Thirty years ago, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive with an ambitious goal: Universal Access to All Knowledge. Today, that mission continues to grow with an exciting new chapter: the launch of the Internet Archive Switzerland, a non-profit foundation based in St. Gallen.
The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context. Its efforts will initially focus on preserving endangered archives from around the world and collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all. With a UNESCO conference planned for November 2026 in Paris, Internet Archive Switzerland is taking a concrete step to explore how endangered archives can be protected.
In parallel, the Swiss foundation is working in partnership with the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Gallen, on the Gen AI Archive project led by Prof. Dr. Damian Borth. Together, they aim to begin archiving AI models, which is an emerging frontier for preservation.
The choice of St. Gallen is no coincidence. With a thousand-year tradition of archiving and scholarship, the city offers a fitting home for this next phase of digital preservation. Its strong academic environment—including collaboration with the University of St. Gallen—makes it an ideal place to establish a 21st century memory organization.
“St. Gallen is a very suitable place to take the preservation of our universal knowledge a step further. Stability and innovation go hand in hand here and are embedded in a deep understanding of the importance of cultural heritage,” said Roman Griesfelder, the executive director of Internet Archive Switzerland.
Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
Contact Internet Archive Switzerland Roman Griesfelder, executive director office@internetarchive.ch
The Our Future Memory movement was already building momentum with flagship library organizations like IFLA, ALA, and SPARC. But now, local and regional library systems from across the United States are leading the way in their own communities. From Wellesley Free Library in Massachusetts to St. Mary’s County Library in Maryland, all the way to the Minnesota Library Association, new signatories to the “Statement on Digital Rights” are demonstrating that the daily practices of libraries and other memory institutions need long-overdue legal protections. As the Statement lays out, those protections include four basic rights:
to COLLECT MATERIALS IN DIGITAL FORM;
to PRESERVE DIGITAL MATERIALS;
to PROVIDE CONTROLLED ACCESS TO DIGITAL MATERIALS; and
to COOPERATE WITH OTHER MEMORY INSTITUTIONS.
Wellesley Free Library (WFL) became the first town library in the United States to endorse these rights and join the Our Future Memory movement. It first opened in the Fall of 1883 in the building that is now Wellesley Town Hall. Now, in addition to serving more than 18,000 card-holding patrons from its main library and two branches, WFL pursues its community-oriented mission in great part by collaborating with libraries in neighboring and nearby communities. Director Jamie Jurgensen serves on the Board of the Minuteman Library Network, a local consortium of over 40 libraries, whose leaders recently voted unanimously to encourage other member libraries to join the Our Future Memory movement.
“The Wellesley Free Library is proud to sign the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online,” said Jurgensen and WFL Trustee Ann Howley. “In doing so, we continue to take a leadership role in raising awareness within our community and among peer libraries, in helping people to navigate the digital landscape and in advocating for equitable digital rights and access. Town libraries have always been spaces for learning, creativity, and exploration of new ideas. Digital literacy has become a huge part of our future. Through Wellesley Free Library’s endorsement, we are actively participating in conversations regarding the future of digital literacy, as well as reaffirming our commitment to stated values including promoting universal access to knowledge and ideas.”
Taking the Our Future Memory movement from Massachusetts to Maryland, the St. Mary’s County Library serves its own local community through three branches in Leonardtown, Lexington Park, and Charlotte Hall—not to mention its mobile library for senior facilities, day care centers, and other remote communities. Last year, it celebrated 75 years of service, but looking ahead, Director Michael Blackwell has shown national and global leadership by stewarding and contributing regularly to Readers First, an organization of over 300 libraries advocating better practices and collaborative partnerships between libraries and their e-content providers.
“St. Mary’s County Library is delighted to join the Our Future Memory coalition,” Blackwell remarked. “Libraries of all sizes and types have every reason to join this coalition, with small to medium sized libraries perhaps the most important reasons of all.”
“First, we too, perhaps in a small way, serve as ‘memory institutions.’ We are charged with preserving the history and heritage of our county, and we wish to make our materials available digitally as much as we can, without hindrance, and to ensure their access and preservation.
