Tag Archives: Decentralized Web DWeb Camp Farm

DWeb Fellows 2023: Lighting the Path Towards a Better Web

Posted on August 11, 2023 by Mai Ishikawa Sutton

By Mai Ishikawa Sutton and Nicolás Pace

Photo of Fellows 2023 cohort giving their closing statement

The design and development of most network technologies remains in the hands of the few. In light of this, the right to privacy and freedom of expression can end up being a privilege controlled by large corporations that are incentivized to profit from our digital connections. Meanwhile, a homogenized internet makes it difficult for individuals and communities to express multiple identities and have the agency to determine their own networks.

Thankfully, around us you can always find people who in their day-by-day work contribute to developing a fairer reality for everyone – one that defends environmental justice and social inclusion, innovation at the service of life, and a world where all worlds fit, both online and offline.

The DWeb Fellowship invites people from around the world to come to California for DWeb Camp. This year, we had 36 Fellows – they traveled from India, Cambodia, Argentina, Cuba, Kenya, Malawi, Germany, Italy, and from many other places overseas, as well as from across North America and the Bay Area. We selected these exceptional individuals because they invite and challenge us to transform our reality and co-create a vision of a better Web.

And in practice, they are the embodiment of the DWeb Principles (https://getdweb.net/principles/). The DWeb Principles reflect what we aim for as we work to build a decentralized web – the distributed protocols, applications, organizations, culture, and everything in between that make it possible to manifest the webs of digital connection that make us better humans for each other and all other life on this planet. Our Fellows work to realize the promise of a decentralized Web – where power is decentralized and control over digital infrastructure is meaningfully distributed. They use and build interoperable, free and open source tools to uplift communities in some of the most challenging contexts. They come from open and transparent organizations that govern their projects in a way that actively pursues equity, mutual trust, and respect. And they demonstrate how network technologies can bring about justice and advance individual and collective agency by prioritizing relationships and building communities of care.

In honor of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, we asked the Fellows to participate in our opening ceremony. One of our Fellows, Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayers-Roods, led us in a song in the language of the Costanoan Ohlone-Mutsun and Chumash people, those native to the area that is now known as Northern California. As the Fellows each lit a candle around us, we recognized them as leaders lighting the way towards a better, truly decentralized web – one that distributes power and ensures that individuals and communities share the privileges and responsibilities to steward the network technologies they rely on.

We were lucky to have them at Camp this year to share their perspectives, wisdom, and stories with us. As organizers of DWeb Camp, we continue to strive to find ways to amplify their voices in this movement and support their work.

2023 DWeb Fellows

Akhilesh Thite (https://akhilesh.art/) is an Indian tech enthusiast with a passion for decentralization. He is the founder of P2P Labs (https://p2plabs.xyz/), an open-source organization with a focus on building curated web3 infrastructure tools for the decentralized internet, leveraging the IPFS protocol. He is currently developing a minimal p2p web browser named Peersky. Akhilesh is often found participating in Hackathons or working on devgrants, he has won eight Web3 hackathons. His goal is to develop decentralized tools that significantly contribute to the betterment of humanity.

Amber Gallant is a Masters’ student at the iSchool at the University of British Columbia. She is a librarian, writer, and open-source enthusiast with professional interests in data ethics and digital commoning spaces. She currently acts as the project manager of the Guardians of the Record Lab (https://blockchain.ubc.ca/research/guardians-record-lab), a group that conducts research into maintaining and protecting the integrity of records in human rights contexts and investigates the use of decentralized archival technologies for this purpose. She is also completing an original research project through Blockchain@UBC, where she is examining humanitarian blockchain projects and the data rights of users in conflict contexts through the lens of data justice.

Andrew Chou (https://andrew.nonetoohappy.buzz) is a technologist based in NYC that tends to explore the various corners of the internet. He currently works as a developer with Digital Democracy (http://digital-democracyr.org) and Manyverse (https://manyver.se), building offline-first applications that are designed on the basis of decentralization and autonomy.

Anh Lê is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist based in Lenapehoking/NYC. Recently, they’ve built community-owned internet infrastructure with Community Tech NY/Community Technology Collective and designed advocacy campaigns to support Southeast Asian movement building in NYC. They are currently pursuing their Masters in International Affairs at The New School, where their research focuses on border technologies, migration, and digital rights.

Arky Ambati Rakesh is a technologist and a visual storyteller based in Southeast Asia. Arky has contributed to open source projects aimed at providing equitable access to digital tools and an open web. Over the past decade, Arky has been involved with Free/Libre and Open Source communities and has worked with organizations such as Braille Without Borders (BWB), NGO Resource Center and Mozilla in Asia and Africa.

Barbara Gonzalez Segovia (she/they) is a BIPOC, queer, feminist who sees herself as a social activist. She is passionate about amplifying people’s voices from anti-racist and anti-oppressive lenses, both in her professional and personal life. She values kindness and vulnerability, and is fully committed to infuse the world with joy. These days Barbara works with Digital Democracy (https://www.digital-democracy.org/), supporting grassroot communities and earth defenders utilizing tech tools to defend their ancestral lands. She has over a decade of experience in community development, indigenous rights, and gender equality. Her work has been focusing on program planning, community outreach, and organizational development, particularly within Indigenous organizations and indigenous nations from different countries in South America.

Benson Tilya is a conservation manager and seedbank analyst at Saving Africa’s Nature (http://www.karibusana.com/) in Tanzania. He has been instrumental in the encouragement, support and monitoring of SANA projects in Saadani National Park villages in Tanzania; engaged in conservation activities such as seed banking, greenhouse management and restoration of the forest corridor via tree planting projects. He stands on the thesis that technology and nature don’t have to act as antagonists; that the science behind digital technology can and should work in tandem with the respect for the natural world to subvert deforestation and promote long-term environmentally conscientious solutions.

