The vision for the GUSSE network is to provide a framework for a peer-to-peer, open-source approach to sharing knowledge about urban sustainability and for fostering conversations and discussions about effective solutions.
GUSSE will provide an integrated platform for blogging, social search and social bookmarking, federated search (search across multiple content repositories), discussion forums and a light content management system. These can be used by individuals and groups and are designed to make it easy to discover, share and comment on information.
GUSSE is peer-to-peer as it is being designed to be installed in different cities around the world. Each city is free to host its own version of GUSSE, which shares resources with the others. GUSSE Global (not yet built) provides a common global exchange, develops and supports the GUSSE Framework (the set of open-source software applications), and certain services that may be too expensive to provide at a local level. This is described in this sketch.
GUSSE is not meant to replace or compete with existing repositories and social sites but rather to partner with them and provide a place where information from many websites from different cultures can be found.
GUSSE will provide the social tagging, social search and federated search applications that it is developing to any organization that joins its network. GUSSE is open source in two important ways.