Kune was a free/open source distributed

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods fo ...

focused on collaboration rather than just on communication. That is, it focused on online

real-time collaborative editing A collaborative real-time editor is a type of collaborative software or web application which enables real-time collaborative editing, simultaneous editing, or live editing of the same digital document, computer file or cloud-stored data – s ...

, decentralized social networking and web publishing, while focusing on workgroups rather than just on individuals. It aimed to allow for the creation of online spaces for collaborative work where organizations and individuals can build projects online, coordinate common agendas, set up virtual meetings, publish on the web, and join organizations with similar interests. It had a special focus on Free Culture and

social movements A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one. This may be to carry out a social change, or to resist or undo one. It is a type of group action and ma ...

needs. Kune was a project of the Comunes Collective. The project seems abandoned since 2017, with no new commits, blog entries or site activity.

Technical details

Kune was programmed using the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

-based GWT in the client-side, integrating

Apache Wave Google Wave, later known as Apache Wave, was a software framework for real-time collaborative editing online. Originally developed by Google and announced on May 28, 2009, it was renamed to ''Apache Wave'' when the project was adopted by the Ap ...

(formerly Google Wave) and using mainly the open protocols

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), i ...

and Wave Federation Protocol. GWT Java sources on the client side generates

obfuscated Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intent us ...

and deeply optimized

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

conforming a single page application. Wave extensions (gadgets, bots) run on top of Kune (as in Facebook apps) and can be programmed in Java+GWT, JavaScript or Python. The last version was under development since 2007 until 2017. The code was hosted in the GIT of

Gitorious Gitorious was a free and open source web application for hosting collaborative free and open-source software development projects using Git revision control. Although it was freely available to be downloaded and installed, it was written primari ...

, with a development site and its main node maintained by the Comunes Collective. Kune is 100% free software and was built only using free software. Its software is licensed under the Affero GPL license, while the art is under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

BY-SA.

Philosophy

Kune was born in order to face a growing concern from the community behind it. Nowadays, groups (a group of friends, activists, a NGO, a small start-up) that need to work together typically will use multiple free (like beer) commercial centralized for-profit services (e.g.

Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Go ...

Google Groups Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. The Groups service also provides a gateway to Usenet newsgroups via a shared user interface. Google Groups became operational in Febru ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

Wordpress.com WordPress.com is a platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of WordPress software. This website provides free blog hosting for regis ...

Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 ...

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

...) in order to communicate and collaborate online. However, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product". In order to avoid that, such groups of users may ask a technical expert to build them mailing lists, a webpage and maybe to set up an etherpad. However, technicians are needed for any new list (as they cannot configure e.g.

GNU Mailman GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of opera ...

), configuration change, etc., creating a strong dependency and ultimately a bottleneck. Kune aims to cover all those needs of groups to communicate and collaborate, in a usable way and thus without depending on technical experts. It aims to be a free/libre web service (and thus in the cloud), but decentralized as email, so a user can choose the server they want and still interoperate transparently with the rest. Opposite to most distributed social networks, this software focuses on collaboration and building, not only on communication and sharing. Thus, Kune does not aim to ultimately replace Facebook, but also all the above-mentioned commercial services. Kune has a strong focus on the construction of Free Culture and eventually facilitate

Commons-based peer production Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based ...

History

The origin of Kune relies on the community behind Ourproject.org. Ourproject aimed to provide for Free Culture (social/cultural projects) what

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

and other software forges meant for

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

: a collection of communication and collaboration tools that would boost the emergence of community-driven free projects. However, although Ourproject was relatively successful, it was far from the original aims. The analysis of the situation in 2005 concluded that only the groups that had a techie among them (who would manage

Mailman A mail carrier, mailman, mailwoman, postal carrier, postman, postwoman, or letter carrier (in American English), sometimes colloquially known as a postie (in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), is an employee of a post ...

or install a

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2 (programming language), used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum collection * Color manage ...

) were able to move forward, while the rest would abandon the service. Thus, new free collaborative tools were needed, more usable and suitable for anyone, as the available free tools required a high degree of technical expertise. This is why Kune, whose name means "together" in

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communic ...

, was developed. The first prototypes of Kune were developed using

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

and Pyjamas (later known as

Pyjs Www.google.com (formerly Pyjamas before May 2012), is a rich web application framework for developing client-side web and desktop applications in Python (programming language), Python. The resulting applications can be run in a web browser or as ...

). However, with the release of Java and the

Google Web Toolkit Google Web Toolkit (GWT ), or GWT Web Toolkit, is an open-source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain JavaScript front-end applications in Java. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. GWT emphasizes reusab ...

as free software, the community embraced these technologies since 2007. In 2009, with a stable codebase and about to release a major version of Kune, Google announced the Google Wave project and promised it would be released as free software. Wave was using the same technologies of Kune (Java + GWT, Guice, XMPP protocol) so it would be easy to integrate after its release. Besides, Wave was offering an open federated protocol, easy extensibility (through gadgets), easy control versioning, and very good real-time edition of documents. Thus, the community decided to halt the development of Kune, and wait for its release... in the meanwhile developing gadgets that would be integrated in Kune later on. In this same period, the community established the Comunes Association (with an acknowledged inspiration in Software in the Public Interest) as a non-profit legal umbrella for free software tools for encouraging the

Commons The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...

and facilitating the work of

. The umbrella covered Ourproject, Kune and Move Commons, together with some other minor projects. In November 2010, the free

(previously Wave-in-a-Box) was released, under the umbrella of the

Apache Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Ap ...

