... for work and play. (Family Systems)

... for work and play.

Parent: Brian Reynolds. UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Family Systems is in process of adopting Google Apps and Wave.

Summary

Family Systems was founded by Brian Reynolds to develop voice systems based on the needs he perceived during his Work Experience managing an international software company, and with the potential to implement the Mirror Computer ideas thought up with his children. Brian assigns his rights in all system design activity to Family Systems Ltd, a closely held company which he manages.

Family Systems' inventions such as Verbol Web Server, web collaboration with Voicechat, Verbol and Health Monitoring, plus Playalong and COOPY itself are all being published as CC+COOPY.

We are in process of gearing up from our invention stage to an operating business. Here are some notes on who we are, our pitch and ideas for a plan. We are presently a small team and eager to work with others; please also read the open letter from Brian at Invitation to Cooperate and opportunities to cooperate at COOPYtunities.

News end Sept 09 - Family Systems readies the Voice System V3

AVAILABLE NOW as experimental release; check out our demo at demo.verbol.com.

1. Verbol Web Server introduces Verbol to control an interactive web server implemented with open source Apache augmented with Perl CGI to enable ibook behaviour.

2. Voice System adds VOIP and Voicechat for voice recording with ibots communicating information in real time about the recordings and playback by means of chat messages and using ibook Verbol to organise the voice recordings on an ibook system.

3. COOPY licensing is separated from the ibook system to enable objects to control all their own behaviour, including licensing.

These innovations have the potential for making voice a means of communicating and record keeping as accessible and manageable as text is today, enabling voice as a permanent medium.

NEXT IN OUR PLANS

4. Expansion of Verbol into cooperative operation leads to personas to empower objects to talk with us and

5. in parallel with hardware evolution, leads to the fulfillment of the Mirror Computer goals.

Business rationale for voice as a permanent medium

We convey in phone conversations an order of magnitude more information than we do by typing. Thus there is an order of magnitude more potential for applications and advertising based on our voice conversations than based on our existing text ones.

And as the descriptive information we say is much more informative than what we type, the advertising can be better directed.

The first challenge is to get our voices recorded; they mostly aren't right now and there is a negative association with eavesdropping.

Voicechat changes all that as we individually choose to record our voice as a convenience to us and to express real feeling to the other party. There are more reasons for adoption:-

Voicechat also provides the ability to reply by voice and keep conversations going. This is especially useful when we can't get to the phone at the same time and eliminates phone tag.

The Voice System enable VOIP calls to its enrolees and recording of these is voluntary for each speaker and the calls are broken into each speaker's utterances and noted in the same daily journal. This permits us to maintain a voice record of continuing conversations so we can always go back and listen to what we said.

Yet more benefits of Voicechat; It is very helpful to be able to just speak our ideas and get back to them later or share with our colleagues and friends instead of having to type one letter at a time like we were the machine, just like a typist did two centuries ago. And it is great to be able to speak at any time while listening to someone and not interrupt them yet also be heard.

We are working on topic support and welcome input and contributions.

The second challenge is to convert the speech to text so it can be searched and the advertising matched.

Voice System V3 supports the textual tagging and annotation of voice messages through a chat room and in the daily journal pages. This is very helpful to locate voice messages and provide readable summaries and can be used as a basis for transcription.

To provide a complete solution we ask for other parties to contribute transcription software and services in a way affordable by everyone and learning by identity so as to become increasingly and sufficiently accurate for constan reliable use.

We also ask for speech to text and our favourite example so far is SitePal which also provides lip synching with avatars, another potential component of thge Mirror Computer solution..

Links

We are working on inventions, prototypes and designs principally in three areas being ibook systems including COOPY, Web Collaboration including Voicechat, Verbol and Health Tracking, and Playalong which is utilised in Uplay2.

COOPY

Systems

Web Collaboration
Voicechat
Verbol
Health Tracking

Play Along
Uplay2

Invitation to Cooperate
COOPYtunities.

Various patents have been filed and some issued, listed in Family Systems Patent Filings. We recently filed for some additional patents for our Web Collaboration and Playalong inventions.

Construction Warning - the following notes may change rapidly or move to other pages.

Introducing COOPY

Family Systems Ltd introduces COOPY which is short for cooperative copy licensing so that multiple contributors can share their work and any resulting rewards fairly according to Cooperative Principles which emphasise fairness, democratic decision making and education and promote the good of all.

We see the capital of such information cooperatives or COOPYratives as our common property in the sense of our reciprocally licensed content of all kinds. We visualise that a COOPYrative can be automatically set up whenever anyone makes a derived work of another's content.

Adopting the Cooperative Principles in the information world leads to open reciprocal licenses, and to set up the best conditions for cooperation, we agree to do no harm and to respect everyone's unalienable rights. We feel it is appropriate to sponsor and promote such COOPYratives in the Information World, and we hope you will too.

