We’re thrilled to see how much our hope for DWeb to decentralize globally has been fulfilled this year. In our blog announcing the Core team’s decision to take a hiatus from holding DWeb Camp in California, our Senior Organizer Wendy Hanamura wrote:
[It] is time to put our energy into truly decentralizing DWeb. We want to nurture this movement in a way that empowers nodes around the world, especially those outside of the United States. We want to focus our energies in 2025 on helping local networks build capacity and grow.
In 2025, we held gatherings in Taipei and Berlin before a summer jam-packed with DWeb happenings: DWeb was at What Hackers Yearn in the Netherlands, HOPE_16 in New York, along with the intensive, hands-on week of p2p and local-first protocol learning at the DWeb Seminar SF & Weekend (stay tuned for more writing to come from that).
And of course, DWeb Camp Cascadia, organized by the stellar folks of the DWeb YVR Node. By the spring, we had been hearing murmurs of their planning the event. It all came together when they decided to hold it early August on beautiful Salt Spring Island, a 45-minute drive and 90-minute ferry ride from Vancouver. This was only the second camp outside of California since DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil in 2023.
View from inside a tent at DWeb Camp Cascadia
For anyone who was there in 2019 at DWeb Camp at the Mushroom Farm — it felt so much like our first DWeb. It was held at the Farmers’ Institute, which is regularly used for an annual farmer’s fair for the whole island. About 60 participants in total attended throughout the weekend. An informal polling (raised hands during the opening) showed that about 40% of attendees traveled from the US, with the remaining 60% from Canada — several of whom live on Salt Spring Island itself. It spoke volumes that the local attendees really enjoyed the event while having various interests: from regenerative agriculture and responsible land stewardship to music and web development.
The event kicked off on Friday evening with remarks from Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, whose federal electoral district spans across seven islands, including Salt Spring Island. As leader of Canada’s Green Party, May’s team is working to shape Canada’s upcoming AI legislation. She first gave an acknowledgement of the ancient indigenous history of where we were and its colonization. Then she called attention to Big Tech’s ongoing global dominance, and the recent occurrence of the democratically decided Digital Services Tax having been scrapped by the Canadian Prime Minister over tariff negotiations with the U.S. Following her speech, I (mai), gave a history of the DWeb events and shared the DWeb Principles, with campers getting up to read each of the five principles. Campers then got into small groups to discuss them, with a few of them coming up to share their own reflections.
Campers watching Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, speak at the Opening Session
Saturday and Sunday were packed with talks, discussions, and workshops. Unlike the main DWeb Camp where we have many concurrent tracks, mornings were a single track of programming followed by afternoons with three parallel unconference sessions. DWeb Camp Cascadia’s cornerstone themes were decentralization, democracy, open social networks, regenerative agriculture, and included community talks by local technologists living in and around Salt Spring Island.
Brooklyn Zelenka of Ink & Switch and spec editor for the UCAN distributed RPC and auth system, gave an excellent talk Saturday morning introducing local-first technologies and the affordances of networks that prioritize local, people-centric connectivity. Brooklyn described how big data “cloud” services centralize infrastructure in a way that always requires connectivity (such as when you can no longer edit a Google document when you lose internet access). Offering a powerful metaphor, Brooklyn suggested most services today rely on networks that act more like a military aircraft carrier, when many personal or local services could act more like a bike — nimble, resilient, and scaled down to meet the unique needs of individuals. You can check out the recording of the August DWeb Virtual meetup where she gave the same presentation.
Brooklyn Zelenka giving a talk on local-first networks
There was a cornerstone session for the Open Social Web, led by Nigini Oliviera (DWeb Seattle Node lead) and featured Ian Davis, Matthew Lorentz and Mike Waggooner, each discussing their work with ATProtocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr. They discussed the differences between social media protocols and how each of them hold potential for new apps to be built on them.
Jacob Sayles of Cascadia Collaborative Design gave a workshop on Meshtastic radios. All over the world there has been a growing popularity of LoRa (Long-Range) devices, particularly with the release of Meshtastic software that is increasingly making it easier for anyone to send short, SMS/text-length messages to those nearby. It’s completely decentralized in that it requires no dedicated router and enables messages to hop from device-to-device to go to its intended recipient(s). In practical terms, it’s currently most useful for emergency situations and other situations as an alternative to mobile and internet connectivity. While messages are encrypted, there are still privacy issues with the software/hardware that make it less useful for privacy-sensitive uses.
Poster with unconference sessions scheduled on Sunday, the last day of Camp
Some of the unconference sessions included:
What would a decentralized iNaturalist look like?
Bioregional learning and digital tech
Robotics without data centers
AI safety and how to dwebbify AI
Conscious use of AI by appreciating artisanship
Clean tech + climate tech
“Privacy party” — sponsoring network effects
Fractal cells + self-organizing
How to contain sociopaths
Practical local-first
Pretzel and quark cheese making
Gymnastics + parkour
In addition to these sessions, what made the gathering feel like a DWeb Camp were the other activities throughout the weekend: yoga in the mornings, visits to local regenerative farms, and a hike through redwoods to swim in the ocean.
Photos of a hike through redwoods in Burgoyne Bay
On the first night there was an impromptu karaoke session backed by acoustic guitar played by Paul d’Aoust and cajon played by Nigini Oliviera. On Saturday night we had a dance party and on Sunday night — as may now be tradition — an open mic that featured nine campers showing off their music and comedy.
Campers singing karaoke along on the first night
What I often hear from campers year-to-year is that DWeb is exactly the kind of community they were looking for. People who are deeply engaged with what it means to design and build values-based technologies, who are also themselves people who clearly understand what it means to listen and take care of each other. Along with our curiosity and passion for how we can build better networks, campers are able to integrate that focus with how we are as people — how we want to be better in our communities and the lands we live on. At a time when mainstream technologies seem intent on stripping away our humanity with their use, cultivating these spaces not only feels critical, it’s exhilarating.
