Tag Archives: DWeb Camp

Introducing Department of Decentralization, DWeb Camp 2026 partner

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Tommi Marmo

Since December last year, when we decided DWeb Camp would take place in Europe, we’ve been hard at work to evolve the spirit of our unique event and adapt it to a new context. It took a major leap of faith for us as organizers. We knew it would be an ambitious endeavor, but we felt strongly that it would be worth it. In the 6 months since that decision, we’ve navigated countless challenges behind the scenes.

And at many of those junctures, we would have been lost and out of our depth if it were not for the invaluable support of our local partners; namely, the Department of Decentralization. The DoD is a non-profit active in the advocacy for decentralization and open-source software. They’re deeply rooted in the Berlin community, but also connected with many other networks worldwide.

It all started from a spontaneous reply to one of our posts on the ATmosphere. Afri from DoD proposed that we collaborate in case we chose Berlin as the location of DWeb Camp 2026. When we did, we reached out. As we started collaborating remotely, over video calls and emails, we realized DoD and DWeb’s close values alignment. A few months later, we found ourselves co-organizing what turned out to be a phenomenal in-person meetup at c-base at the end of February.

Looking back, DWeb Camp 2026 would have been impossible without the help we got from the incredible humans of DoD. They welcomed us with open arms, and now, we want to introduce them to you before you can meet them all at Camp. Below are excerpts from interviews we did with DoD’s Raul, Afri, Peter and Franzi. We have made slight edits for reading clarity.

Both as an organisation and as a community of practitioners, DoD profoundly cares about digital rights and Software Freedom. Despite its long history, the open source ecosystem continues to face multiple challenges in this ever-changing world. While we will be diving deeper in these topics at DWeb Camp, we asked the interviewees to share their thoughts.

Raul’s point perfectly summarizes the multi-faceted hurdles around the key problem of sustainable funding:

The FLOSS world has demonstrated remarkable results in development, security, and community building, [and] open source software is the foundation beneath virtually every critical piece of technology in use today. We have proven that a collaborative, collective approach to solving problems is a model that works. Yet the movement’s most pressing challenge, and I acknowledge my bias having worked on this issue for many years, remains its failure to secure stable, non-discretionary funding for the developers and maintainers who underpin our everyday technology stack. This is not a new problem, but it is one we have consistently failed to resolve. Grants and donations, however well-intentioned, are inherently unpredictable and cannot serve as the financial foundation for critical infrastructure. What we need is a path toward sustainability that doesn’t depend on goodwill alone.

What makes this harder is that the challenge is as much internal as it is external. The FLOSS community itself is divided over how to solve it, and those competing visions create real friction within ecosystems that should, ideally, be pulling in the same direction.

Since DoD began as a collective focused on event organising, the issue of funding applies in this scenario, too. How to make events open and accessible, while still remaining independent and autonomously financed? Afri is proud of DoD’s stance on sponsorships:

The most important lesson I learned by organising events with DoD is to refuse sponsor money. Grants, memberships, donations, anything but a logo on the wall. It is harder to fund and easier to run. The atmosphere is unobstructed, the discussions are honest, and people show up in their free time because they want to, not because their employer paid for the booth.

If the environment feels light, welcoming, and free from corporate interest, Peter points out that it becomes even more enticing for volunteers to contribute:

People are happy to participate as volunteers and organisers in events without being paid when they believe in the cause and see that you are not sacrificing it for the sake of convenience.

People who are treated with respect for their views and reasons are extremely nice, proactive, helpful, and very easy to work with.

Raul adds:

Nothing matches the energy that voluntarism brings to spaces like this: not just in getting things done, but in the sense of belonging it creates. For anyone building a new community, the FLOSS world offers the clearest possible model: organic, gradual, rooted in shared interests and shared concerns. A community that grows from genuine common ground is one that is very difficult to break.

It is precisely because of this spirit that we realised DoD was a perfect partner for DWeb. Beyond sharing our values and restlessly pursuing the DWeb Principles, we decided to collaborate with the Department of Decentralisation because of a virtually endless set of skills, competence, and networking—both literally and metaphorically. In a timespan of a few months, DoD truly became the backbone of DWeb Camp 2026.

The volunteers of the DoD will be in charge of fundamental infrastructure and teams at DWeb Camp. Raul’s expertise has been instrumental to help us figure out administrative matters. Afri planned electricity distribution against German VDE norms and will set up the LoRa mesh across the campground. Franzi is involved in the overall content curation alongside the DWeb Core Team and is co-producing the Opening Ceremony. Peter is focusing on the communication infrastructure, closely collaborating with the Freifunk folks, who are some real megaminds behind the network setup.

DoD and their members are responsible for a tea tent and the Roots Music stage. And they’ve been hosting the digital camp infrastructure for ticketing, the Call For Proposals, schedule, and the internal document suite.

Despite the great amount of work we are all facing, we are in the middle of BUILD, impatient for DWeb Camp to start. Here is why Franzi is excited about it.

Conferences are usually short on time, conversations only happen in hallways compressed between talks or in awkward networking events. I’m looking forward to making organic connections, and getting to know new communities!

Afri is looking forward to…

Five days where the people who actually build the decentralized Web are physically in the same forest. Builders, researchers, organisers, kids running between tents. I want the collaborations that form face-to-face in a week tend to outlast the ones that begin on a video call.

