Place that is new to you.
What is the difference between InPlace and a chat App?
A chat app is like InPlace – but it only has one type of Place, the “Chat”. Think of this Chat as a table, seating a number of people. All they can do is say things to each other (by typing messages). This is very useful, but there so many other things we can do together but chat!
As an example, think of a child’s birthday party (let’s call it a BirthdayPlace). It will start out with:
- a list of invitees,
- a date, time and place
- and a list of wishes.
Then invitees either accept or decline. An invitee sees who else has been invited and whether they’ve accepted or declined. An invitee obviously sees the wish list, too. He or she can claim a wish. But they can also start a chat on a wish: asking, for example, for a specific color or whatever. So these chats are very context-specific, being about a single wish. There is a more general chat, too. A parent may ask whether their child should bring rain clothing, for example.
So a Place has roles and actions for its participants. It may contain documents and other media. And, let’s not forget it, it allows you to chat with the others.
Of course, the birthday child does not see what wishes have been claimed and certainly not by whom!
Tell me more about data sharing and privacy!
Think of a Place as a bundle of information. Who owns this information? Where is it stored? InPlace is constructed in such a way that every user playing a role in a specific Place, stores that bundle of information on his or her device – and only on those devices! If a user performs an action that modifies that information, his device will send that modification directly, not through any intervening server, to the devices owned by the other participants. This is what we call peer to peer distribution.
So everyone playing a role in a Place has the information she needs. Anyone not involved cannot have even the tiniest bit of that information, in any way. There is no overseeing authority, no entity that has a birds eye view of all that goes on in InPlace-space.
As a matter of fact, various roles may have different perspectives on the same Place. The Birthday place described above has an example: the birthday child cannot see whom is going to give what. So, the bundle of information on your device depends on your role, too.
I’ve nothing to hide. Why should I care about privacy?
You may have come across the notion that ‘data is the new gold’. This is almost not a metaphor. If true, data protection is not just about privacy. It is also about locking your door to prevent the Big Five stealing your valuable data!
How does it work?
The world is full of privately owned computing devices. Nearly everyone has plenty of computing power, so we don’t need to hire it (forget the cloud). We just need to organise it better, so your data and media cannot get lost and we can connect to each other directly. It also should also be easier to create programs that support collaboration.
InPlace runs on Perspectives. Perspectives is two things. One: a Co-Operating System – for that huge, very distributed, loosely connected infrastructure consisting of all our phones, laptops and desktops. It welds them into a single entity that runs software. Two: a new kind of programming language that makes it very easy to write programs that support co-operation.
Why do I have to pay € 3 /month?
Creating a Place costs an effort, sometimes considerably so. Such work should be paid. We believe in Free Software, but not ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’. The monthly fee you pay is distributed among the authors of the PlaceModels that you use. This creates an incentive for creative individuals to contribute. It also creates a community for individuals who create or use these creations and are willing to support each other. In other words, we believe in a community that is also a market.
By paying a monthly fee you contribute to that community and help to keep Places free from advertisement or other forms of commercial activity in order to pay those who make InPlace attractive.
Importantly, you help keep it free from nosey third parties, too!
This model works very well for medium.com, a well known platform for authors of texts, be they columns, short stories or serious papers. It is similar to the model of Spotify, but without the music industry between those that pay and those that play. We believe it will work for authors of PlaceModels, too.
Is it Open Source?
We will make the source code available soon after the network launches, that is, when the first users connect to each other and co-operate. We wait until that moment in order to be able to focus on launching in a small team, without the added complexity of maintaining software in the loose collaboration within a community, that is so characteristic for open source software. We have not yet decided on the type of license (Free Software, Open Source, etc.) that we’ll provide InPlace under.
About us
Perspect IT is a company of two, Cor Baars and Joop Ringelberg. We both have a background in (Good Old Fashioned) Artificial Intelligence and between us we can boast more than sixty years of experience in IT. We’ve applied this knowledge to large projects, working for large to very large clients. We’ve gradually, over the years, come to the conclusion that Things Are Not OK in IT. Extreme concentration of money and incredibable accumulation of data fundamentally unhinge the relationship between BigOrg and the citizen. This caused a concentration of power that threatens democratic society. In short, we feel increasingly uneasy.
Perspectives and InPlace is our answer. It is our gift to society. We worked on it non-stop since january 1 2016. Now it is your turn to accept that gift and vote with your feet, or refuse it and give in to the Big Five. Support our campaign and become part of a movement that breaks away from Silicon Valley Hegemony!
Do you want to be just another Big IT Company?
No. We are a small company and that’s how we like it. We have plenty of R&D to do (on work that goes beyond InPlace) and we will fund those from the revenues of InPlace. We will continue to provide our results to the community. InPlace will create a market for creative designers and screen builders, so money will be spent and made, but this does not have to go through Perspect-IT. We don’t want Perspectives to be ‘ownable’ so it cannot be incorporated by an existing big IT company.
What do I need?
You’ll need the following:
- A computer (laptop or desktop) that runs Windows, MacOs or a Linux variant.
- Internet!
- The Perspectives Runtime.
- Others to co-operatie with, who run the Perspectives Runtime, too.
How do I start?
Contribute to this campaign by paying 12 months in advance (€ 36,-). As soon as InPlace is available, go to www.in-place.org and download the software. You’ll be able to use InPlace for as many months as you’ve paid for. Then, one month later, you’ll have to pay for that month, or opt out. This will repeat each successive month. Note: there will be no refund of fees paid in advance.