On the ferry ride back from Salt Spring Island, members of the DWeb YVR Node were already starting to discuss plans to organize it again for next year with more campers. As someone who’s been involved in DWeb Camp from the beginning, I will say that seeing this event grow feels incredibly affirming: that there’s a need and desire to bring together in-person those ready and able to build better digital networks during these turbulent times.
Sunset over the Farmers Institute, the venue for DWeb Camp Cascadia on Salt Spring Island, Canada
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This blog post has been written by mai ishikawa sutton, Senior Organizer of DWeb and member of the DWeb Core Team.Learn more about DWeb at: https://getdweb.net/
Guest blog by ngọc triệu, DWeb Fellowship Director
The DWeb Camp 2024 theme is “Migration: Moving Together.” Migration, in the context of decentralization, involves moving people and their data to a more open, secure, equitable, and accessible decentralized web. It is a call for collective action and resource gathering that will not only enable these migrations, but also surface and address the various issues that come with them.
Conversely, communities experience forced migration due to war, environmental degradation, corporate land grabs, and political forces beyond their control. Decentralized and distributed tools can offer significant benefits to these displaced populations by providing solutions to secure identity verification, access to resources and currency, censorship resistance, data sovereignty, and the preservation of cultural artifacts. We’ve learned this through the story of the stateless Rohingya people and how they’ve overcome authoritarian controls to preserve their identity and culture, the story of how Maasai Tribespeople of Tanzania locate and map their oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning, and the story of how communities in repressive environments bypass censorship or maintain secure community-owned and operated networks in the face of Internet shutdowns and intermittent connectivity.
Tools are better when they are built with the communities they are intended to serve. This is why the DWeb Fellowship Program seeks out people who work directly with marginalized communities, or in service to them. Often, our Fellows find themselves navigating the harsh realities of repressive regimes, striving to challenge and counteract the many oppressive forces at play. These exceptional individuals stand on the frontlines, harnessing technology to forge pathways to liberation, resilience, agency, and autonomy for those who need it most.
This year, we are honored to welcome 25 Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East — 21 of whom will be joining us in the ancient Redwoods of California, eager to share their knowledge, learn, and connect.
Our Fellows represent a diverse tapestry of cultural and professional backgrounds. They are human rights activists, technologists, educators, community organizers, archivists, researchers, artists, musicians, scientists, cultural conservationists, civil society workers, and digital security experts. Through intersectional approaches to decentralization and decolonization, our Fellows fight for environmental and social justice. Together, they strive to ensure equal access to knowledge, enhance security and privacy, and uphold sovereignty and autonomy for their communities. Together, they spearhead the DWeb movement, moving toward a more just, inclusive, and accessible web.
Please meet our 2024 DWeb Fellows:
Alex Zhang
Alex Zhang is strongly passionate about research and activism in the areas of censorship measurement and circumvention. Over the past five years, the work he led has helped millions of users in China and Iran to bypass various emerging censorship challenges during politically sensitive periods of time. His work has thus received media coverage and several awards: the IMC 2020 Best Paper Runner-up, the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI community, First Place in the CSAW 2023 Applied Research Competition, and the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize in 2024. Additionally, Zhang has been contributing to the GFW Report, an English and Chinese website focused on studying and understanding censorship incidents in China.
Andreas Dzialocha is an electric bass player, producer, composer and developer. His work consists of both digital and physical environments, spaces, festivals, software or platforms for participants and listeners. The computer itself serves as an artistical, political, social or philosophical medium, dealing with computer culture, machine learning, platform politics or decentralized networks.
He is member of the band Sun Kit with Jules Reidy, member of the Berlin-based community computing space offline, co-founder and core-contributor of the local-first protocol p2panda, co-founder of the music label Hyperdelia and the intermedial score platform Y-E-S. Sometimes he teaches artistic computer practices, recently at UdK Berlin. He studied art history, musicology, media philosophy and computer science in Berlin where he also lives and works.
Batool advocates for transforming cultural norms to facilitate the adoption of open research practices, tools, and ethos, while addressing the existing power dynamics and inequalities in knowledge production. She believes that Open science is fundamentally about decolonization by challenging the legacy of settler colonialism, which often marginalized indigenous knowledge systems, and by promoting the integration and respect of these diverse perspectives in the broader scientific discourse. She founded the Open Science community in Saudi Arabia (OSCSA), which introduces and contextualizes Open Science practices in Arabic-speaking countries.
Batool is actively engaged as a mentor and governance committee member for The Open Life Science program. She is also a core contributor to The Turing Way and a member of the Open Science expert group organized by the International Association of Universities (IAU) where she co-develop a new approaches to assessments of and incentives for researchers to engage in Open Science in the Universities.
When she’s not coding, Batool loves going on spontaneous road trips to explore new places.
Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi is a telecom engineer passionate about environmental protection, focusing on sustainable solutions to socio-economic and environmental challenges. Currently, Rachad is pursuing a PhD in digital and artificial intelligence for management.
As Technical Lead at Digital Grassroots, a youth-led organization enhancing local digital citizenship, Rachad led the Digital Rights Monopoly project, creating a virtual platform for decentralized power distribution and amplifying marginalized youth voices.
Rachad’s interest in internet-related issues began in 2016 with the Internet Society Benin, where he now serves as Secretary-General. At Digital Grassroots, he curated the Community Leaders Program for Internet Advocacy, focusing on democratic participation through the Internet. He also coordinated the universal access and meaningful connectivity working group for the Project Youth Summit. As an Open Internet Leader, Rachad collaborated with the AU-EU Digital for Development Hub to represent youth at the 17th Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
Rachad received the Youth Digital Champion Award and the Inaugural Paul Muchene Fellow Award, honoring an ICANN staff member dedicated to enhancing the Internet’s resilience. He advocates for youth inclusion in environmental and digital policies and aspires to become a policy analyst. His hobbies include agriculture, tourism, and football.