Blake Stoner is a grassroots reporter, social entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast with a history of community advocacy. After working on over 10 grassroots campaigns, he noticed many communities across the United States of America needed more representation to highlight their culture and concerns. He believes that an important challenge to address right now is the growing crisis of news deserts that disproportionately leave communities of color ill-represented and uninformed. In response, he founded Vngle, a grassroots news network which provides an equitable decentralized approach to local reporting and brings nonpartisan coverage to underreported geographic and demographic areas. Through a gig-economy model, it verifies and trains local citizens with smartphones to serve as reporters and editors. Through scaling, Vngle seeks to make verifiable news mainstream, where anyone can check the origin of where, when, & how stories are captured through a public ledger.

brandon king is a dj/sound-selector, multidisciplinary artist, and cultural organizer from the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hampton Roads VA, who creates installations exploring African Diasporic identities, honoring his ancestors’ stories through archival and found materials, sound collages, painting, film, and other forms. he is a founding member of Cooperation Jackson (https://cooperationjackson.org/), a cooperative network in Jackson Mississippi and currently serves as the Executive of Resonate Coop (https://resonate.coop/), an international, open source, music streaming platform cooperative. he is also a member of the NYC based artist collective PTP (Purple Tape Pedigree)(http://ptp.vision/) and is currently an MFA candidate at Queens College focusing on Social Practice and Installation.

Calum Bowden is an artist working with organizations as a medium. He collaborates on stories, games, and platforms that relink the cultural with technology, economics, politics and ecology. He co-founded Trust (https://trust.support/) and Black Swan. Trust is a network of utopian conspirators, a sandbox for creative, technical, and critical projects, and site of experimentation for new ways of learning together. Trust is a hybrid online and physical space in Berlin for inquiry into emerging social and political phenomena through the lenses of aesthetic, narrative, game, technical, climate and design research. Since 2018, Trust has developed a public programme that includes lectures, installations, residency programmes, reading groups, working groups, live-streamed participatory events, and online resources. Trust incubates software projects that build a creative culture of the commons.

Camille Nibungco (http://camillenibung.co) is a designer currently based in Los Angeles, CA. They most recently helped build the Angelena Atlas project, an crowd-sourced intersectional community network/resource for marginalized folks in Los Angeles. They currently work in the healthcare tech space and are interested in decentralized technologies/web3 as a tool for working class sovereignty, labor, and grassroots change.

Chia Amisola (https://chia.design) is an internet + ambient artist born and raised in the Philippines, and now based in San Francisco. Their (web)site-specific art is an act of worldmaking constructing spaces, systems, and tools that posit worlds where creation is synonymous with liberation. Ambience is political: their environments tackle infrastructure, poetics, labor, and maintenance. Simply put, they wish to gather all the people they love in one place and explore how the internet might be that place. Chia is the Founder of Developh (https://developh.org) and the Philippine Internet Archive (https://philippineinternetarchive.com/). They graduated from Yale University in 2022 with a BA in Computing & the Arts, receiving the Sudler Prize.

Cody Harris is a technical volunteer with Seattle Community Network (https://seattlecommunitynetwork.org/) and assisted with the deployment and operations of the DWeb network in 2022. He has volunteered at the Connections Museum in Seattle, a hands-on museum of vintage (mostly Bell System) telecom equipment, giving tours and working on the exhibits since 2019. At ToorCamp 2022, he participated in a performance art project with the ShadyTel hacker collective establishing a telecom bureaucracy and deploying an analog switched telephone network to connect campers’ landline phones, modems, and fax machines.

Esther Jang is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on community networks in both rural remote and urban contexts, and especially how communities of practice can build and sustain technical infrastructures. She has helped install community networks in the Philippines, Mexico, Tanzania, and various states around the US. She is currently a lead organizer and installer for the Seattle Community Network (https://seattlecommunitynetwork.org/), which seeks to build community-owned and maintained Internet access infrastructure to support digital equity in Seattle and Tacoma. She serves as a Director at the Local Connectivity Lab, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focusing on technology research, deployment, and teaching in support of community networks around the world. In her free time, she is an avid jazz singer and plays with a band called Django Junction in Seattle.

fauno’s work and activism is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure. In the last five years he has been working almost exclusively on resilient web sites using Jekyll and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty (https://sutty.nl/).

Jack Fox Keen is the Data Empowerment Lead for the Guardian Project’s ProofMode application (https://guardianproject.info/apps/org.witness.proofmode/), a cryptographically verifiable way of providing visual evidence of the world around us. Jack has been doing data analytics for non-profits for the last two years, after graduating from Florida State University with a degree in biomathematics and scientific computing. They will be starting a PhD program at UC Santa Cruz this September, where they will focus on explainable artificial intelligence. They are focused on ethical data acquisition and analysis, pulling inspiration and guidance from many realms of life, including intersectional feminism, queer theory, and decolonial studies.

Jacky Zhao (https://jzhao.xyz/) is an independent researcher and open source maintainer. Currently, he is exploring what agentic, interoperable, and communal technology looks like in his research practice: how might we create infrastructures and technologies that empower the residents of the web to have access to the same tools as the architect? On a broader level, he cares deeply about creating spaces that enable others to have more agency: agency to ask questions without judgement; agency to do what they are intrinsically drawn toward; agency to play (because what’s the point if we can’t have a bit of fun?). In his spare time, he works with Hypha Worker Co-op on Distributed Press (https://distributed.press/) and is a core contributor at verses (https://verses.xyz/).