“Second, the budgets and staffing of smaller libraries make us utterly dependent upon a large community of digital providers to ensure free and fair access for our patrons. We do not have the wherewithal to navigate paywalls or create archives beyond our immediate purview. If memory institutions are unable to join together to ensure digital access to human heritage, we face being shut out of access to and participation in a larger whole. Just as ‘no man is an island,’ no library can now exist except as ‘part of the main.’ And increasingly, digital access and preservation are what make up that greater whole. They are the essence of library work today and into the future. Ownership of our physical materials in the digital world and continued access to those materials are fundamental to our mission. Without these rights, we ultimately cannot engage in our work.”
In the midwest, the Minnesota Library Association (MLA) undertakes its own impressive advocacy and public-service work. Now a chapter of the American Library Association, it has a history dating all the way back to December 29, 1891, when a small group of librarians met to organize a State Library Association for Minnesota. Early on, MLA played a major role in building support for the legislative bill establishing the first State Library Commission, and it continued that legislative advocacy throughout the 20th century. In 2022, it incorporated the professional organization of Information and Technology Educators of Minnesota (ITEM) as a division within its ranks. Most recently, MLA has been spearheading efforts to pass state legislation to keep publishers and commercial vendors from gouging tax-funded libraries with costly, short-term eBook licenses—which can be priced at levels three to five times higher than those facing other consumers.
MLA President Liza Shafto explained the decision to sign the Statement and join the Our Future Memory movement not only as a natural extension of traditional library work, but as encouragement for these ambitious legislative efforts: “For libraries across Minnesota,” she said, “the four digital rights reflect core functions carried out every day. Libraries must be able to collect digital materials, preserve them, provide appropriate online access, and work with other institutions to ensure ongoing availability. These responsibilities extend long-standing library practices into the digital environment.
“These rights also reinforce the Minnesota Library Association’s advocacy for fair and sustainable access to digital content, including efforts to ensure that Minnesota libraries can provide reliable and equitable access to ebooks for all residents.
“The Minnesota Library Association supports these rights because they enable libraries to continue serving their communities with dependable and equitable access to information.”
Ready to Join?
The process is simple, and we encourage memory institutions and their allies to sign the Statement and join the movement. Just go to the Our Future Memory website, download and sign the statement, and send that copy back to campaigns@internetarchive.eu.
From disappearing news articles to lost films, music, and websites, a new book from the Internet Archive reveals how our shared digital record is eroding, and what it will take to preserve it.
What does it mean to live in an era where culture can simply… disappear?
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record—a new book from the Internet Archive—brings together essays, research, and case studies that document a growing crisis: the erosion of access to the knowledge, media, and history that shape our collective memory. From journalism and government information to music, film, and the web itself, the shift from ownership to access—and from physical to digital—has made culture more vulnerable than many realize.
This isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about accountability, scholarship, and the public’s right to access information. When news articles are altered or removed, when public information is taken offline, or when creative works are locked behind shifting licenses, the historical record becomes incomplete. What disappears is not just content, but context.
Recent efforts by some publishers to block web archiving services like the Wayback Machine underscore how fragile access to digital history has become. When large portions of the web are intentionally excluded from preservation, gaps in our shared record are structural, not accidental.
At the same time, libraries, archivists, and preservationists are working to push back against this loss. The Internet Archive and its partners continue to build a digital library for the web: capturing, preserving, and providing access to materials that might otherwise vanish.
Vanishing Culture is both a warning and a call to action. It invites readers to reconsider what it means to preserve culture in a digital age, and to recognize that without intentional effort, much of what we create today may not be available tomorrow.
Read the book, explore the essays, and join us in the work of preserving our digital past before more of it disappears.
Where do public monikers come from and what do they say about culture?
One of the more eclectic titles to enter the public domain in 2026 was Universal’s King of Jazz, a two-strip Technicolor musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, Bing Crosby, and even Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The work features stunning visuals, comical moments, and grand musical numbers. At the center of it all is the titular “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman.
While the film does not accurately explain how Whiteman came to receive the name—instead presenting a fictional animated sequence from in-house director Walter Lantz—it presents the moniker as his. But how did Whiteman actually come to be known as the “King of Jazz,” and what does that say about cultural production? Let’s break down the origins of this moniker.