We regard the Information World as including all information content, behavior, software, systems, media services, products etc etc represented as information, and COOPY World as those Information World artefacts, systems, methods and processes etc which are COOPY licenced by notice, reference or other means.

To provide licensing of Family Systems' full IP portfolio, we recommend utilising the COOPY.BIZ

The sponsors, owners and contributors of any particular COOPY licenced content (COOPY Content) are members of a COOPY cooperative (COOPYrative for short) for that Content. We view this membership as occurring by default upon contribution of content and continuing as long as we adhere to the rules, chief of which are the no harm clause and cooperative principles.

A cooperative opportunity in the Information World as put forward by Family Systems is a COOPY opportunity or COOPYtunity license services which include the licenses themselves and a registration and archiving service to make our COOPYratives visible to each other. for short. Thus COOPYtunities are opportunities for cooperatively licensing ideas, songs, inventions, computer programs etc; anything in the Information World.

Cooperative Principles have been established and worked well in the material world. We anticipate that these principles combined with community monitoring will enable the trust needed for the cooperation to solve the big problems as well as innumerable niches.

To facilitate communication, mutual assistance and an appeals process, we propose that all members of all COOPYratives are members of a COOPYerative of all COOPYratives we call the Help Club. For example each COOPYrative should set up an all@<COOPYrative-name> and add it to a COOPY.biz email list all.all@coopy.biz to reach the help club membership.

CC+COOPY

In CC+COOPY which is our present implementation of COOPY, we use Creative Commons licences which cover free non-commercial use. We supplement these with a commercial license, presently either COOPYright or COOPYshare.

We typically use COOPYright for audio or video whose auther does not wish any changes to be made, and may wish to include advertising or product referrals.

We use COOPYshare for any content however expressed whose text and ideas are open to improvement by others coupled with the agreement for all Contributors and Sponsors of any Commercial Use to share fairly in any revenue arising. For a definition of Commercial Use, we suggest following what is emerging as the standard for the distinction between commercial and non-commercial in other open licensing forums.

Licensing of FSL patents

FSL licenses you our patent portfolio provided you are operating under a Cooperative License provided by or approved by our COOPY.biz service Our present version of the Cooperative License, V4 is provided as an add-on
to Creative Commons Licenses [a Commercial Commons?] which provide free non-commercial use, and is notified by CC+COOPY which should be a link or next to a link to a copy of a valid Family Systems Cooperative License that itself links back to COOPY.biz.

FSL will approve other Cooperative Licenses that conform to the Cooperative Principles and will seek to hand this task over to the democratic information cooperative movement as it is formed.

And provided they follow the same rules of visibility and reference back to COOPY.biz. Archiving at COOPY.biz is optional but must be done somewhere so cooperation over the implication of events in the past can be accomplished as there is always an audit trail of transactions.

Family Systems Background

For Ibook System V1 we used Microsoft Java which was convenient because it had useful extensions to interact with the Windows environment. Sun filed suit to stop that and the language we had used was discontinued by Microsoft. For V2 we were therefore forced to migrate the server code to Sun Java. On the client we adopted a side bar in the browser and used a mixture of Sun Java and Microsoft C.

At V2 we produced a lot of software and put a lot of effort into trying to make this work only to discover it was impossible to achieve production quality. We could not fix some show stopping bugs to do with interactions between Java and C components locking up which were caused by the incompatibilities of the underlying Sun and MS infrastructure. As only they had the source codes and they were not cooperating, there was no way such bugs could be fixed and we had to abandon the whole implementation and rewrite in a working and more stable environment.

For V3 we adopted open source software as our building blocks rather than proprietary. We chose Perl as our server programming language as it was recommended as the most stable of languages as well as being good for text processing with regular expressions a feature. We chose Javascript as our client language as it is available in the browser and so behaviour can be created by adding Javascript routines to a template that is loaded with the contents of every page.

We have found in practice that open source works and is stackable and continues to work if you don't change it, for instance in our voice system demonstration demo.verbol.com there is an open source Linux operating system at the base then the Apache open source web server, Jabber open source messaging, Asterisk open source PBX. They all work together beautifully and provide VOIP and Voicechat ahead of the market, but at present they do need expertise to instal and would benefit from help in automating the install process.

In our ibook system prototypes our vision was that innovation would occur on the pages of our interactive web site and so the enrolment rules spelled out content licensing rules for material contributed. By V3 these had evolved to be cooperative in nature and referred to a cooperative business model. In parallel, our systems thinking has evolved so that rather than being confined to a site, behavior such as licensing can be attached to content objects which is why the licensing has evolved to CC+COOPY and has moved to www.coopy.biz so that it can apply to Ibook Systems, Web Collaboration, Uplay2 and other projects.