James Gondwe is the founder and Director of Centre for Youth and Development. His passion for decentralized approaches to digital literacy and connectivity has positioned him at the forefront of exploring the transformative role of ICT, including the internet, in enabling opportunities for marginalized communities. James is a recipient of the Royal Commonwealth Queens Young Leaders Associate Fellowship, 2016 One Young World Ambassador, honored with the Trust Conference Changemakers Award, and is a recipient of the African Community Networks Summit Fellowship. Through his unwavering dedication to community empowerment, he drives change by bridging the digital divide and creating opportunities for marginalized individuals and communities.

Photo of Kanyon Coyote Woman Sayers-Roods

Kanyon Coyote Woman Sayers-Roods (https://about.me/kanyon.coyotewoman) is an Ohlone Mutsun and Chumash Native American whose art serves as a heartfelt expression of her Native heritage. Kanyon is a dedicated and active member of the Native Community, assuming various roles as an artist, poet, activist, student, and teacher, inspiring emerging scholars to explore their creative paths and embrace decolonization. Graduated with an A.S+B.S with honors from the Art Institute of CA majoring in Web Design and Interactive Media, Kanyon weaves her knowledge of the digital world and her ancestral knowledge of the land. In addition to her artistic pursuits, Kanyon also serves as the CEO of Kanyon Konsulting (https://kanyonkonsulting.com) and acts as a caretaker for Indian Canyon, a “Federally recognized Indian Country” (https://patreon.com/IndianCanyon) situated between San Francisco and Monterey (https://costanoan.org).

Luisa Bagope is a documentary director interested in cyber as well as natural and human technology. With support from APC she has been documenting community network activities in the global south and was an active participant of PSP Community Network (Portal sem Porteiras – https://portalsemporteiras.github.io/) for 3 years. Luisa coordinated the Nodes That Bond project: a collective learning process centered around technology that happened through circular encounters amongst women. Focusing on feminist methods of community-based organization, she now continues to work with communication as a potency for social transformation in the Afluentes Association, in Monteiro Lobato, Brasil.

Marcela Guerra is a writer, artisan, and mother. She learned with Oankali that humans have an inevitable tendency to hierarchy. Even though she recognizes this tendency in all the relationships she can witness, she challenges herself to imagine non-hierarchical technologies, especially the communication ones. Marcela is part of the Portal sem Porteiras association (PSP – https://portalsemporteiras.github.io/) that runs a community internet network. She is a co-creator of the project Nodes that Bonds (https://portalsemporteiras.github.io/en/nos-por-nos/2019/) which takes place in the PSP network and member of the collective Sítio do Astronauta (https://sitiodoastronauta.com.br/) that teaches electronic handicraft. She is also part of Marlu Studio, which develops methodologies for the creation of community fictions.

Mark Anthony Hernandez Motaghy is an artist and cultural worker of Mexican and Iranian descent. Operating with mediums such as experimental video, as well as installation, books, and oral histories, Mark’s practice explores the digital commons, care-based economies, and sociotechnical imaginaries. They recently published the zine-book Rehearsing Solidarity: Learning from Mutual Aid with Thick Press. The book archives how mutual aid groups assembled solidarity digital infrastructures for the COVID-19 crisis and how they sustainably reassembled for sustaining communal care. Currently, they are a fellow at Ujima Boston Project, providing artistic and editorial direction for a new magazine on art, culture, and the solidarity economy.

Maurice Haedo Sanabria (m00.copincha.org) is an industrial designer passionate about technology and its impact on society. His work focuses on the circulation of information and the creation of goods through open collaboration, especially in Cuba, where material scarcity and limited Internet connectivity have forced society to seek creative alternatives. Five years ago, he transformed his own home in Downtown Havana into a hackerspace/laboratory called Copincha. (In Cuban slang, “pincha” means work, so “Copincha” can be understood as “collective work”.) Inspired by “DIY” and “do it together” philosophies, Copincha’s members use collaborative, open-source methods to share knowledge and develop solutions to local challenges through transdisciplinary, resilient and ecological practices.

A Rohingya himself, Muhammad Noor has established several Rohingya institutions and trained several highly-regarded members of the Rohingya community worldwide. His most notable contributions include the digitization and Unicode of First Rohingya Alphabet, serving as the chairman of Rohingya Football Club, authoring “ Born to Struggle: The Child of Rohingya Refugees and His Inspiring Journey” and working on several assignments with the UN High Commission for Refugees, the Red Cross, International Organization for Migration, International Network of Human Rights. Noor is the Co-Founder of Rohingya Vision (RVISION), the world’s first Rohingya Satellite television channel.

Nicolás Pace (https://www.apc.org/en/users/nicopace) is the technology and innovation co-coordinator within the LOCNET initiative, which supports organizations and communities in exploring the innovative approaches to the use of technology in the context of community networks in the global south. Nicolás has traveled to more than 15 countries to build bridges between community networks and to understand the diversity and complexity of the field.

Qianqian (Q) Ye is a Chinese artist, creative technologist, and educator based in Los Angeles. Trained as an architect, she creates digital, physical, and social spaces exploring issues around gender, immigration, power, and technology. Her most recent collaborative project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. At the Processing Foundation, Qianqian is the Lead of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users. She currently teaches creative coding as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC Media Arts + Practice and 3D Arts at Parsons School of Design. For 2022-2023, Qianqian is a NYU ITP/IMA Project fellow and Civic Media Fellow at USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Risper A Rose works with the low cost community wireless network, TunapandaNET (https://tunapanda.org/) in Nairobi, Kenya, as a gender and community engagement expert. She is involved in digital outreach, understanding women and their usage of connectivity, amplifying meaningful usage and utilization of connectivity, and conducting impact assessment studies of connectivity in the community. She has handled tech-centered advisories and training on digital rights, digital inclusion, digital advocacy, and digital protection and privacy. Her main focus is on gender justice, community capacity development, community research using human-centered design, stakeholder engagement, and public participation in policymaking. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Gender and Development (with Honors) Degree from Kenyatta University.