On April 9, 1919, the East St. Louis Daily Journal gave clarinetist Horace George the moniker “the King of Jass.” Notably, Horace George was also referred to as the “Clarinet King.” Horace George’s history in music has been largely overlooked, but he was present throughout the earliest years of jazz’s development. George’s recording career—as best as we can understand today—was sparse, with only a handful of records being cut under his own name. One crucial pairing was with Shelton Brooks, composer of the jazz standard, “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The pairing’s partnership dissolved in June 1920.
Paul Whiteman began recording music in 1920 with his “Ambassador Orchestra” while performing at Atlantic City’s Ambassador Hotel, before dropping the Ambassador title altogether later. Their first release came under Victor Records with “Best Ever Medley,” which included Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Throughout the 1920s, the group—commonly known as the Paul Whiteman Orchestra—would record many popular hits. In 1924, the Orchestra teamed up with George Gershwin to make the first ever recording of “Rhapsody in Blue.” By 1930, Whiteman was the star personality called the “King of Jazz,” meant to carry the Universal Picture film of the same name. Whiteman received this name as early as August 15, 1923 at an event with New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Excerpt from the August 15, 1923 edition of The Evening Star
That Paul Whiteman is the one to end up as the “King of Jazz” in a major Hollywood motion picture of the day is not surprising, given the social benefits that he enjoyed as a white male in the early twentieth century. Jazz was created and shaped by Black musicians, many of whom were marginalized by the recording, touring, and publicity systems that elevated white bandleaders like Whiteman. Artists like Horace George, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and countless others innovated and shaped the sound and musical language of jazz.
A 1930 poster for King of Jazz
Recognizing this does not diminish Whiteman’s popularity or influence in his own time. Rather, it highlights the whitewashing and flattening of history and culture that arises over time. This kingly title exists within the broader social and commercial structures that shaped the musical landscape of the early twentieth century. The persistence of the moniker tells us as much about race, access, and media power as it does about musical achievement, and invites us to revisit the era with a wider lens.
Now in the public domain, King of Jazz and other recordings by Whiteman are accessible and tangible to many more of us by a simple click. The celebration of these past works further emphasizes his social benefits, but also allow for closer examination of this historical moment. There is the potential for us to discover more of Horace George’s work and other overlooked jazz artists of the time—to disentangle the moniker from one man, and to understand the broader moment without barrier.
Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications, a library devoted to ham radio, shortwave, and related topics, announces a number of new collections to mark World Amateur Radio Day.
DLARC now offers a selection of each of the “big three” American amateur radio magazines: CQ, QST, and 73. The library recently added every issue of CQ Amateur Radio magazine published from its launch in 1946 through 1963, 230 issues in all. In addition, DLARC includes 530 issues of QST Magazine from its founding in 1915 through 1961, and every issue of 73 Amateur Radio: 516 issues published from 1960 to 2003.
73 Amateur Radio was published by Wayne Green W2NSD, who donated a complete set of the magazines to Internet Archive before he died so that they would be freely available to the world. QST is published by The American Radio Relay League, a membership organization for U.S. ham radio operators founded in 1914. CQ was published by Dick Ross, K2MGA. The issues of QST and CQ in the DLARC collections have entered the public domain. These three magazine collections are just a small part of the more than 9,500 issues of ham radio magazines available in the DLARC library.
In addition, DLARC has added a new collection of Review of International Broadcasting newsletters. Review of International Broadcasting was a newsletter devoted to the shortwave listening hobby, covering notable content heard on the air, news about legitimate broadcasters and pirate radio stations, program schedules, and radio hardware tips. The new collection includes 107 issues published from 1978 through 1997, many of which were scanned from the collection of publisher Glenn Hauser.
Finally, DLARC is home to a new collection of material from the Texas A&M Amateur Radio Club. The collection includes club newsletters, QSL cards, meeting minutes, slides, and other material collected and created by the group. Founded in 1912, the club is one of the oldest university radio clubs in existence.
World Amateur Radio Day is celebrated annually on April 18 to commemorate the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union in Paris in 1925.
Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a generous grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact me at kay@archive.org.