Billion is Taiwanese and a co-founder of Cofacts. She started this project in 2016 and she has been advocating for marriage equality and open freedom, dedicating herself to connecting different communities and providing empowerment courses to combat disinformation. She has previously visited PolitiFact in the United States as a fellow. She has exchanged and connected contributors from different countries, to collaborate on clarifying information. She manages a community working on OSINT fact-checking skills and media literacy. She likes cakes and cookies.
Evan Hahn is a computer programmer based in Chicago. He works at Awana Digital (previously known as Digital Democracy) building Mapeo, a Hypercore-powered mapping app used by frontline communities to defend their environmental and human rights. Previously, Evan worked at Signal, the encrypted messenger.
fauno’s work and activism focus on investigating, re-thinking, adapting, modifying, and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, especially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure.
He has been involved in free software and hacktivist communities since 2007, with a special interest in the intersection of technology and grassroots organization. This interest led him to work on technology development from intersectional, trans-feminist, anti-oppressive, decolonial, and ecological perspectives, along with many friends and colleagues.
In the last six years, he has been working almost exclusively on resilient websites and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty, which is also the name of the worker-owned cooperative through which he sustains this work.
This work has led him into the dweb space. Through his alliance with Distributed Press, the websites built at Sutty are available on several distributed protocols, and lately, he has enabled social interactions through ActivityPub, the protocol for the Fediverse.
Juan Cruz was born in Venezuela and has been living in Colombia for 6 years. He’s currently a final semester student pursuing a degree in Systems and Computer Engineering. His journey with community networks began over two years ago when he joined Red Fusa Libre. What started as a quest for knowledge and a desire to contribute has grown into a deep passion for connecting marginalized communities with the world.
He is dedicated to community networks stems from witnessing firsthand the transformative impact of internet access in underserved areas. Through his work at Colnodo, Juan has been involved in implementing and supporting various community-driven initiatives across Colombia. These experiences have not only sharpened my technical skills but also taught him invaluable lessons in empathy, collaboration, and resilience.
Juan is committed to advocating for decentralized technologies and believes in empowering communities through digital inclusion. His goal is to leverage technology to bridge the digital divide, ensuring that everyone has equitable access to information and opportunities.
As a software developer and sociologist, Marie Kochsiek (she/her) is particularly interested in the intersections between societies, technologies and sexual health. She is an active member of the Heart of Code, a feminist hackspace in Berlin. With a team of three she started the drip app, a free and open source period and fertility tracking app.
Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz is a prominent Zapotec communicator, activist, and researcher from the community of Yagavila in the Rincón de la Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. He is a co-founder of SURCO, Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca, A.C. where he has worked to support community media projects, access to information, open source technologies, and community education. He is currently contributing to the INDIGITAL initiative, a collaborative project focused on ensuring access to information in indigenous languages and data. He was a 2023 participant in the LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry) Líderes Program on Internet Governance, and will be a Digital Civil Society Lab Technology & Racial Equity Practitioner Fellow with the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University during the 2024-25 academic year.
Nádia Coelho (she/her) is an electrical engineer, who’s been studying regenerative agriculture for the last five years. After spending three years visiting and researching alternative farming experiences throughout Brazil, she established herself in the Atlantic Rainforest in the State of São Paulo. There, she co-founded Tekoporã, a project focused on building tailor-made digital systems for agroecological social organizations, using proper tools with free software and hardware.
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist interrogating the politicality of the alienated body/mind networked within a call for collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer :::as a portal::: as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice. They reflect on the virtual as a space of potential requiring contestation for the ways it mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility, collectivism, and friction as generative mediums.
Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology. They render the mobility device/disabled body as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics, as formal object laden with stigma while freedom-giving, sterile and metallic while sensual and soft, (un)aestheticized while interacting with designations of usefulness, function, and capitalistic innovation.
Nat is a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, a Y10 member of NEW INC and was a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also a community organizer and access worker. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies.
Muhammad Noor, a Rohingya visionary and the founder of the Rohingya Project, is a pioneer in blockchain for social and financial inclusion for stateless communities. His multifaceted role extends to founding and directing impactful institutions, including the globally acclaimed Rohingya Vision (RVISION) TV broadcast station, watched by millions worldwide. With vast expertise in journalism, humanitarian work, and corporate leadership, Noor actively uses technologies such as Blockchain, AI, Crypto, Metaverse, Data Science, security, and privacy to benefit marginalized people. He also mentors students and has given talks on refugee issues and technology at universities throughout the world.
Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Weise7 studio in Berlin and Lecturer in the Digital Arts program at Die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters of Professional Studies in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her teaching and media art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. With a focus on radio art and computer networking, she researches and develops artworks as educational tools and workshops that demystify computer networking and radio technology. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.
Senka Hadzic is a telecom engineer, researcher and public interest technologist working on affordable connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. She is part of the iNethi team, a Cape Town based project enabling decentralized content distribution in community networks, and collaborating with Grassroots Economics to bootstrap circular economy in the communities by using a locally-owned network and community inclusion token as a catalyst.
Shadrach Ankrah is an Information Technology (IT) Specialist and the Founder and Executive Director of Connect Rurals, a nonprofit organization focused on bridging the digital divide in rural and underserved communities in Ghana. The organization provides digital skills training including coding and graphic design, and is committed to connecting rural communities to the Internet to provide access to various opportunities. He advocates for Internet access and has actively participated in Internet governance discussions and initiatives since 2017. He has mentored and guided over 150 youths on Internet governance issues, helping them navigate the ecosystem and contribute to the development of the Internet. He is affiliated with various global Internet organizations, including the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Shadrach has been a fellow at ICANN72 & ICANN77, AFRINIC-31, and the 2019 Hackathon@AIS (Africa Internet Summit). His vision is to see rural and underserved African communities have access to decentralized technologies and tools that provide them with Internet access, digital literacy, and job opportunities.