Saqib Sheikh‘s work centers on advocacy, social inclusion, and educational access for refugees and stateless people. He serves as Project Director for the Rohingya Project, a grassroots initiative for the empowerment of the Rohingya diaspora using blockchain technology. He is also a co-founder and advisor for the Refugee Coalition of Malaysia (RCOM) where he focuses on creating formal pathways for refugee placement in higher education institutes in Malaysia. A journalist by training, Saqib received his Masters in Communication from Purdue University, and is currently a PhD researcher at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore, researching the use of technology for legitimization of stateless communities.

Sheley Gomes is a POC, queer feminist, researcher and activist for digital and human rights, as well as the right to communication, being part of non-profit organisations both in Brazil and Europe. Her research goes from contexts such as Latin America, western-European, and Sub-saharan African countries, investigating the role of media, the ownership, and freedom of expression in those different scenarios. Her focus goes especially to new media technologies and its impacts for marginalised communities.

Stacco Troncoso (https://stacco.works/) teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralised governance, blockchain, and more. He is the co-founder of DisCO.coop (https://disco.coop/), project lead for Commons Transition, and co-founder of the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation. His work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship-building with prefigurative communities, policymakers, and potential commoners.

Subhashish Panigrahi (https://psubhashish.com) is interested in research and building resources in the intersection of community, tech, and media. A public interest archivist, non-fiction filmmaker, and civil society leader, he has served and catalyzed many open knowledge/internet communities through his work at Wikimedia, Mozilla, Internet Society and the Internet Society. He currently serves as the director of the Law for All Initiative at Ashoka. A National Geographic Explorer, he has made ten critically acclaimed documentaries, focusing on endangered languages, digital rights, and the open internet movement in South Asia. He founded OpenSpeaks and co-founded O Foundation in 2017, both building openly-licensed media and resources for low- and medium-resourced languages through participatory means.

TB Dinesh is a community media activist with a background in Computer Science. The recent focus of their work is on infrastructure for encouraging people from marginalised communities to document their ways of life to help tell their stories. This involves helping create a Community Owned Wifimesh (COWMesh) with Libre Routers, Bamboo towers, ASPi client kiosks and Internet independent services with Janastu (janastu.org). Services include audio-video fragment-annotating tools, voice communication and negotiation of traffic vouchers. Set in a remote rural hilly forest region, near Bangalore, India, their Lab is open for visitors and residents who wish to creatively engage in creating a replicable model of self-determined future Community Networks. Anthillhacks (anthillhacks.in) is their end of year annual event where everyone is invited to live with their community.

Tommi Marmo is self-described “enthusiastic and curious 22 years old weirdo from Italy.” He is the co-founder of Scambi Festival (https://scambi.org), a cultural event focused on interactive workshops which is organized exclusively by a staff of volunteers under 25 years old coming from all over Europe. He just graduated in Philosophy, International Studies, and Economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Tommi is a dreamer and an activist concerning the need of a deeper sociological and philosophical analysis of the Internet, at its essential core. In 2020, he deleted all of his mainstream social media accounts and created https://tommi.space, which he considers the virtual representation of his mind. He is the admin of Pan (https://pan.rent), a Fediverse node.

Victor von Sydow is a member of Coolab (https://www.coolab.org), a co-operative lab that builds community telecommunication projects promoting autonomous infrastructures through technical training and community activation. He is interested in research and strategy development focused on systemic and infrastructural conditions that shape socio-economic, political, and institutional realities. To this extent, he develops and operationalises experimental approaches to organisational design, policy, finance and rights.

Xin Xin is an artist currently making socially-engaged software that explores the possibilities of reshaping language and power relations. Through mediating, subverting, and innovating modes of social interaction in the digital space, Xin invites participants to relate to one another and experience togetherness in new and unfamiliar ways. As an artist, their work has been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, Eyebeam, DIS, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. They were an Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow and a Sundance Art of Practice Fellow. As an organizer, Xin co-founded voidLab, a LA-based intersectional feminist collective dedicated to women, trans, and queer folks. They were the Director for Processing Community Day 2019 and they serve on the Processing Foundation Board.

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We want to extend our deep gratitude to the sponsors who made this Fellowship program possible: Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Ford Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, Storj, RSS3, Planet, Gitcoin, NextID, and Paul Lindner.

DWeb Camp 2022: A Grounded Convening of Those Building a Decentralized, Values-Driven Web

Posted on August 2, 2022 by Mai Ishikawa Sutton

Much has changed since 2016, when the Internet Archive held the first Decentralized Web Summit. Scrappy teams with lean funding have grown into formidable organizations with budgets in the millions. Niche technologies and far-fetched debates from a few years ago have dominated headlines and are shaping entire economies.

Each of the DWeb events reflected a moment in a quickly shifting landscape of protocols, institutions, and ideologies. In the three years since DWeb Camp in 2019, some major trends have transformed people’s thinking. The explosion of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into the mainstream. The renaissance of projects centered on shared ownership and governance of assets. The reckoning with the power and potential of decentralized technologies: to either further entrench existing social inequities and exacerbate ecological harm, or radically reconstruct the ways in which individuals and communities can meaningfully address these and other crises of our time.

As organizers of this community, the defining change was the development of the DWeb Principles. The Principles help us to define what we stand for, instead of merely what we stand against. They emerged out of discussions and alignment between many members of the DWeb community, and are just one part of a growing awareness of the ethics and beneficiaries of decentralized digital ecosystems.

DWeb Camp 2022 will be held from August 24-28 at Camp Navarro, California. As the programming takes shape, the themes, spaces, and participants of this year’s event clearly reflect where we are in this still nascent movement. At DWeb Camp, we’ll be hacking and live testing cutting edge decentralized protocols, platforms, and hardware. We’ll tackle thorny topics about who these tools serve and how to govern and steward them sustainably. We’ll confront questions about power, marginalization, community, identity, ecology, and human rights.

