BERLIN, Jan 28 - All across Europe, from Brussels to the Balkans, a new generation of WikiLeaks-style websites is sprouting.

Like their forerunner, the fledgling whistle-blowing sites are a chaotic mixture of complex systems engineering, earnest campaigning, muckraking and self-promotion.

And though their goals are varied, the activists behind the sites told Reuters that they share one major concern: they all vow not to repeat mistakes they believe were made by Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks creator.

The proliferation of websites to encourage, facilitate and shelter leakers is so anarchic that two aspiring anti-corporate leak sites are both claiming rights to the rubric "GreenLeaks" and muttering about legal consequences if the other side doesn't back down.

The most closely watched rollout in the leak-hosting world was the launch on Thursday of OpenLeaks.org, a site whose principal creator, German transparency activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was once Assange's closest collaborator.

Domscheit-Berg, who used the pseudonym "Daniel Schmitt" as Assange's official WikiLeaks co-spokesman, says he doesn't believe, as Assange initially did, that confidential material should just be dumped on the Internet. The bare-bones mission statement posted on OpenLeaks describes Domscheit-Berg's vision as both a safe-deposit box and a social networking site for leakers and their consumers.

Other WikiLeaks copycats, spinoffs and wannabes are germinating: activists say they have learned of recent launches of leak-accepting websites focused on specialized topics or regions -- from Russia and the European Union bureaucracy to international trade and the pharmaceutical industry.

Major news organizations are also moving to establish web-based mechanisms for receiving leaks directly, such as electronic "drop boxes" which would enable leakers to feed the media outlets directly, cutting out middlemen like Assange.

"THE ARCHITECT"

The most ambitious and potentially far-reaching WikiLeaks spinoff to surface this week is Domscheit-Berg's OpenLeaks, which its founder describes as a mechanism both for putting together leakers with knowledgeable recipients and for linking leak-consuming organizations to each other.

The burgeoning Wikiworld has been eagerly anticipating Domscheit-Berg's next project since his falling out with Assange last year. The two became estranged following an e-mail exchange in which Assange summarily suspended Domscheit-Berg as WikiLeaks co-spokesman for allegedly leaking information to the media about growing concern among other WikiLeaks activists about Assange's private life.

Domscheit-Berg subsequently quit WikiLeaks, denouncing Assange for "acting like an emperor or slave trader." He took with him other more shadowy figures who had been important collaborators with Assange in creating key elements of WikiLeaks' leak-handling systems architecture.

One of the defectors was a programmer known to most insiders simply as "The Architect." Described by colleagues as at least as brilliant at programming as Assange, The Architect was the principal designer of the systems WikiLeaks used to produce Assange's greatest public triumphs last year, the distribution of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government reports.

In a conversation with Reuters on Thursday from Davos, Switzerland, where he appeared on a World Economic Forum panel devoted to "Confidentiality and Transparency," Domscheit-Berg said his WikiLeaks experience had convinced him of the wrongness of Assange's view that the website should publish raw information and let others sort through it. (Assange's approach subsequently appears to have matured, as demonstrated by WikiLeaks current snail-like release of its cache of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.)

Domscheit-Berg said WikiLeaks taught him that huge efforts have to be made to authenticate, analyze, filter and if necessary redact leaked secret documents before making them public. He said that WikiLeaks also demonstrated that a top-down group like WikiLeaks, which Assange by his own account rules like something of an absolute monarch, might not be the best model to undertake painstaking pre-publication reviews of complex, and potentially damaging, data.

He said his concept is to create a new network through which leakers of any kind -- government, corporate, environmental, whatever -- could make confidential submissions to groups that could make use of them. OpenLeaks itself would not evaluate, let alone publicly release, the information. Instead it would convey it from leaker to leakee.

The plan is to create a central web architecture for moving confidential documents from leaker to recipients, and then recruit organizations from the media, NGO world and labor movement, to become partners in the network he is creating.

With his system -- which is still being put together, and which, according to some activist sources, has had to postpone its launch date more than once -- would-be leakers could anonymously approach OpenLeaks to be connected with a group of OpenLeaks partners who would have the resources and expertise to process their data properly, or with a single leak recipient.

Leakers wanting to connect with a single recipient, such as a specific media outlet, would be able to. But Domscheit-Berg says that in most cases OpenLeaks' practice would be that the individual media organization receiving a leak would have only a limited embargo period, usually a few weeks, to analyze the material and decide how or whether to use it.

After that, the leaked material would be shared with all partners in the OpenLeaks project. Domscheit-Berg says this system is designed both to provide leaks exposure to a wider circle of potential expertise and publicity and also to encourage partners to share more information among themselves.

"We're trying to be a gatekeeper but actually enabling everyone else," Domscheit-Berg said. If a leaker wanted the material never to be shared beyond a single initial recipient, he said, that could be arranged.

Domscheit-Berg said that at some point he hoped to establish a foundation to help raise funds for not just OpenLeaks operations but also research legal and political issues related to transparency and disclosure.

He said none of the partners joining the OpenLeaks network would be asked to make any direct financial contribution, and that OpenLeaks would not generate revenue by brokering information. Instead, he said, OpenLeaks will suggest that potential partners with large servers contribute computer time or space to help build the network.

Some internet activists and journalists who heard details of Domscheit-Berg's scheme before its official launch are already raising questions. They wonder whether the plan is too complicated and how the system will fulfill promises to leakers that their material will only be shared with limited recipients if that's what the leaker wants.

Domscheit-Berg said that leakers and partners would have to operate on a measure of "trust." He declined to discuss the role "The Architect" or other activists would play in crafting OpenLeaks' technical infrastructure, other than to acknowledge that some of his new site's "technical people ... were with WikiLeaks."

Reuters