We federate to keep things moving, recognizing value in the past, but not locked to it.
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Federation
Unhosted 
defines a protocol stack called remoteStorage. A combination of WebFinger for discovery, OAuth for authorization, CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) for cross-domain AJAX calls and GET, PUT, DELETE for synchronization.
Tahoe-LAFS least authority file system creates privacy in a distributed world.
LOCKSS distributes archival responsibility. Inventor David Rosenthal blogs about the danger of government bodies rewriting history .
Perils of Plagiarism advice to students defines stealing words from others. Are we different? I think so.
Erasmus reconciles the Latin and Greek new testament translations. Melvyn Bragg's podcast reflects on various motives.
Massively Distributed Authorship of academic papers. Submitted to CHI 2012.
SyncTap reliable connections established by synchronized physical events, like Bump.
Whitepaper searches merged publication databases.
Lockdown is a post by Marco Arment (Instapaper) explaining the forces threatening the open network.
Nitrogen distributed authentication and messaging for devices by Tim Park.
TogetherJS from Mozilla adds live cursor and keystroke sharing and other webRTC features to existing pages.
Redecentralize assembles a list of alternative internet projects and interviews their proponents.
Named Data Networking alternative network architecture. A version of PARC CCNx.