With all the DWeb events, we aim to create spaces for people to share their ideas, projects, and research among warm, supportive peers who believe in a plurality of approaches and solutions to build a decentralized values-driven web. By meeting in-person, outdoors among towering redwood trees, DWeb Camp is about manifesting that ethos as we invite all those participating to bring their full selves. We’re designing this event to be a place for us to be curious and humble. Not to come with all the answers but to be open to having your mind and heart changed.

Below are some of the Spaces, or thematic sessions, that will be held throughout the five-day event. In addition to the Spaces described below, we will build a local Mesh Network across the campground for participants to share locally-hosted materials, test hardware, and experience a community network first-hand.

Spaces

Hackers Hall – Tech projects, Science Fair, and User testing
Healing Waters in Cambium Pavillion – Conversations, music, tea, and storytelling
People-2-People Tent – Exploration of emergent wisdom through play
Open Source Library – Storytelling, books and games
Redwood Parliament Pavillion – Imagine and co-inspire a governance layer for the DWeb
Filecoin Foundation Forest Hang Out – Connect with new friends while lying in hammocks
Redwood Cathedral – Wellness, meditation, and conversation
Universal Access Amphitheater – Talks and breakout discussions
Be Water Waystation – Art and hands-on programs for children
Thunder Salon – Lightning talks

We’re lucky to have an incredible group of people stewarding the programming in each Space, ensuring that the sessions invite collective practice in discussion, imagination, and play. Continue reading below for more detailed descriptions of some of the Spaces, written by the stewards. An online schedule of all the sessions in each Space will become available the week of the event.

Hackers Hall

The Hacker’s Hall is the place for people of technical and non-technical backgrounds to meet each other at all hours of the day and night. We will have Wi-Fi, couches, whiteboards, and tables. It will be the Mesh Network Hub of the Camp. Come to the Science Fair on Thursday, where everyone can try interactive demos of existing decentralization projects and meet the people who are building them. Then on Friday, come to “Dogfooding Decentralization,” a User Testing Lab for DWeb project. Each team will have office hours where you can come deep dive with them.

Come build on and improve projects, test software, be a user tester, meet developers and designers, ask questions, and learn new things about the decentralization all around us!

The Redwood Cathedral at Camp Navarro, the venue of DWeb Camp 2022

Healing Waters in Cambium Pavilion

Oceans and creeks, rivers and lakes, from the clouds in the sky to the pipes in our homes, water connects us all. This is the focus of Healing Waters at DWeb camp, an Indigenous-led, multi-modal celebration of this precious substance that supports all life on Earth. By the meeting place of the Navarro River and the Pacific Ocean, Healing Waters invites DWeb campers to explore their relationship to water and what it means to be fluid, literally and metaphorically. Our programming navigates the currents leading from Indigenous technologies and storytelling to hyper-modern science and cartography, with ports of call in art, music, policy, poetry, history, and mythology.

Programming Highlights:

A conversation led by Haudenosaunee artists Asha Veeraswamy and Amelia Winger-Bearskin about the parallels between open-source technology, decentralization, and the consensus-building practices that led to the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, and deeply influenced the U.S. Constitution
Data visualization workshop using real water data from the US Geological Survey led by data manager/designer Martha Bearskin
Real-time data-driven VJ session featuring artist/technologist Devin Ronneberg
Morning communal singing rituals led by artist and opera singer Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Musical performances and night raves in the majestic redwood forest
Sound baths (meditative experiences in which the audience is “bathed” in immersive spatialized audio)
Martial arts instruction, guiding students to access the deep aquifer of intuition that flows just below the conscious mind

People-2-People Tent

Let’s myceliate!

Let’s root and spread our hyphae through the ground: tree-to-tree, person-to-person, peer-to-peer, and node-to-node.

Let’s relieve networks of the extractive transactional usage and explore in earnest what it’s like to design, form, and experience networks the way fungi do. The way the complex systems of our bodies do. The way humans do when we weave our relational webs. Our webs have connections, overlapping points, tensions, resistances, and anchors.

Let’s weave, let’s twine, let’s interwingle. Let’s use our technologies of language, of frames, of digital media to better see and play with these patterns of relating in real time, in real life, with each other.

Those working on peer-to-peer (P2P) projects are invited to do a Kindergarten Lightning Talk to share their technologies using crayons and paper and pipe cleaners. We’ll have interactive sessions from different P2P projects like Scuttlebutt, Holochain, and Fluence. There will be a full on battle session (playful, of course) between blockchain folks and fully distributed folks over what the “D” in DWeb stands for. Think arts and crafts and workshops meet P2P technology!

Filecoin Foundation Forest Hang Out

Our Venue Sponsor, Filecoin Foundation, invites you to hang out in the trees and meet Foundation leaders. This is the place to come to chill, meet new friends, and enjoy late night pizza cooked to order in a wood-fired oven on Wednesday and a Silent Disco on Friday.

Open Source Library

Looking for a place of quiet contemplation? Come to the Open Source Library to peruse some favorite books of your fellow campers. We’ll ask each person to bring a few meaningful books to give away. Authors’ talks and storytelling, game nights and children’s films will all take place in the Library.

Redwood Parliament Pavilion

Imagine an Internet where democracy is at least as available as autocracy.

The decentralized Internet is a complex network of technical and social interdependencies; a mix of protocols and the communities that thrive in and across the network. However, the Internet as it currently exists has been flattened and consolidated to render these socio-technical complexities into top-down, autocratic defaults for social organization. And yet, these interdependencies continue to grow, challenging and proving the current form of the Internet socially unsustainable; calling us instead to develop more collective means and intuitions for how we govern our commons.

Redwood Parliament is a collection of events at DWeb Camp that will address these interdependencies in all of their complexity and practice alternatives to autocracy.