Stacco Troncoso is an avid synthesizer of information and a radical polymath working towards elemental, people-led change on a burning planet.
Stacco lives, breathes, teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralized governance, blockchain and more as part of DisCO.coop, Commons Transition and Guerrilla Translation.
Tanveer Anoy (They/Them) is a Bangladeshi queer author, academic, archivist, and human rights activist. Anoy has provided leadership and edited several queer print productions. As a writer, Anoy addresses critical socio-political issues such as the gender binary, bullying, and religious violence. Anoy is the founder of MONDRO, the first and largest Bangladeshi queer archive that collects and preserves the artistic and cultural history of communities of marginal gender and sexual diversities. Anoy also established Bangladesh Feminist Archives, a comprehensive digital platform dedicated to preserving, documenting, and promoting the intersectional feminist movement in Bangladesh.
Wassim Alsindi is the founder and creative director of the 0xSalon, which conducts experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. A veteran of the timechain, Wassim specializes in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems, on which he writes, speaks, teaches, and consults. He has an editorial column at the MIT Computational Law Report, and he co-founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal and conference series. Wassim has curated arts festivals, led a sculptural engineering laboratory and published experimental music, satirical theater, fiction, games, poetry, and speculative scripture. Wassim holds a Ph.D. in ultrafast supramolecular photophysics from the University of Nottingham.
As a Gen-Z artist, Ziye Zhang leverages diverse digital tools and mediums to delve into contemporary culture and the nuances of social life in the digital era, highlighting the unique challenges encountered by the Digital Native Community. Additionally, Ziye has a high level of expertise in emerging technologies in VR, virtual production, and motion capture.
Ziye also uses his game design knowledge to encourage people to solve social issues through games and hosts board game design workshops at MIT, NYU, etc. In addition, Ziye is an invited guest speaker by Hasbro China.
Now, he is conducting field research and studies for his new works, which will discuss individual consciousness neglected on the internet through interactive installations, continuing to refine his theoretical research and artistic language.
Zoe is a software consultant, open source advocate, and conference organizer. Her work often focuses on underserved communities. She is currently working to restart Oakland’s Sudomesh network. Away from tech, her hobbies include photography, fixing bicycles, and flying and maintaining experimental aircraft.
Fendji is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Ngaoundere, Cameroon, and Research Director at Afroleadership. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany. Post-Ph.D., he collaborated with German cooperation initiatives in Cameroon to establish community networks in the northern regions of the country. With APC funding, he proposed a regulatory framework for community networks in Francophone African countries.
Fendji’s recent research interests include artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, sustainable agriculture, education, and addressing bias and ethical issues. He collaborated with the Alan Turing Institute on the ADJRP project and held sessions at the Mozilla Festival. In 2021, he facilitated the UNESCO Forum on Youth and AI in Yaoundé.
He has been awarded fellowships at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. Fendji is a member of the ICT and AI Commission at the National Committee for Technology Development in Cameroon and mentors in the African track of the Scaling Responsible AI Solutions project led by CEIMIA and GPAI.
Michael Suantak, also known as Pumsuanhang Suantak, is a distinguished social innovator and entrepreneur known for his impactful work in Myanmar and India. He founded and directs ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities), where he has established community wireless networks connecting over 20 remote jungle villages in Myanmar’s Chin State, providing vital educational content and local news. Beginning his career as a founding member of the Burma Information Technology (BIT) team in 2002 and later serving as an organizational manager in New Delhi, Suantak has also become a prominent digital and cybersecurity trainer. His expertise includes policy development, law, and integrating modern technology into education across Asia. As a DeBoer fellow, he leads digital and cybersecurity research at ASORCOM, enhancing community development through strategic internet and wireless technology use.
Nzambi is an experienced and skilled professional with a strong background in data collection, operations, program support, and project Implementation. Her work has involved collaboratively designing, implementing, and coordinating projects with data, technology, and design components, making her well-equipped to contribute to the DWeb ecosystem.
She is a techie who believes that her passion for using technology to address societal issues, combined with her strong project management and research capabilities, makes her a valuable asset in the pursuit of a more decentralized, equitable, and inclusive web. She looks forward to engaging with the DWeb Community and exploring ways in which she can collaborate to advance the DWeb movement.
Shalini finished her Bachelors of Engineering in Tumkur and joined Servelots and Janastu soon after. And that was 15 years ago. After realizing that her role is essential for keeping the programs of working with communities alive she decided to get involved with all activities of the organizations including keeping the account books ready! Now she is working with the village women in various capacities — craft center to local mesh deployment, while also handling the overall management of activities of the organizations. One of them being the decentralization of a platform that caters to keeping the local knowledge, much of which also has personal stories of women. Shalini works with the women, listening to their stories and keeping it for next iteration. In the meantime, the stories are shared with the people the women trust and annotated so they can get back fast to things that are of interest to them. This also means that the annotations will be media that will be tagged. Most women are not literate so we have a way of asking them to associate with a person who they trust and can use the system. Shalini and her team are looking at ways to include them as first class users of the system – with face and voice recognition to start.
Taslim is a software engineer at eQualitie, an open-source company dedicated to developing tools for online freedom and privacy. He contributes actively to the company’s open-source browser, Ceno Browser, which aims to provide secure access to online content for all users worldwide.
It’s 10 am and I’ve already been traveling for 20 hours — two planes and a long layover from California on my way to Ubatuba, a town 4-hours northeast of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I feel nervous. I’ve never been to Brazil before but the bus ride is serene. The city buildings give way to lush rainforest along the mountainside. It’s almost silent on the bus, a calm quiet. I take a cue from the locals, close my eyes and try to get some rest. I am on my way to DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil.
