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IOPS and ZSocial News

Hello

IOPS

Efforts to create a web system continue but are delayed. We anticipate a usable site for sign up to the new organizational project by mid to late December. The nature of the delay is the difficulty of having a web system able to serve not only the encompassing international organization, but also nationals and cities, composing it - giving each its own venue, combining all when that makes sense, having tools for dues collection, discussion and debate, member engagement, and so on.

If you look up above, in the left menu system, under IOPS Project, you will see links to information about various facets.

ZSocial

If everything goes as planned we will unveil a web system we are tentatively calling ZSocial in January. Out plan is to test it first by inviting, via email, about 100 Z Sustainers to test it. They will be invited to use its various aspects and even, should they wish too, to invite others who they know well to do so. We will accumulate their reactions, notices of bugs, etc. and adapt the system accordingly. Then we will open it either to all Z Sustainers, or, if it appears ready, all Z Free Members, again to use as everyone chooses. Whether that is one step or two, it will end with the widest possible public promotion of the system.

ZSocial will replace many of the interactive features of ZCom with much better versions, over time adding much that is new, as well. We will release it in stages - the initial opening will have most, but not all features. The rest will be added over a month or two so that each is tested and adapted, if need be, in turn. We hope for ZSocial to become the means by which everyone on the left interacts with others who are also on the left.

To those ends, ZSocial will provide all the usual features of social networking, and then some - plus it will be really really easy to use.

What ZSocial won't do, however, is sell you or your friends to corporations as targets for ads and other commercial pursuits. It will also not make your private lives and information fodder for profit, and will even give you simple control over what you make available and to whom. Nor will ZSocial surveil you including turning over information about you to states and security agencies. And finally, it will not bias against substantive content, length or substance, but welcome it, of course.

It will still make good sense to cautiously use mainstream social networking as a way to find old friends or socialize with apolitical friends or family, or as a way to publicize left ideas and efforts to potentially large audiences. Facebook is a good tool for all that. But we hope it will no longer make sense to compromise your privacy and commercialize your politics as a condition of relating to one another within the broad left - because ZSocial will aid you in doing that, without the debits, and with added benefits. That is why we hope we will all move our serious left activity and social engagement from mainstream corporate social networks to ZSocial.

We'll see if we can deliver - soon!

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