The track will bring together practitioners, researchers, artists, builders, and dreamers to actively imagine and co-inspire a governance layer for the decentralized Internet. Over four days, campers will have the opportunity to participate in a collection of distributed activities, workshops, and discussions designed to give us the conceptual and experiential tools and frameworks that we can take with us to help us do this work.

Together, we will:

Explore ways of flexibly composing and experimenting with different decision making structures through workshops and hands on engagement with new digital-native tools;
Immerse ourselves in a black-box modular governance Live Action Role Play (LARP);
Collectively develop a map of governance practices and protocols existing across the decentralized Internet;
Read, annotate, and be guided through various constitutions forming around the decentralized Internet;
Design ecological patterns, protocols, and mechanisms, guided by the ethos of the DWeb, to shape and inform the inter-relationship between our physical and economic environments; and
Engage in speculative writing and world building exercises focused on imagining approaches to governance past, present, and future;

These activities and happenings will complement and inform a series of meta-level discussions around research that the organizers of the Redwood Parliament have been conducting on this topic of a governance layer for the decentralized Internet.

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Redwood Parliament is a joint collaboration between Metagov, the Internet Archive, and RadicalxChange, with support from the Unfinished Network and the National Science Foundation.

Community Networks Adapt to New Realities Under COVID: A DWeb Meetup Recap

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Mai Ishikawa Sutton

People’s access to accurate, reliable information is always essential. Of course, it becomes ever more critical during a global pandemic like COVID.

But giving people “internet access” alone is not enough. For information to be useful to people, the means of access cannot be a one-way street. Information is social. Information must be contextualized. What are the spoken languages, levels of reading literacy, ways of life, and the legacies of systemic oppression? Community networks take a holistic approach to information and communication technology. Instead of seeing people as passive users, people are active participants, co-creating media through collaborative processes, thereby making it more inherently more accessible than content produced elsewhere.

These are some of the main takeaways from the DWeb Meetup on July 29, 2020. Four DWeb Camp 2019 Global Fellows shared how their community networks in South Africa, Brazil and India are adapting to COVID. Though they can connect to the World Wide Web, the fact that these networks maintain steady connectivity between local nodes with locally-hosted content is in many ways more valuable than their internet access.

So how do their community networks steward connectivity and information in this way? How do they work with their communities to produce local knowledge that feeds their networks?

Community Networks Contextualize Information

Sol Luca de Tena, director of Zenzeleni Networks Non-Profit Corporation (NPC), spoke with us from Cape Town, South Africa. Zenzeleni Networks supports and seeds cooperatively-owned community networks. There are currently two community networks, Zenzeleni Mankosi Cooperative and Zenzeleni Zithulele Cooperative. Together they cover 19 villages and are the first legally-recognized community networks that are owned and governed by their members in South Africa.

She described how the problem in rural South Africa went beyond having access to reliable information. The public health information regarding COVID was not even useful given the realities of people, especially given that it was not even available in their languages:

“So imagine in your [urban] setting, all the [COVID safety] guidelines that are being published by the government and by doctors, are about how to stay safe when using a communal tap. How to stay safe when taking your cattle out, or tending for your crops. Amidst the anxiety of knowing what to do, what’s real, what’s not. When the information is not contextual, and it’s not even in your first, or second, or third language, imagine the strain that creates.”

The Zenzeleni community networks serve areas where, over the last decade, its network was largely built alongside its energy infrastructure. Its lack of public services and infrastructure was a direct legacy of underdevelopment due to the Apartheid regime. When national and international health guidelines on COVID assume access to running water and other amenities, it just was not helpful or relevant.

“Our Stories, Our Internet”

Two of Zenzeleni’s initiatives were started to address this. The first was the Digital Community Notice Board. Though they had already zero-rated many websites for health and educational resources, they were finding that it was difficult to filter and make sense of it. The Notice Board curates information from credible sources, carries videos in local languages, and empowers people to filter information that is relevant to them.

The second project Sol shared with us was Amabali Wethu, Intanethi Yethu (“Our Stories, Our Internet”) Challenge. It came out of the need for more content that is locally-created by indigenous black community members. The challenge calls for content in audio and visual formats and makes the content freely available on the networks across 65 hotspots. Those who create the works can win cash prizes to incentivize people to contribute and help people financially.

Sol emphasized that we need to think about tech as being not separate from people’s lives. The internet is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Our networks ought to come out of our communities, and be designed according to actual felt needs.

Nodes that Bond

Marcela Guerra joined us from Monteiro Lobato, in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. She helps with her neighborhood association, Portal Sem Porteiras, whose main project is operating a local community mesh network. The network uses Altermundi’s Libre Routers for its 18 nodes and has over 200+ devices connected. They use Pirania, a captive portal system also built by Altermundi, to moderate the use of the network and gather micropayments to help pay for the ISP connection.

Marcela discussed the organizational hurdles of maintaining the network. With more than 12 people volunteering to maintain it, they made big changes to the way they organized themselves and have made its management more decentralized. They split themselves into five territories, where each group of volunteers is responsible for the connectivity issue of each area’s network.

But as a community network, she said, the work can get very personal. Marcela said that neighbors often knock on the doors of network maintainers when they need internet connection. So they created a virtual channel with a made-up character to help answer those queries. A person is actually answering them behind the scenes, but the character helps to prevent people from getting attached to specific people.

Of course, since all the volunteers are members of the communities themselves, it can be difficult to manage their time and priorities when you live there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Marcela said that they’re trying to get more involved and are working on better governance so they can consider all their members’ perspectives and adapt as best they can.

In the meantime, they are opening a new physical location, a hub, for their community network. It’s a well-ventilated house where people can exchange knowledge and take care of personal business — to pay their bills, use a printer, and other tasks people need specialized devices to do.