View of buildings at Neos Institute where campers found cover from the elements. Photo by: Bruno Caldas Viannalicensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed
My phone buzzes. It’s Victor (Coolab) and Dana (Colnodo). They pick me up from the station and we’re off to Neos Institute, where we’ll spend the next five days together. Coolab Camp is a continuing experiment in the DWeb movement — weaving together technologists, dreamers, builders, and organizers in a beautiful outdoor setting, providing food and shelter for the week, then letting the sharing, imagination, and community building fly.
Gathering on the first day to talk about the themes of agriculture and ecology.
I arrive early to help set up parts of the camp, which is being hosted by the Neos Institute for Sociobiodiversity. They are a collective that has spent the last six years rebuilding this once dilapidated cultural center. One of Neos’ goals is to protect and conserve this area, the Brazilian Atlantic forest. Only about 10% of this forest remains in the wake of development.
This spirit of conservation overlays with the themes of Camp: agriculture, sustainability, and ecology. Coolab is bringing together farmers and organizers from Latin America with DWeb builders and technologists to discover how we can take care of both our digital and physical landscapes.
My roommate, Bruna, from the Transfeminist Network of Digital Care, shares their work on Pratododia. They use the metaphor of food to explain how we can practice healthier technology habits. For instance, just as we wash our hands before meals, it’s important to check our security and privacy settings online before tasting everything the internet offers us.
Papaya, mango, and watermelon served during our vegetarian meals.
Coolab Camp is more than a conference, it is an experiment in building a pop-up community. We start each day with a general meeting at the Casarão (Big House), where we forge acordos (agreements) about how to take care of the space and each other.
Alexandre from Coletivo Neos goes over the history of the Neos Institute.
Coolab Camp morning meetings are at once relaxed and energizing.
These acordos range from simple things: don’t feed the cats and take off your shoes — to strong expressions of our values: no oppression or discrimination of any kind based on class, race, gender, or sexual orientation. At the beginning of every meeting we reiterate these agreements and ask ourselves: do we still agree, does anything need to be changed, does anything need to be added?
This daily gathering is only possible because the event is small, about 80 people over the five days of Camp. That intimacy means we recognize familiar faces and at least exchange a friendly greeting (Bom dia!). There are no janitors to clean up during the event. We wash our own dishes and clean our own bathrooms.
A community member helps setup the mesh network.
Folks also volunteer to be the “olhos (eyes) ” and “ouvidos (ears)” of the community. The Olhos serve to watch out for any misbehavior. The Ouvidos are there to listen if someone has issues they are uncomfortable bringing up to the group. All of this adds to the building of our community.
Marcela and Tomate crafting posters and zines.
How do we communicate at Camp? First, we test some technological solutions like a Mumble server for multiple audio channels, then having AI do live translation. But in the end, the best solution is human: to have another person by our side.
A lot of the Brazilian campers speak both Portuguese and English, so volunteers translate whispering next to us English-only speakers. It is incredibly humbling to have community members put so much energy into making sure we are included in the conversations and know what is going on.
Creating our session schedule through unconference.
Next comes the fun part, the sessions and workshops! Sessions are organized through an unconference where everyone proposes sessions, determines their interests, and those garnering the most interest place themselves on the schedule. Workshops range from:
Learning programming with Scratch for kids and beginners
Working with a mesh network
ODD.SDK – a local-first framework for app development
An analog map of the camp site and where routers for the mesh network will go.
Campers gather around the firepit to share experiences working in cooperatives.
Luandro Viera from Digital Democracy shares the Earth Defender’s Toolkit.
One of my favorite sessions is with Ana, a Brazilian farmer and social researcher guiding us through a game called Sanctuaries of Attention. It happens on the last day. It is impromptu and they just ask around for people to join after breakfast.
Ana is able to lead the session in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. We spend two hours sharing stories of how our attention changes in different situations and which situations feel safe for us — ”sanctuaries” that we can rest in.
The unconference style suits DWeb+Coolab Camp, because it allows the time and space for sessions like these to happen organically, without constraints.
Ana guides participants through the Sanctuaries of Attention.
Nico teaches programming for beginners using Scratch.
Setting up network equipment for the mesh network on site.
Some sessions are discussions around topics like:
Experiences as a cooperative
How to organize groups using sociocracy
Sharing challenges and workarounds managing a community network
It doesn’t hurt that we can hold some of these discussions at the beach. There are also plenty of casual conversations over meals, on a couch, or lounging in a hammock.
Discussion on the beach about community networks.
One of the things I’ll keep with me from those conversations is a new way of understanding the saying, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
Those of us from luckier circumstances fret about the end of the world. Those from different circumstances have already seen it happen. Their economic systems have collapsed or their environment is suffering through the worst of the climate catastrophe. The end of the world is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
But an end is just a new beginning. Here in Brazil, we meet in the forest with people who are already rebuilding, regenerating from the ruins. The contributions we make will remain. Regeneration is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Creating improvised music with Música de Círculoaround the campfire.
Peixe (Fish) and Ondas (Waves), the spaces where sessions were held.
Farmers, organizers, designers and technologists at DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil 2023.
We could have been anywhere, but we got the opportunity to be within the songs of the birds, the whispers of the trees, and the laughter of the sea. Within smiles and greetings, warm embraces and supportive shoulders. To all the people who gathered us together: Tania, Hiure, Marcela, Luandro, Victor, Dana, Bruno, Marcus, Colectivo Neos and anyone else I may have forgotten, thank you for showing us how to regenerate culture, environment and technology through community. Obrigado!
All photos by Melissa Rahal licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deedunless otherwise stated.
In the fifth session of “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web” – a joint series of events with Internet Archive, METRO Library Council, and Library Futures – “Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse, and the ‘Next Big Thing,’” Internet Archive Director of Partnerships Wendy Hanamura took a deep dive into the metaverse and NFTs through an exploration of virtual worlds with pioneering metaverse developer Jin.
