A little proposal to make Eelo more valuable
Eelo is a project to build “Desirable, privacy-enabled smartphones & web services”. This is a proposal about the “web services” part of Eelo, as presented here.
I dare suggest that a non-negligible part of those web services should be as independent as possible from Eelo and coincide with what I’ve been calling “percloud” (permanent/personal cloud) since 2012 / 2013: a stand-alone, really integrated and easy to use personal alternative to Facebook+Twitter+Gmail+…several other web platforms (I explained why I propose this approach also in my Mastodon-related posts).
Support to create a percloud as I see it could be either something people find as one app pre-installed in Eelo smartphones, OR something they could get and use independently, from many third parties. In other words, Eelo may also become a partner and “entry point” of the large scale percloud pilot described in that proposal of mine.
I believe that such an “Eelo+percloud” bundle may have much more value, that is be much more attractive for end users, than the sum of the two parts. At the same time, the fact that perclouds may be offered independently from Eelo, and thus be interesting for community-owned ISPs and similar partners, may also make Eelo’s burden a bit lighter, and easier to manage: Eelo wouldn’t have to develop, maintain and provide all those web services all by itself.
Let me make one thing very clear
I am NOT asking for a part of Eelo’s money for myself. Of course, I really wouldn’t mind if it came, and I would love to actively participate in “Eelo web services” project(s). But my actual proposal, and position, are these:
- a) personally, I can work on the percloud ONLY if I am paid to do it, but I do NOT mind if others implement it. In that case, I only demand credit where credit is due, really!
- b) both percloud AND eelo are badly needed, independently from each other
- c) but the more I read about Eelo, the more I feel that a bundled app to let people create in a few minutes their own, integrated, permanent personal website+email+social networking service… that’s guaranteed to work even if they stop using that phone (=freedom!) would be a killer app for an Eelo smartphones
So, please somebody do it. Feedback about this proposal is extremely welcome, of course. Just email me!
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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