The other project Marcela coordinates is called Nodes that Bond, which works to shift women’s relationships with technology. They used to have in-person monthly women’s circles to build trust and connection with each other, which was important as they shared personal stories and shaped what they wanted to be able to do with their community network.

Since the pandemic began however, they replaced the women’s circles with a podcast that collects testimonials on various subjects. Some of the episodes help women navigate tech documentation, and others help them as they go through a digital security orientation. She is now working with her team on an audio novella based on research from 2019 about local women’s stories of domestic violence. In order to anonymize the women’s identities, the novella will weave those into one story of a fictional woman.

Marcela combines creativity and practical approaches to ensure her local network is both sustainable and accessible to the women and underserved in her community.

Scrap Laptops + Raspberry Pis + Kolibri

Hiure Queiroz, tech lead of Coolab, supports the creation and maintenance of community networks in his local area. Like most places in the world, education in his community has been hugely impacted by COVID. He talked about how he is using the local mesh (which Marcela mentioned runs on Libre Routers) to provide educational resources to students.

Hiure is relying on Kolibri, an offline educational application built by Learning Equality, which he said was the best app he found for peer-to-peer networks. He is equipping scrapped laptops with Raspberry Pis to wirelessly mesh the devices to build the peer-to-peer network. He named these devices “Frankenberries”. Students and teachers can then use the Frankenberriess to access the educational materials on Kolibri.

Previously, students had to read and access educational materials on their parents’ mobile phones. With the Frankenberry laptops, students can more easily read and interact with the materials. Hiure is holding study groups with students and teachers to train them in using this system.

In order to meet the urgent educational needs of his community under COVID, Hiure is building devices and fashioning them with the materials teachers require to teach their students. Just as important to this is the training he is holding to onboard them.

Building Local Knowledge with Hypermedia and Mesh Mash Networks

Last but not least was TB Dinesh, who presented his work with Janastu, and Servelots. He is building free and open source technologies to address the needs of populations in the Global South, particularly indigenous communities and those experiencing systemic inequity and prejudice. Dinesh’s passion is building the tools for a truly inclusive Web, one that takes into account that still a large population of the world have low reading literacy.

Dinesh is based in a village that lies on top of a hill next to a valley, about one hour from the city of Bangalore in India. A mesh network connects his village to other villages across the valley.

Janastu has built a radio storytelling platform atop that mesh network, enabling people to share their stories and knowledge using audio and visual media. They converted old phone booths into nodes for the radio, called Namdu1Radio. They are equipped with Raspberry Pis that allow people to walk up to listen to other people’s recordings or record their own with a push of a button. Dinesh noted that making the technology approachable this way is crucial. By making use of familiar infrastructure, like a phone booth, you can more easily embed new technology.

But archiving this material in ways that low literacy people can contribute, was another challenge they wanted to address. Dinesh and his team have created hypermedia archives, using image-based web annotation technology to connect audio to other audio. Like hypertext, where text documents are interconnected with other text documents through links, hypermedia does the same using media. The archive tool allows people to drag-and-drop images to associate them to audio files.

Their hypermedia project has been underway for several years. What have they had to change since the COVID lockdowns? This year, Janastu was planning to go to another village and build out their mesh network, radio, and hypermedia archive in an area 2000km away. The pandemic forced them to indefinitely postpone that project.

Now Dinesh and his team are building what he calls a “mesh mash” — a mesh network with an overlay or logical network. Since building out the physical mesh network is difficult under the lockdown, they are enabling other devices, such as laptops or tablets connected through mobile cell service, to be part of the mesh.

They use IPv6 identifiers to allow those devices to connect and access the other nodes on the network. The mesh mash uses Syncthing to keep files synchronized and up-to-date across the mesh network. They use Yggdrasil to configure log-ins and host video streamed workshops that are broadcast across the network.

Dinesh is currently building out Papad, the audio annotation tool. Like the hypermedia archives, the images can be dragged and dropped to related audio files. People can also add text tags to add another layer of annotation. For example, if an audio recording is about a math lesson, someone could find an image of numbers and arithmetic operators and add that to the audio file. This is all updated and available across the mesh network.

This allows people to not only contribute their knowledge and stories to the mesh network. It empowers people to organize and archive this shared knowledge so it’s discoverable, all without needing to be able to read or write. This shared hypermedia archive enables people to connect across similar interests, share recipes, and even offer gig services across the villages.

Dinesh’s projects emerge out of a passion for creating technology that is community maintained and developed. He believes in the potential of technology, combined with locally-available resources and knowledge, to bring about local futures that are more equitable and self-determining.

Reflections

As COVID spread throughout the world, even those in the most internet-connected, developed cities were susceptible to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news. Here in the United States, COVID has exposed deep deficiencies in how we access accurate, reliable information, especially about what we each must do to mitigate this crisis in our communities.

The Global Fellows showed us how their communities are taking control of their network infrastructure, to make the information that is shared on their networks more relevant, accessible, and valuable for themselves. It’s easy to become disillusioned with the centralized, top-down, and profit-based systems that those of us in urban and developed areas have come to rely on for our news and information. Seeing how the Global Fellows are innovating to create homegrown technologies to address immediate information and education challenges is truly awe-inspiring.

What they are showing us is that “decentralization” is not only a matter of developing technology that is not centrally managed. It’s about building community, meeting people where they are, and approaching technology not as an end unto itself, but a means to address the real challenges that people face.

Coming this Summer: The First DWeb Camp

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Wendy Hanamura

Join us for the first ever DWeb Camp at a private farm one hour south of San Francisco.

How do we build a better Web? The Web we want, the Web we deserve? A Web with no central points of control?

Since 2016, we’ve been calling this the Decentralized Web (DWeb for short) and now we are inviting everyone who wants to imagine and co-create that better Web to join us this summer at one of the most beautiful spots on Earth.