Few organizations understand the moral imperative of digital preservation better than the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) and the After Violence Project. That is why both have just endorsed Our Future Memory’s “Statement on Digital Rights,” joining a growing roster of organizations committed to preserving vulnerable archives and insisting on the four basic rights that they and other memory institutions need to do their critical work:
COLLECT digital materials;
PRESERVE those materials;
PROVIDE CONTROLLED ACCESS; and
COOPERATE with other memory institutions.
HMML is a nonprofit engaged in photographing, cataloging, and providing free access to manuscripts housed in libraries around the world. Now celebrating over 60 years of operation, it was founded at Saint John’s University (SJU) in Minnesota when the threat of the Cold War loomed large. Father Colman Barry of the Order of Saint Benedict envisioned that SJU could provide a safe repository for microfilms of the Benedictine manuscripts held in European libraries. After that, HMML expanded its mission to preserve copies of manuscripts from different religious traditions in other regions. It now serves as a digital life raft for irreplaceable documents from Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, and other war-torn areas, with an enormous collection of digitized manuscripts hosted in its online Reading Room.
“HMML is delighted to join Our Future Memory in advocating the 4 Rights,” said Dr. Columba Andrew Stewart, CEO and Executive Director. “As an organization dedicated to digital preservation and online access, HMML regards its care for the handwritten voices of our ancestors as a moral imperative. We have promised communities in dozens of countries that we will keep their manuscript heritage safe forever in digital form, and they in turn have trusted us to share that heritage with the world. We encourage all institutions, organizations, and concerned individuals to stand with us in defending the power of open information.”
The After Violence Project answered the same call in pursuit of its own archival mission. With roots in Austin, Texas, the organization is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the endangered knowledge of communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence and erasure. Its first oral history project, now called the After Violence General Collection, comprises reflections from individuals, family members, and activists about the effects that carceral and capital punishment have had on their lives. And in 2021, the After Violence Archive was created to retain interviews, correspondence, records, and all sorts of keepsakes from vulnerable and traumatized people. These projects enable everyone to bear witness to the pervasive social and psychological impacts of state violence—in defiance of concerted efforts to erase that testimony.
“The state has always tried to destroy the records of its own violence,” explained Hannah Whelan, Associate Director of Programs and Strategy. “Today that threat is more organized and better resourced than ever, as we witness federally-funded knowledge initiatives being destroyed, libraries gutted, and public access to information under attack.”
“This epistemic violence also comes from the slow monopolization of knowledge itself: platforms that lock up information behind paywalls, predatory contracts that strip memory institutions of their ability to collect, preserve, and share materials freely, and commercially-motivated systems that decide what gets remembered and what disappears. The state doesn’t just commit violence; it works hand in hand with these infrastructures to erase all evidence of how and why that violence functions.
“We signed the Our Future Memory statement because the communities we work with, namely people impacted by police brutality, mass incarceration, and the death penalty, deserve archives that can collect thoughtfully, preserve carefully, and share their stories without interference. Protecting those rights is not a technical matter or a vague policy issue. It is a critical condition under which resistance becomes possible.”
Needless to say, the Our Future Memory coalition is thrilled to welcome these distinct but complementary digital preservation efforts into the fold. With these and other signatories, the push to protect memory institutions’ traditional work keeps gaining momentum—at a time when that work is more urgent than ever before.
Ready to Join?
It’s easy! Your organization can join the movement and sign the Statement by going to the Our Future Memory website, downloading and signing the statement, and sending it back to campaigns@internetarchive.eu.
Want to Learn More?
ATTEND: If you’re in the Minneapolis area, register and attend HMML’s upcoming events, including workshops on Ethiopic manuscripts and a keynote by Dr. Stewart on its “Museum without Glass” ethos.
As our group of DWeb Camp organizers arrived at Wiesenburg station, frazzled by countless train delays in Berlin, a light rain and a blossoming gray winter sky welcomed us.
Moments after our arrival, a car and a van swooped up in front of us. Two of Alte Hölle’s stewards, Marv and Störte, had come to pick us up. During our days at this former forest hotel, we heard a common refrain: Imagine this place greener and warmer. Still, we did not have to stretch our imaginations very far. From the very first moment we laid eyes on Alte Hölle e.V., the only thing we could see was DWeb Camp 2026.