Watch session:
In this engaging session, Hanamura and Jin explored the technologies that would transform the future and the world as we know it within Web 3.0: the immersive spaces and built communities of the metaverse. As indicated by participants, to some, NFT and metaverse means “cyberspace on steroids,” or “Second Life,” while for others it holds a more negative connotation. From the “read-only” Web 1.0 to the forthcoming “read-write-trust verifiable” future of Web 3.0, the evolution of the web is leading to an enhancement of reality to create new and augmented realities.
An NFT, or an entry on a blockchain, can be anything from a document to even a virtual representation of a physical space like the Internet Archive. Jin, for example, is able to create a complete virtual desktop where their entire life and memory lives in 3D, and where they conducted the virtual reality interview with Hanamura. From hacker spaces to raves to the virtual representation of the Internet Archive they built as a central space to conduct their work, Jin’s life is mediated and defined through their virtual world building.
What makes Jin’s world unique is their commitment to building with other people in the open source community in an “interesting, collaborative, co-creation.”
Within these worlds, one of the key provisions is interoperability: the ability to carry these worlds between each other. For Jin, this is still a work in progress, with new modes of interoperability still being built. In addition, privacy is a major concern – Web 3.0 provides a new form of privacy through avatars and other obscuring technology, but Jin cautions that due diligence is still warranted, just like in the real world.
The conversation ended with a discussion of the democratizing aspects of NFT creation and independent artists. As an artist, Jin’s first NFT earned him more money than he ever had previously in his career. One of the most exciting aspects of this kind of creation is the way it removes the middle person from the art market: rather than creating for museums or other art markets, Jin is able to reach their audience directly.
Jin ended the session on a positive note: “In virtual reality, you have a lot more bandwidth for empathy. There’s a lot of nuance that is lost in text-based communication platforms. It’s more asynchronous. The sense of presence, of being there with other people, you experience a lot of genuine and good connections… there’s a lot of genuine appreciation of art. That gives me hope.”
“How Decentralized Identity Drives Privacy” with Internet Archive, Metro Library Council, and Library Futures
How many passwords do you have saved, and how many of them are controlled by a large, corporate platform instead of by you? Last month’s “Keeping your Personal Data Personal: How Decentralized Identity Drives Privacy” session started with that provocative question in order to illustrate the potential of this emerging technology.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI), defined as “an idea, a movement, and a decentralized approach for establishing trust online,” sits in the middle of the stack of technologies that makes up the decentralized internet. In the words of the Decentralized Identity Resource Guide written specifically for this session, “self-sovereign identity is a system where users themselves–and not centralized platforms or services like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn–are in control and maintain ownership of their personal information.”
Research shows that the average American has more than 150 different accounts and passwords – a number that has likely skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. In her presentation, Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, discussed the implications of “trading privacy and security for convenience.” Hanamura drew on her recent experience at SXSW, which bundled her personal data, including medical and vaccine data, into an insecure QR code used by a corporate sponsor to verify her as a participant. In contrast, Hanamura says that the twenty-year old concept of self-sovereign identity can disaggregate these services from corporations, empowering people to be in better control of their own data and identity through principles like control, access, transparency, and consent. While self-sovereign identity presents incredible promise as a concept, it also raises fascinating technical questions around verification and management.
For Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, her interest in identity comes from networks of global ecology and information technology, which she has been part of for more than twenty years. In 2000, when the Internet was still nascent, she joined with a community to ask: “How can this technology best serve people, organizations, and the planet?” Underlying her work is the strong belief that people should have the right to control their own online identity with the maximum amount of flexibility and access. Using a real life example, Young compared self-sovereign identity to a physical wallet. Like a wallet, self-sovereign identity puts users in control of what they share, and when, with no centralized ability for an issuer to tell when the pieces of information within the wallet is presented.
In contrast, the modern internet operates with a series of centralized identifiers like ICANN or IANA for domain names and IP addresses and corporate private namespaces like Google and Facebook. Young’s research and work decentralizes this way of transmitting information through “signed portable proofs,” which come from a variety of sources rather than one centralized source. These proofs are also called verifiable credentials and have metadata, the claim itself, and a digital signature embedded for validation. All of these pieces come together in a digital wallet, verified by a digital identifier that is unique to a person. Utilizing cryptography, these identifiers would be validated by digital identity documents and registries. In this scenario, organizations like InCommon, an access management service, or even a professional licensing organization like the American Library Association can maintain lists of institutions that would be able to verify the identity or organizational affiliation of an identifier. In the end, Young emphasized a message of empowerment – in her work, self-sovereign identity is about “innovating protocols to represent people in the digital realm in ways that empower them and that they control.”
Next, librarian Lambert Heller of Technische Bibliothek and Irene Adamski of the Berlin-based SSI firm Jolocom discussed and demonstrated their work in creating self-sovereign identity for academic conferences on a new platform called Condidi. This tool allows people running academic events to have a platform that issues digital credentials of attendance in a decentralized system. Utilizing open source and decentralized software, this system minimizes the amount of personal information that attendees need to give over to organizers while still allowing participants to track and log records of their attendance. For libraries, this kind of system is crucial – new systems like Condidi help libraries protect user privacy and open up platform innovation.
Self-sovereign identity also utilizes a new tool called a “smart wallet,” which holds one’s credentials and is controlled by the user. For example, at a conference, a user might want to tell the organizer that she is of age, but not share any other information about herself. A demo of Jolocom’s system demonstrated how this system could work. In the demo, Irene showed how a wallet could allow a person to share just the information she wants through encrypted keys in a conference situation. Jolocom also allows people to verify credentials using an encrypted wallet. According to Adamski, the best part of self sovereign identity is that “you don’t have to share if you don’t want to.” This way, “I am in control of my data.”
To conclude, Heller discussed a recent movement in Europe called “Stop Tracking Science.” To combat publishing oligopolies and data analytics companies, a group of academics have come together to create scholar-led infrastructure. As Heller says, in the current environment, “Your journal is reading you,” which is a terrifying thought about scholarly communications.