The Internet Archive is hosting a community-built event: DWeb Camp from July 18-21, 2019. Or come early and stay late if you want to help build the camp with us: July 15-22, because that’s when the fun begins. DWeb Camp is all about connecting: to your deepest values, to the community around you, and to the planet. Can we come together to imagine and co-create the technologies, laws, markets and values for the societies we want to live in? REGISTER NOW to attend this first-of-its-kind-event.

We’ll be camping at a farm that’s just a ten-minute hike to this beach, with streams, forests, and trails all around the adjacent private property.

WHERE: We’ve reserved a private farm one hour south of San Francisco and one hour west of San Jose. It’s surrounded by 600 acres of pristine, untouched coastal land: beach, forest, stream. Once you register, we’ll send you the exact location.

The Farm will rent you a bell tent, cots, and bedding if you don’t have gear of your own.

HOW WILL IT WORK: bring a tent and sleeping gear, or if you need one, you can rent a tent and bedding from the Farm and they’ll have it set up for you when you arrive. These 5-meter bell tents are big enough for 3-4 people, so invite your friends and share. RVs are welcome too.

All your meals will be covered in the cost of your ticket: healthy, locally-sourced food, some grown on the Farm itself. You should plan to bring all the extras: snacks, drinks, wine, s’mores, coffee. We won’t be serving alcohol, but it’s BYOB. Bring enough to share! We’ll set up some DIY coffee/tea bars, or you can set up a tent and host your own lounge.

Galileo Kumavais builds his first decentralized city at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018.

WHO’S INVITED: DWeb Camp is family-friendly, so you can bring the kids. For the kid in all of us there will be plenty to do from morning yoga, picking berries, watching the sunset on the beach, hiking up a local stream—plus we’ll have kid-friendly activities going on as well. But every child under 18 needs to be accompanied by a parent at all times—no babysitting provided.

Are you a coder, lawyer, artist, activist, armchair philosopher or all of the above, working to create new ways to connect to and through technology? Ready to get your hands dirty and build something new from the ground up? Love to camp, cook, hack, hike, and connect with the great outdoors? Then DWeb Camp may be for you.

Since we’re still working out the kinks, we will be limiting DWeb Camp to 500 people this first year. Sorry, but that means no daytrippers, latecomers, or unregistered drop-ns allowed.

The Farm has a variety of structures to adapt, share, and co-create within. From 44′ domes, a dance floor, and workshop rooms to raw spaces we can shape together.

WHAT’S THE GAME PLAN? DWeb Camp is a community-built event, so it will be what you make it. We supply the land, some shelter, nourishing food, power and the rest is up to you.

We hope you’ll bring your own project, share your knowledge, launch a conversation, host a tea lounge, offer massages, lead a creative class. The sky’s the limit. Enlist your friends to come and help. Members of the Farm will be creating spaces for meditation, yoga, music making, nature walks, beach hikes, regenerative farming, star gazing, and more.

The Farm has limited connectivity to the internet and little to no cell service. Volunteer teams are setting up a local mesh network throughout the Farm so we can communicate and work offline with the decentralized tools you bring. We’re looking for DWeb communities to build services on top of the mesh.

Why is this important? Because a truly Decentralized Web would work in places where there is limited to no internet connectivity or restrictions due to cost or censorship. The DWeb Camp is a perfect opportunity for us to make local messaging, mapping, websites, and file storage work with community-managed infrastructures in the wild, where we can all be builders and users of our decentralized technologies. Visit our Mesh@DWeb Camp GitHub to get involved now!

HOW CAN I CONTRIBUTE? Here are the GitHub repositories where we hope to co-organize DWeb Camp with you! Our goal is to make this a volunteer-run event in the future and leave behind a trove of knowledge for others. If you prefer to share information in places other than GitHub, we’ll be publishing a new website with more information in mid-April, and in the meantime, you can always email us at dwebcamp@archive.org with your ideas!

By mid-April, we’ll have a process in place where you can see some of the projects that others are proposing and find ways to pitch in. Better yet: propose your own! Our goal as organizers is to make sure you have a place to land to create magic—but you’ll need to bring just about everything else, just like when you camp!

WHAT KIND OF ENVIRONMENT CAN I EXPECT? The environment is beautiful but raw. California’s northern coast is often shrouded in fog, with temperatures ranging from 72 to 53 degrees. Natives of this area say it never rains here in July, but don’t expect to be diving into the ocean without a wetsuit! You’ll want to bring layers of clothing, and shoes suitable for hiking.

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST? The true cost for this 4-day camp is $800 per person. We know that’s a lot of money for some, and not that much for others, so we’ll be offering a sliding scale to register, from $200 for students to $1200 for highly resourced professionals who want to sponsor someone else. Kids under 12 come for free.

There will be some limited financial aid and a committee will evaluate each person on the basis of need.

The Farm is also renting 5-meter canvas bell tents with cots and bedding for $400. Put together a group and share! There’s a $100 parking fee if you want to bring your RV.

(For the ultimate non-camper, there is a lodge with suites, cabins, and glamping tents just ten minutes away. But you’ll have to make arrangements on your own.)

WHAT IF I VOLUNTEER? Volunteers who work three 4-hour shifts (12 hours) during the Camp can qualify for a 50% rebate on their ticket price. Those who come for the Build/Strike days (July 15-22) and contribute three 8-hour shifts (24 hours) can qualify for a 100% rebate. Volunteer slots are limited and we’ll post a way to apply in mid-April.

What will happen when you put 500 committed people in a beautiful, natural, ocean-front space? We hope to leave you inspired. Recharged. Connected. Grounded. Ready to change the world.

Questions? Help us plan by filling out this simple form.

Interested in being a DWeb Camp Sponsor? Contact Wendy Hanamura at wendy@archive.org.

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