History

1999-10-27

  • The Espian collective is founded by Tav.

Late-1999

  • Tim Jenks implements a organisation management system based on Pecus. The value of technology in facilitating decentralised collaboration is gradually understood.

Early-2000

  • Øyvind Selbek joins the collective through the acquisition of the IceSphere project and introduces the concept of composable services/blocks as a necessary element of an application platform.

May-2000

  • Daniel Biddle introduces Wikis to the Espians. The value of bi-directional links and transclusion are quickly incorporated into the “xnet” collaboration app.

Mid-2000

  • Tav implements the “PlexNews” web app — a combined RSS reader, link manager and news submission/aggregator built on top of trust metrics.

Late-2000

  • Luke Graybill works on a cross-platform GUI library and a Jabber-based “starIM” communications app.
  • Steve Alexander helps Tav develop the Zope-based “xnet” with integrated journals (blogs), trust maps and project management features.
  • Øyvind Selbek implements an auto-updating package management system called “espSetup” for managing the installation of the various applications.
  • Tim Jenks, Alex Tomkins and Martyn Hurt work on a metaverse-esque gaming platform called “LastContinuum”.
  • Daniel Biddle works on implementing real-time messaging (Jabber) inside the web browser.
  • Mathew Ryden, John Hurliman and Jacob Everist join the collective through the acquisition of the “Tropus” Freenet application.

Early-2001

  • Øyvind Selbek starts working on a 3D engine.

2001-02-14

  • The beta version of Espra is released with support for searching RDF-based catalogs of files shared over the decentralised Freenet network. Espra integrates a media player supporting Ogg Vorbis and a micropayments-based “tipping” mechanism in order to create a Gift Economy for content creators.

March-2001

  • Work starts on creating a generic platform to support community wireless (Wi-Fi) networks.
  • Tav fails to secure further funding and everything crashes to a halt.

Mid-2001

  • Luke Graybill and Tav implement an IRC bot called “xena” backed by composable, RESTful web services.
  • Together with Mathew Ryden and Fenton Whelan, Tav comes up with the initial design for a comprehensive decentralised platform — the “Plex”.

2001-11-09

  • The vision of a decentralised application platform was shared by Tav on the #rdfig channel.

2001-10-24

  • Together with Aaron Swartz and other P2P hackers, Tav kicks off the initial development of the Plex — day 0 chatlog.

2002-03-07

2004-2009

  • An “iteration” takes place every year or so, with various aspects of the overall vision being attempted by lots of amazing people.

2009-07-24

  • John McCane-Whitney, Sean B. Palmer, Jan Ludewig and Gerry Gleason help figure out a relatively clean syntax for transclusions and services.

2009-08-14

  • Frustrated with his own grand Plexnet/Espra designs and the tendency of others to complicate that which should be simple, Tav writes a series of posts to the OpenKollab and Espian mailing lists. Titled "in favour of simplicity", it outlines a potentially simpler collaboration platform.

2009-08-18

  • With help from David Pinto, Tav codes a prototype version of the collaboration platform called Tent which adds micro syntax and structured search in order to facilitate collaboration over IRC.

Late 2009

  • Discussions between James Arthur and Tav concerning the Espra Trustmap service they'd been working on leads to refined insights about the requirements of a scalable platform.
  • With lots and lots of help from David Pinto, Mamading Cessay, Sofia Bustamante and eventually Yan Minagawa, much of the general architecture (for both the backend and the user interface) of the platform is gradually finalised.

2010-01-06

  • The now much simpler idea was explained relatively cogently on IRC and was received positively. With inspiration from Sofia Bustamante, Sean B. Palmer came up with the name “Ampify” for the project and the domain ampify.it was promptly registered.
  • Development officially started with a public Ampify repository on GitHub.

2010-01-12

  • Prompted by Sean B. Palmer's questioning of App Engine's limitations, Tav abandoned its use as the backend and decided to use Go instead.

2010-01-17