These academics are hoping to move toward shared responsibility and open, decentralized infrastructure using the major building blocks that already exist. One example of how academia is already decentralized is through PIDs, or persistent identifiers, which are already widely used through systems like ORCID. According to Heller, these PIDs are “part of the commons” and can be shared in a consistent, open manner across systems, which could be used in a decentralized manner for personal identity rather than a centralized one. To conclude, Heller said, “There is no technical fix for social issues. We need to come up with a model for how trust works in research infrastructure.”
It is clear that self-sovereign identity holds great promise as part of a movement for technology that is privacy-respecting, open, transparent, and empowering. In this future, it will be possible to have a verified identity that is held by you, not by a big corporation – the vision that we are setting out to achieve. Want to help us get there?
On our current web, most platforms are controlled by a central authority—a company, government, or individual—that maintains the code, data and servers. Ultimately, consumers must trust that those central authorities will do what is in their best interest.
“In order to have ease of use, we have ceded control to these big platforms, and they manage our access to information, our privacy, our security, and our data,” explained Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, who led the workshop.
In contrast, the decentralized web is built on peer-to-peer technologies. Users could conceivably own their data. Rather than relying on a few dominant platforms, you could potentially store and share information across many nodes, addressing concerns about censorship, persistence and privacy.
“It is still very early days for the decentralized web,” Hanamura said. “All of us still have time to contribute and to influence where this technology goes.”
At the event, Mai Ishikawa Sutton, founder & editor at COMPOST Mag, explained how her publication can be viewed over the decentralized web using IPFS and Hypercore, while using Creative Commons licensing to openly share its contents. In addition, Paul Frazee demonstrated Beaker Browser, an experimental browser that allows users to build peer-to-peer websites on the decentralized web.
Using the current system, Web 2.0, relies on content living on web servers in a certain location.
“This is a problem because [publishers] want to change it. They want to update it. They … go out of business. They want to merge with somebody. And it goes away,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, noting that the average life of a web page is 100 days. The Wayback Machine was built to back up those web pages after-the-fact, but there is a need to build better decentralized technology that preserves a copy as the content is created, he said. “The Web should have a time axis.”
According to Kahle, in the future a decentralized web would look much the same to the user, but could build features such as privacy, resilience and persistence right into the code. It could also create new revenue models for creative works. For example, a decentralized web could enable buyers to make direct micropayments to creators rather than licensing them through iTunes or Amazon.
“This is a good time for us to try to make sure we guide this technology toward something we actually want to use,” Kahle said. “It’s an exciting time. We in the library world should keep focused on trying to make robust information resources available and make it so people see things in context. We want a game with many winners so we don’t end up with just one or two large corporations or publishers controlling what it is we see.”
Even amidst the COVID lock down, builders of the Decentralized Web have hit new milestones with their projects this year. At our last DWeb Meetup of 2020, we heard from a dozen projects about their breakthroughs, challenges, and roadmaps for the coming year.
As with all of our DWeb Meetups, these lightning talks provided an opportunity for us to learn from others and explore potential partnerships and collaboration. We had rounds of 5 minute talks with 2 minutes of Q&A in Zoom.
Here were the speakers (and the times when they appear in the video):
Maria Bustillos, Co-Founder, Brick House Co-operative (1:00:40)
Mauve Signweaver, Agregore (1:10:12)
Tom Trowbridge, Co-founder, Fluence Labs (1:17:42)
Travis Vachon, ItMe.company (1:27:01)
Brandon Wallace, Plan Systems.org (1:35:03)
Michael Toomim, Braid (1:44:35)
Descriptions of Speakers and Their Lightning Talks
1. Dietrich Ayala, Ecosystem Lead, IPFS
Big is Small is Big: IPFS Usage, Users and Use-cases in 2020
As adoption and availability of IPFS grew in 2020, we saw it used across a broad spectrum of applications, varying widely in industry category, use-case, architecture and more. IPFS ecosystem lead Dietrich Ayala will speedrun through a sampling of these, sharing what was learned and how our users are guiding the IPFS project into 2021
A Volunteer-based Mesh Network Workshop in China Academy of Art
DWeb Shanghai, along with the Institute of Network Society at China Academy of Art, co-hosted a special workshop this month on building mesh networks at its fifth annual conference. Yisi will share what they did and what they learned from the workshop and its participants.
It’s hard to get started building a decentralized application. Even if you’ve been building them for years, it’s hard to get them adopted. Decentralized applications operate differently than centralized ones — and we need new tools that developers and designers can use to understand how to build applications. Simply Secure is now producing a library of resources, assets, and patterns to support the design and development of better user-facing applications that are backed by decentralized architecture.
Founded in 2014, GUN is an open source cybersecurity protocol for synchronizing graph data in decentralized mesh networks. It is as easy as Firebase yet supports end-to-end encryption and uses “CRDT” algorithms instead of a Blockchain.
In 2020, GUN hit 200M+ downloads with 30M monthly active users. The project is powered by 2 full time staff, 10 part-time volunteers, and 100+ contributors.
“At the DWeb Camp in 2019 I led a brainstorming session on how we can build a cloud providing the same openness and freedoms to users and developers as open source. One year and a pandemic later, I’m excited to finally release the first step in pursuit of that vision: “ensembles”, git repositories that package open cloud services.
They are designed to be the building blocks of an open and decentralized cloud infrastructure: reproducible, relocatable and shareable. Decentralization is obtained via a notion of a persistent identity that is defined not by a network location but rather a reproducible state.”
6. Paul Frazee, Founder, Breaker Browser
Beaker Browser 1.0: Share P2P Websites
“Unless there was a disaster between my talk-submission and Thursday, then Beaker Browser 1.0 is now available! Join us for a quick overview of building and sharing peer-to-peer Websites with this newest release.”
