At the June 2021 Decentralized Web Meetup, we heard the latest from a range of projects across the DWeb ecosystem. Watch the recording of the event and learn more about the speakers below. You can also read the chat stream that accompanied the discussion here.
Featured Speaker
Our featured speaker at the June DWeb Meetup was Nathan Schneider, an author, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Director of the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is a leading scholar of cooperative enterprises and has analyzed how projects could put the second DWeb Principle of Distributed Benefits into practice.
A truly distributed Web will require different kinds of companies. Today, tech startups rely on types of financing that demand an “exit” in one of two forms: an acquisition by a bigger company or an IPO on Wall Street. Both options help drive us toward radical centralization of power, no matter how decentralized our technology may seem. In his powerful essay “Distribute Commons, Not Commodities,” Schneider suggests a new way forward. Instead of creating another top-1% who hold increasingly concentrated power, what if start-ups committed to distributing value to the community contributing to it?
At the June Meetup, Schneider described the idea of “Exit to Community,” and presented real-world scenarios where distributed benefits are working.
Watch Nathan’s talk here:
Lightning Talk Speakers
Guo Liu, Co-Founder and CTO of Matters. Matters is a social network of content creators, mostly consisting of journalists, novelists, and critics. It’s a decentralized content publishing and discussion platform for creators to publish, manage, license, and monetize their work. Guo shared the lessons they’ve learned while designing and migrating the network to decentralized architecture.
Watch Guo’s talk here:
Ana Jamborcic, Product Strategist at Social Roots. Ana guides product direction with a steady eye on the intersection of business value and approaches to complex social problems that are innovative, applied, useful, usable, collaborative, sensible, and more.
Christina Bowen, Knowledge Ecologist at Social Roots. Christina integrates tech and human processes with living systems principles to support healthy teamwork and information flows that lead towards more sensible futures.
Watch Ana and Christina’s talk here:
Santiago Bazerque is the creator of Hyper Hyper Space, an open-source, not-for-profit effort to create distributed applications using web browsers as full peers. He discussed how the design concepts that inspired TCP/IP, the original internetworking protocols, can be applied to the design of dapps. He also shared his experience using the browser as a platform for experimenting with new dweb protocols.
Watch Santiago’s talk here:
Mix Irving is the Senior Developer at Āhau, an indigenous knowledge management system, built in New Zealand, designed for offline, data sovereignty first. Mix dipped into the platform’s theory of change and gave us a small peek at the tech stack built on scuttlebutt, hypercore, and graphql. First generation kiwi, with roots in England / Scotland, Mix lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington with two small kids, a partner, and a cat.
Watch Mix’s talk here:
Vera Winters is a member of Flancia, a collective formed to carry out social experiments based on input from its members. They use a platform they developed called the agora to determine the desires of the collective. Vera has worked in open source for over a decade and is passionate about decentralized systems and organizations.
Watch Vera’s talk here: