Esp is a vehicle to bring about whatever the collective espian vision is; right now, it's dominated by my vision of espia, but that may change with time. As long as tav's around, he'll be pitching for espia. It exists to effect various technical, economical, political, social, and cultural changes. The important thing is linking the changes within each of those fields.
Firstly, everyone will have their basic socio-economic needs (food, shelter, communication, transport, etc.) provided for them. There'll be numerous decentralised communities, numbering no more than 500 or so -- perhaps made up of even smaller communities governed by single people. The only thing that each of these communities have to respect is the globally agreed upon basic provisions, rights, and guarantees statues: a kind of human rights charter. The decentralised political system enables that decisions that affect the locals, besides those with global environmental impact, will be discussed locally.
Any global discussions will use a form of direct democracy (i.e. liquid democracy), and the judiciary and policing branches will be created through a mixture of election, liquid democracies, and lottery.
The benefit of the system is that, tied in with having your basic needs provided for you, this means that the average individual now has a lot more time to live life rather than simply work to live and live to work.
You do not have to be of a particular politicl persuasion to be an Espian, but its members are all lower-left at this time. Furthermore, eventually, espian out to become synonymous with world citizen. The aim is to have as much diversity as possible, yet be united on a few basic principles.
One gets accepted to becoming an espian through the toman model, and becomes either an open espian or a full espian.
The toman model is a form of organisational structure that uses reputation systems to define membership, remuneration, and power. (sbp's original: The toman model is a reputation based system, where existing members of a group get to vote upon new members of the group, or change the statuses of existing members.)
One's espian status as full, fuzzy, or open member is defined through a system of trust metrics, similar to the one on advogato to an extent. it starts off with me as the seed node..." [explain the algorithm here].
Right now (2004-03), however, tav is acting as the sole certifier for espians. He hopes to change that with the advent of a working toman model.
Links to further reading on the toman model:
Unlimited; it's like asking how long a piece of string is. xnet is effectively just one aspect of kalati, the application layer that sits on top of the plex.
(Sidenote: So as to avoid confusing people, xnet and kalati are often used interchangably, but technically xnet is meant to apply solely to the groupware aspects of kalati, e.g. super-wiki supporting plex-links, toman model, currency generators, content management system, social networking, etc.)
Myoo is basically a collective/network of service providers who provided hosted xnets. Think of all the various hosting companies who provide apache/mysql/php, etc.--it's like that, but with xnets.
The idea is that various myoo agents could specialise for various communities. For example, myoo.de, run by erik moeller of infoanarchy, will be a myoo agent catering for German folk with the xnet localised into German component, and other things he believes will satisfy them better, etc.
A shaila is a pancontextual summary of an event. Its purpose is to capture many aspects of an event, "forked across many contexts" as he likes to say, and mark them up for language, range of opinion, level of complexity, and so forth. The example that Tav used in the WTF as to where a shaila would be useful is in explaining cryptography to someone: the material would have to vary according to your audience. The goal of both is to make it possible to reuse the best forms of content, and to enable discrete and personalised searches depending on your own particular needs.
A person who writes up a shaila is called a "shailar"; same pronunciation.