Emergent Chaos

I've mentioned the Spirit of America anonymous blogging project before. To help move things forward, I've offered Jim Hake my assistance as a project coordinator. As Jim describes the project:

The project is to review all available technologies and techniques and get the input of the best minds available to put together a plan for how we can achieve anonymous blogging. The goal is to enable bloggers in Iran, China, whereever to blog with the least possible risk of being identified and jailed. The goal is 100% anonymity with 100% certainty. I doubt that's possible but the question is how close we can get, how to implement it and how much it costs.

There are a lot of good folks who've shown enthusiasm for this project, and we'd like their participation.

I think that the project should be open, in many senses. I'd like to operate openly. I'd like to blog about what we're doing, not work in the shadows and then come out with something. I'd like to encourage people who can contribute to contribute. I'd like users of our system or systems to be able to read up on how it was created if they're interested. To get started, I'm thinking of this as a three phase project:

1. Figure out what we should build
2. Build and operate it.
3. Improve it.

In phase 1, there's a requirements portion and a budgeting portion. We've done some initial writing on what those requirements should look like, on our Wiki at http://privateblogging.noreply.org/privateblogging/.

If you have thoughts on these things and would like to help out, I'd love to hear from you, either via email or comments or trackbacks. We also have a wiki set up and encourage contributions there.