“We are just starting to wake up,” Marv told us while we looked across the property in late February. Just a couple of weeks earlier, snow levels reached an almost record 71 cm, and temperatures sank to double digits below zero. We arrived at this Brandenburg event space as bare trees, families of wild boars, and humans alike were emerging from their winter hibernation.
Alte Hölle has a very special history. Originally built in the 1800s as a Prussian forestry administration center, it later became a recreational facility for the Secret Service of communist Eastern Germany. Then a woman purchased it in the 1990s and managed it for three decades as a forest getaway spot. By 2021, the hotel wasn’t making a profit and she was searching for successors to take over. The full potential of this historic venue was yet to be recognized and realized.
At the same time, a diverse ensemble of friends who met at Chaos Communication Congress got together, looking for a place to establish a physical base to gather, build and host events and festivals. The old forest hotel was finally seen by the right sets of eyes, imagining it in a new light!
These ardent builders and dreamers booked the whole hotel for a week, coming up with ideas and ways to infuse the space with new life. After witnessing their process, the original owner slowly decided that selling her life’s work to a loose group of DIY enthusiasts was really the best option.
In 2021, this group purchased Alte Hölle, transferring the property to an association to ensure its long-term stability as individual involvement shifts and changes. Ownership by an association establishes Alte Hölle as a collectively-run physical commons. The members of the collective chipped in smaller amounts to secure a long term loan, thus collectivizing and decentralizing ownership and financial risk.
Rural Brandenburg isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot attracting scores of young people. Yet, for the Alte Hölle collective this place offers an opportunity to usher in change and a new cultural presence in the Brandenburg area. We don’t want to be a group of happy dropouts isolated from society, Störte explained to us. Our intention is to look outward, participating in local initiatives, bringing people to this place, and being a backbone for community organising and democratic practice.
The Alte Hölle collective welcomes open involvement in decision-making and shaping the future of the project. Alte Hölle’s governance model is non-hierarchical and based on consensus. It’s hard to distinguish between who lives there and who doesn’t: people come and go, but they still actively contribute to decision-making and developing Alte Hölle’s infrastructure. We want to blur the lines as much as possible between who is here and who is not, because not everyone can afford to work remotely and stay long term, but this should not influence their sense of belonging to the project, says Franzi, one of the stewards of the venue.
Alte Hölle runs as a seminar hotel for a broad variety of groups. Other collectives come there to organize retreats, literary groups hold reading events on the grounds, bike enthusiasts come for week-long workshops. And from July 8-12 2026, Alte Hölle is welcoming DWeb Camp.
How did we select this unique place an hour southwest of Berlin? It becomes clear if you look back at the history of Camp and the principles that guide our decisions.
Since our first outdoor convening, we’ve aspired to work closely with our venue’s stewards to help improve the land. We did so at the Mushroom Farm in 2019, when we brought stable internet to the remote California coastal location by building a tower and installing antennas across the property to establish a local mesh network. We want DWeb Camp to be firmly grounded in a place. A place with history, community, strong values, and aspirations. A place that shares our principles of giving agency to people, distributing value and power broadly. DWeb seeks to achieve this in the digital realm; Alte Hölle does so in a collectively-run 100,000 square meters of forest and field.
In November, we sent an email to share our ideas and explore the possibility of hosting Camp at Alte Hölle. Marv was the first to see our inquiry. As I read that email, a few things immediately just clicked. The right values, talks and workshops with interesting content and initiatives. I sent a very enthusiastic reply, and a couple of weeks later we were walking the place together with a first exploratory delegation from DWeb.
Then in February, a dozen members of our team convened to survey the site and start planning the details.
Marv of Alte Holle pointing out power, connectivity, and other features of the 100,000 square meters of the property.
So now, the organizing machine is in full motion. We are meeting the vibrant culture of Alte Hölle with the joyful spirit of DWeb Camp. Not only will we have a lot of infrastructure to build, but also many things to make! Using wood sourced from local forests, we plan to craft benches, tables, and some other key structures we’ll need at camp.
The DWeb and Department of Decentralization organizers and the Alte Hölle community are looking forward to welcoming you to this land of rich history and abundant promise.
As Franzi shared, I love the idea and the principles behind DWeb Camp, and I am really looking forward to having an international event with many people coming from all around the world!