7. Maria Bustillos, Co-Founder, Brick House Co-operative
Decorporatizing the Public Sphere
Megaplatforms from Amazon to Facebook to Penguin Random House have flattened and centralized the human imagination. Netizens know that something is draining out of our world, that there’s less variety, less brilliance, and fewer surprises, in our movies, music, and writing. But it’s not clear to most that this cultural deterioration is the result of a breakneck form of capitalism enabled by technology.
The Brick House Cooperative, launching December 8th, is addressing this problem as writers and artists, ‘from the other side’. They’re looking to join forces with technologists and others interested in decorporatizing media. Maria will also share how her previous experience with Civil, a blockchain-based media platform that aimed to fund journalism, will inform her work with The Brick House.
Agregore is a local-first web browser which aims to simplify application development across different peer-to-peer protocols while staying as minimal and customizable as possible. Through Agregore, Mauve is trying to address the issue of web browsers not having access to full peer-to-peer protocols. They want to make creating local-first apps easier by simplifying the programming interface and app distribution method.
Fluence Labs was established in 2017 by 3 founders, Dmitry Kurinskiy, Tom Trowbridge and Evgeny Ponomarev. They started in 2017 and spent a lot of time researching and experimenting with decentralized computing. Just recently, in November 2020 they launched Phase 1 of Fluence: the decentralized computing protocol that allows applications to build on each other, share data and users. They call it an open application platform.
The goal of Fluence is to enable the next wave of internet innovation by turning the competition into collaboration. Fluence creates an open alternative to proprietary platforms, enabling developers to build with confidence and be fairly compensated for usage.
Self Determination for our Digital Bodies with Solid
Centralized tech monopolies and other large corporations capture the vast majority of the value of the world’s data in 2020. In order to create the conditions necessary to return this value to the world’s users, we need new politico-technical-social institutions that give users the ability to provide and retract informed consent over the ways their data is used. itme is building the world’s first cooperatively owned and operated data union built on Tim Berners-Lee’s new Solid web standard to let users reassemble their digital bodies and capture the value of the data they create.
PLAN Systems is a technology 501(c)(3) founded in 2018 by two U.S. veterans in Austin TX., including Drew O’Meara, inventor of G-Force realtime audio reactive music visualizations. Their development effort centers on building a framework of open protocols and universally accessible interfaces designed for privacy, real time collaboration, data visualization, and secure data storage & portability. November was a critical milestone, demonstrating PLAN (pre-alpha) running on 4 major platforms across desktop and mobile devices.
Github: https://github.com/plan-systems
Email them at info [at] plan-systems.org to learn more and get involved.
“At 2019’s Dwebcamp, a group of us found a back room and spontaneously designed a shared protocol for distributed synchronization. Tim Berners-Lee walked by, and thought it would be a great addition to the web.
We will report on what’s happened since!
We presented the protocol to the IETF’s HTTP Working Group in Montreal, and received a surprisingly enthusiastic reception. We are now building software on the protocol, to show how HTTP can be extended into a distributed shared fabric for local-first applications, users, and systems, with great debugging and tooling.”
The folks at Protocol Labs love their rockets. And outerspace. And exploration.
So when Filecoin, their cryptocurrency-fueled decentralized storage network launched recently, it was no surprise they called it Filecoin Liftoff. In the payload of that Filecoin rocket are treasures from the Internet Archive:
For 15 years, LibriVox has harnessed a global army of volunteers, creating 14,200 free public domain audiobook projects in 100 different languages. Where else can you listen to Jules Verne’s 20,000Leagues Under the Sea in French, Spanish, English, German or Dutch…for free? Now, phrases of Shakespeare, Poe, Joyce and Dante will be stored across the Filecoin mainnet, broken into packets to be reconstituted when needed—perhaps in a new century.
The same destiny awaits the home movies, stock footage, educational and amateur films in the public domain, lovingly curated by the Prelinger Archives founder, Rick Prelinger. He encourages creatives to download and reuse these videos, creating countless new works like this one by musician Jordan Paul:
Now filmmakers and connoisseurs can sleep easier, knowing that a new, distributed copy of those films lives in the Filecoin network, (along with the main copy and multiple backups in the Internet Archive’s repositories.)
So what’s next Filecoin explorers?
Today, Protocol Labs and the Internet Archive are happy to announce the Filecoin Archives, a new community project to curate, disseminate and preserve important open access information often at risk of being lost. You can get involved in so many ways: by nominating information to be stored, uploading it to the Internet Archive, preserving the data as a Filecoin node while earning Filecoin for sharing your storage capacity.
What information should we be preserving?Please tell us!
How about 166,000 public domain books (60 terabytes) from the Library of Congress? Including 2100 texts about Abraham Lincoln and slavery?
It takes a host of global voices with diverse viewpoints to ensure that humanity’s most precious knowledge is represented online and preserved. So we need to hear from you. What open access information or datasets are you interested in preserving?
Between now and November 5, please send us your ideas and vote on the others. We will gather your suggestions, add our own, and publish the list from which we will select information to preserve across a global network of Filecoin nodes.
How to send us your suggestions
Look for the tweet from @JuanBenet– reply to it with:
The Name of the Dataset.
The size in GB or TB.
An HTTP or @IPFS link to the data.
Why it matters.
#FilecoinArchives
Bonus points if the data is already stored in the Internet Archive or if you upload it there. Vote for ideas by retweeting them and please help us spread the word!
In 2015, a young developer named Juan Benet wandered into the Internet Archive headquarters. He painted a picture of a decentralized stack, something he now calls Web3, where the storage, transport and other layers would be distributed across many machines. Together with the DWeb community, we have imagined a web with our values written into the code: values such as privacy, security, reliability, and control over one’s own identity. With the launch of Filecoin’s mainnet, a piece of that new web is perhaps within reach.
Now it’s up to us to make sure the payload includes humanity’s most important knowledge.
Ana guides participants through the Sanctuaries of Attention.
