Douglass Rushkoff is organizing a conference to be held this October with the aim of getting past the current hierarchical limitations of the Internet and developing something new, something decentralized, something subject to no central authority:

Lately, however, what’s wrong with the net has become quite crystalized for me. It started with the corporate-government banishment of Wikileaks last year, and reached a peak with Egypt shutting off its networks to stave off revolution. The Obama administration seeking the ability to do pretty much the same thing in the US, Facebook’s “sponsored stories,” and the pending loss of net neutrality don’t help, either.

Here on Shareable, and then again in an OpEd for CNN.com, I suggested we “fork” the Internet – that we accept the fact that the net is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture, surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something else for ourselves.

This “Contact” event sounds like it is designed to get together people who are interested in all the various peer-to-peer / mesh networking / open routing / open social-graph projects and see what kind of cross-pollination can come about. I might go to this.