At the legendary c-base, technologists, activists, and artists gathered to shape the next chapter of the decentralized web.
c-base is a space station that “crashed” and is being reconstructed along the Spree river by a group of Berlin hackers. Some call it the mother of all hackerspaces.
On a gray February morning in Berlin, people wandered down a dark ramp into a space station.
Not a metaphorical one—at least not entirely. c-base, with its blinking lights, maze of cables, and decades of hacker lore, has long described itself as a space station that crashed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Since the mid-1990s it has been a gathering place for coders and tinkerers who prefer to build the future themselves rather than wait for it to arrive.
On this particular morning, they had come to design something new.
In February, an invitation had circulated across Europe’s decentralized technology networks: come to c-base and help shape the next DWeb Camp, a five-day gathering that will take place this July in the forests of Brandenburg.
There was no fixed agenda, and no finished plan.
Just a question.
If we were to build the next version of DWeb Camp together, what might it look like?
Before long, the room filled. Peer-to-peer developers had come from Edinburgh, free-software advocates from Berlin, privacy-first technologists from Shanghai, and policy thinkers from Copenhagen. Artists, funders, open-source builders, and organizers filtered in carrying laptops and winter coats. Most of them had never met before.
They had come not just to attend—but to help build something.
The timing was not accidental. Across the world, the systems shaping the internet—and increasingly public life—are consolidating. Governments tighten control. Platforms encroach on our privacy. The internet as we know it is splintering, and along with it, our consensus about what is true. For many in the room that morning, the pressing question was can we restructure the web before it hardens into something more destructive than its early architects ever imagined?
DWeb Camp, first held in Northern California in 2019, grew out of that concern. The gathering was conceived as a place where technologists, artists, organizers, and policymakers might come together to begin building a more decentralized web.
A web built less like a pyramid and more like a forest. Distributed. Resilient. Sharing resources underground.
This summer, DWeb Camp’s theme is “Root Systems,” and it moves to Europe for the first time. The meeting at c-base was an early step in imagining what might grow there.
For an hour, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle answered the questions of DWeb Sr. Organizer, Wendy Hanamura, in a wide-ranging chat about public AI, his successes and failures, and the imperative for decentralization in this political moment.
Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.
“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”
Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.
“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”
Collective Intelligence
At c-base, Kahle and a dozen core organizers didn’t arrive with a finished program. Instead they facilitated breakout conversations, solicited unconference topics, and most importantly, listened.
Throughout the day, small circles formed across the space station, and similar themes surfaced again and again.
Not everything, participants suggested, needs to scale to billions of users. Perhaps some of the most important decentralized tools will serve smaller networks—families, communities, groups of collaborators who know one another. An intimate web, as some people called it, rather than the global one.
Others spoke about shared infrastructure in a broader sense: not just software, but the resources communities could distribute. Buildings. Time. Convenings. Knowledge. The question, several people suggested, was not simply how to build better tools but how to sustain the ecosystems that allow those tools to exist.
Hölke Brammer, of the Hypercerts Foundation, offered a framework that drew nods around the table.
“It’s said, first you need the values,” he recited. “Then governance. Then the right incentives. And finally the technology to build it.”
DWeb Camp tries to bring all of those layers together in the same place at the same time. Which means inviting not just engineers but researchers, economists and storytellers.
Marek Tuszynski, co-founder of Tactical Tech, offered a wry observation about how the technology world often divides itself.
“They say technology is inspired in San Francisco,” he recounted. “It’s built in China. And criticized in Europe.”
The challenge, he suggested, was to move beyond those boxes—to collaborate across them.
Later, when participants were asked what would make the camp most valuable, one answer surfaced repeatedly.
“To find the people I want to work with after Camp,” someone said, “and figure out how to keep working together on an on-going basis.”
Grounded in Place
Franzi and Marv, two of the stewards of the Alte Holle Collective, share the terrain of the 100,000 sq. meters retreat site.
DWeb Camp has always been shaped by the places where it occurs.
When organizers began looking for a European site, they eventually settled on Alte Hölle, a forested property in Brandenburg about an hour southwest of Berlin.
The decision had as much to do with the people stewarding the land as with the landscape itself.