. Since then, the community began integrating its source code within the Kune previous codebase, and with the support of the IEPALA Foundation. Kune released its Beta and moved to production in April 2012. Since then, Kune has been catalogued as "activism 2.0" and citizen tool, a tool for NGOs, multi-tool for general purpose (and following that, criticized for the risk of falling on the

second-system effect The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence. The phrase was first used by Fred ...

) and example of the new paradigm. It was selected as "open website of the week" by the

Open University of Catalonia The Open University of Catalonia ( ca, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC; ) is a private open university based in Barcelona, Spain. The UOC offers graduate and postgraduate programs in Catalan, Spanish and English in fields such as Psycho ...

, and as one of the #Occupy Tech projects. Nowadays, there are plans of another federated social network, Lorea (based on

Elgg Elgg is a municipality in the district of Winterthur in the canton of Zürich in Switzerland. On 1 January 2018 the former municipality of Hofstetten merged into the municipality of Elgg. History Elgg ( la, Elgovia, Sacer pagus) is first menti ...

), to connect with Kune.

Feature list

* All the functionalities of

, that is collaborative federated real-time editing, plus * Communication ** Chat and chatrooms compatible with Gmail and Jabber through XMPP (with several XEP extensions), as it integrates Emite ** Social networking (federated) * Real-time collaboration for groups in: ** Documents: as in

** Wikis ** Lists: as in

but minimizing emails, through waves ** Group Tasks ** Group Calendar: as in

Google Calendar Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It became available in beta release April 13, 2006, and in general release in July 2009, on the web and as mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms. ...

, with ical export ** Group Blogs ** Web-creation: aiming to publish contents directly on the web (as in

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architectu ...

, with a dashboard and public view) (in development) ** Bartering: aiming to decentralize bartering as in

* Advanced email ** Waves: aims to replace most uses of email ** Inbox: as in email, all your conversations and documents in all kunes are controlled from your inbox ** Email notifications (Projected: replies from email) * Multimedia & Gadgets ** Image or Video galleries integrated in any doc ** Maps, mindmaps, Twitter streams, etc. ** Polls, voting, events, etc. ** and more via Apache Wave extensions, easy to program (as in Facebook apps, they run on top of Kune) * Federation ** Distributed Social Networking the same way as e-mail: from one inbox you control all your activity in all kunes, and you can collaborate with anyone or any group regardless of the kune where they were registered. ** Interoperable with any Kune server or Wave-based system ** Chat interoperable with any XMPP server * Usability ** Strong focus on usability for any user ** Animated tutorials for each tool ** Drag&Drop for sharing contents, add users to a doc, change roles, delete contents, etc. ** Shortcuts * Free culture ** Developed using free software and released under AGPL ** Easy assistant for choosing content licenses for groups. Default license is

BY-SA. * Developer-friendly ** Debian/Ubuntu package for easy installation ** Wave Gadgets can be programmed in Java+GWT,

or Python

Supporters and adopters

Kune has the active support of several organizations and institutions: * Comunes Association, whose community is behind Kune development. It used to host a Kune server for free projects
https://kune.cc
* IEPALA Foundation, which was supporting the development with economical and technical resources. It used to host a Kune server for

non-governmental organizations A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in ...

"Social Gloobal"
* Grasia Software Agent Research Group of the

Complutense University of Madrid The Complutense University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; UCM, links=no, ''Universidad de Madrid'', ''Universidad Central de Madrid''; la, Universitas Complutensis Matritensis, links=no) is a public research university loc ...

provided technical resources. * Interns from the Master of Free Software from the

King Juan Carlos University Rey Juan Carlos University ( es, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, URJC) is a Spanish public research university located in the southern area of the Community of Madrid (Spain), with five campuses at Móstoles, Alcorcón, Vicálvaro, Aranjuez and Fue ...

participated in the development. * Trainees from the

American University of Science and Technology The American University of Science and Technology (AUST) (french: link=no, Université américaine de sciences et technologie; ar, link=no, الجامعة الأميركية للعلوم والتكنولوجيا) is a private, non-sectarian, and ...

(Lebanon) participated in the system administration. *

Paulo Freire Institute Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (19 September 1921 – 2 May 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work ''Pedagogy of the Oppressed'' is generally considered one of the foundat ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

participated in the early design and prototypes. * The Kune workgroup of the Medialab Prado participated in the beta-testing.

References

External links

Kune.cc main site
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120619153537/http://kune.cc/ , date=2012-06-19 Project hosting websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Free project management software Social information processing Groupware Collaborative real-time editors 2012 software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Internet properties established in 2007 Software using the GNU AGPL license