In 2021, a collective of friends who met at Chaos Communications Camp purchased the property—once a Stasi recreation site—with the intention of turning it into a long-term gathering place for artists, hackers, and activists.
Their question was straightforward.
Why build a camp only to dismantle it a few days later? Why not create infrastructure that could remain?
Two of the site’s stewards, Franzi and Marv, joined the gathering at c-base. Rather than simply presenting the site, they participated in the discussions, listening carefully to the people who will soon gather there.
“We share a lot of the same values,” they said. “We are a volunteer group that supports [you] and is an ally for [your] event.”
The goal, for DWeb organizers, is not merely to occupy Alte Hölle but to contribute to it—to plant something, rather than simply passing through.
The field where some 700+ campers will pitch their tents in Brandenburg.
Partners with Principles
Afri of Department of Decentralization demonstrates the programmable badge his team is developing for DWeb Camp. Via radio waves, you will be able to talk person to person at Camp, without going to the cloud or WIFI.
Strong collaborators don’t just support your vision. They push you to live up to it.
Berlin’s Department of Decentralization (DoD)—a collective formed after organizing ETHBerlin in 2018—has encouraged DWeb Camp organizers to align our tools more closely with our principles. That means prioritizing open-source infrastructure wherever possible.
Tickets will be sold through PreTix. The schedule will run on PreTalx. Collaborative documents will live on CryptPad. Camp communications will be via Matrix.
Tools designed with privacy and security in mind. Not just talking about decentralization, but practicing it.
Building Across Borders
Some of the organizers of DWeb Camp from Alte Hölle, Department of Decentralization and the Internet Archive came together at c-base in February to plan for July.
Based across North America and Europe, the organizers of DWeb Camp 2026 have lineages that span the globe—Nigeria, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, and the United States. We come from different political contexts. Different assumptions about technology. Different cultural norms. The challenge–and the promise–is to weave those perspectives into something coherent, yet distinct.
Toward the end of the day at c-base, Kahle returned to a theme that was disarmingly simple.
Welcome.
“This is a really special community…they welcomed me twenty years ago,” he said. “You may not be aware of the effect you have by saying ‘welcome’ to somebody from a foreign place. I think it is a hallmark of a community that is living and thriving.”
That small gesture, he suggested, can shape the direction of entire communities. “I hope that DWeb Camp is to your liking, if it’s not, say so, and let’s basically make it better. Let’s build something together.”
Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.
It is something closer to a living system. It’s shaped by the people who show up, the relationships they form, and the ideas that take hold.
And in the forests of Brandenburg this July, those connections—technical, social, and human—will begin to spread beneath the surface.
Like any root system, their real strength may lie in what we cannot see.
Join Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation. This event will bring together the producers, preservers, and users of local news to develop collaborative, scalable solutions to address the urgent preservation challenges presented by the rapidly changing local news landscape.
This free, in-person event will be held on June 17, 2026 in conjunction with the IRE 2026 Conference in National Harbor, Maryland just outside of Washington, DC.
Through panels, presentations, and facilitated discussions, Summit attendees will:
Discover proven strategies and partnerships behind successful local news preservation initiatives
Shape recommendations for local news preservation to be distributed nationally to newsrooms and memory institutions
Network with leaders from news and cultural heritage organizations
Explore tools and programs that can support the preservation and access of local digital news assets
This event is part of Today’s News for Tomorrow, a program supported by Press Forward. Additional support for the Summit has been provided by the Society of American Archivists Foundation.
The 2026 Public Song Project is here — and for the first time, WNYC’s Public Song Project is partnering with the Internet Archive!
Here’s what you need to know:
Anyone can participate. You don’t need to be a professional musician. Voice memos welcome. Bedroom producers, shower singers, full bands — the public domain is for everyone.
What’s the public domain? It’s the vast commons of creative works not protected by copyright — meaning you’re free to enjoy, remix, adapt, and build on them. In the U.S., that includes creative works published in 1930 or earlier, sound recordings from 1925 or earlier, plus U.S. federal government works from any year.
What’s new this year? This year’s playlist will live not only with WNYC, but also on the Internet Archive, where millions can stream and share it.
Fun fact: The submission deadline (May 10) falls on the Internet Archive’s 30th birthday!