If you don’t have a ticket for DWeb Camp yet, here is why Franzi thinks you should get it:

DWeb Camp brings together bright minds from different communities that still exchange too little in their regular day-to-day lives. I believe that many technology puzzle pieces will need to come together to enable human freedom in an increasingly dystopian world—DWeb camp presents a unique opportunity to sync across domains and build stuff that really matters.

Peter boils it down to a perfect metaphor:

[…] this is a really great place for cross-pollination. Like a huge meadow of wildflowers as participants, with ideas as the bees in between!

DWeb Camp is just three days away. Join us in our journey towards a distributed tech ecosystem, and come meet all the members of the Department of Decentralization!

Roots System: Introducing the Pollinators of DWebCamp 2026

Posted on June 23, 2026 by Tommi Marmo

by Marie Kochsiek

Decentralized technologies have the potential to create a better web: one that upholds people’s privacy, security, and self-determination. Yet, for many communities, the current web has failed to provide these foundations. Marginalized and underserved groups, those most impacted by surveillance, censorship, and systemic exclusion, stand to gain the most from decentralized tools. These tools can offer lifelines: secure identity verification, censorship-resistant communication, community-owned networks, and the preservation of cultural knowledge. We’ve seen this in action from grassroots mesh networks that keep communities connected during internet shutdowns, to decentralized archives that protect the histories of displaced peoples, to platforms that empower individuals to reclaim control over their data and narratives.

Tools are most powerful when built with, not just for, the communities they serve. This is why the Pollinator Program seeks out those who are already doing the work: past DWeb Fellows and Node leaders who continue to imagine and actively build a better web.

This July, we are thrilled to welcome a fantastic group of 12 Pollinators from eight countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, and West Africa — all of whom will be joining us at Alte Hölle, Germany for DWeb Camp: Root Systems (July 8–12, 2026) to share their knowledge, learn, and connect. Together, we will explore how decentralized technologies can foster resilience, justice, and autonomy. Our Pollinators represent a rich diversity of backgrounds: activists, technologists, artists, educators, and more. They are all united by a commitment to building a web that is truly by and for the people.

Please meet our 2026 DWeb Camp Pollinators.

Andrew

I firmly believe that everyone deserves the ability to have autonomy over their data. We should be able to choose where it lives and how it’s shared. The usefulness of protocols is building the tools and practices necessary to achieve this, regardless of the current state of the tech. Tech changes and in some domains, it changes quite rapidly. That’s a fact of life. Protocols are meant to represent stability and shared understanding such that it’s relatively immune to these changes.

Andrew is a technologist based in New York City that has always had a strong curiosity for decentralized technologies. He has worked on peer-to-peer applications focused on data autonomy and offline-first use cases since 2021, primarily in the form of data collection and mapping tools for indigenous communities at Awana Digital.

Project links: https://awana.digital/ & https://comapeo.app/

Join his session at DWebCamp 2026: Peer-to-Peer in Production

Blake

Decentralization matters because the current web concentrates power over information, visibility, and truth—often reinforcing structural inequities. Communities that are already marginalized are frequently excluded from contributing to, or being accurately represented within, the systems that shape public understanding.

Blake Stoner stands at the intersection of legacy and innovation, building infrastructure for the next chapter of civic innovation. Inspired by a lineage of public service, his work focuses on expanding how communities are seen, understood, and represented in the systems shaping society.

Stoner is the Founder and CEO of Vngle, a Civic Insights Company designing trusted systems for real-time, community-verified insight. He also serves as Board Chair of Heart of South Downtown, stewarding the revitalization of ten historic blocks in Downtown Atlanta into America’s most ambitious district for doers, creatives, and innovators. To advance nonpartisan progress, Stoner launched the Institute for Nonpartisan Innovation in partnership with the City University of New York, building collaborative research and civic technology that elevates community-powered breakthroughs. His leadership has earned national recognition, including honors from MIT Solve, American Public Media Group, and Special Congressional Recognition from the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

A recognized thought leader and fellow of Harvard, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and the Goldin Institute, Stoner is also part of the UCLA x National University of Singapore Global Executive MBA program, where he studies markets and shifting power dynamics across the USA and Asia. He holds an MS in Strategic Communication from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Morehouse College.

Project links: https://www.vngle.com

Who Gets Seen? Rebuilding Trust and Visibility in the Age of AI will be his session at DWebCamp 2026.

Billion

In an era of information monopolies and algorithmic gatekeeping, the only way to safeguard the integrity and resilience of truth is distribution of power and data sovereignty. For Cofacts, decentralization is a commitment to democratic practice, making fact-checking data remains transparent and free from the censorship or technical vulnerabilities of any centralized platform.

Billion is the co-founder of Cofacts, a project she initiated in 2016. She is a staunch advocate for marriage equality and open freedom, dedicating herself to bridging diverse communities and providing empowerment courses to combat disinformation. She is an expert in civic technology and digital democracy.

Project links: https://en.cofacts.tw/

Join her session at DWebCamp 2026: From Blood to Bits: Building a Decentralized Truth.

Camille

My thinking has moved from decentralization as a technical question to a governance question. Who controls the keys, who can fork, who can exit. Working across civic mapping projects and local government AI, I keep returning to the same problem: the communities most affected by these systems have the least visibility into how they work and the least power to change them.

Camille Nibungco is a UX designer and civic technologist based in Los Angeles. They work across healthcare AI systems and community-centered civic tech, and they build at the intersection of complex systems and the people those systems routinely fail.

Project links: http://camillenibung.co

Human-in-the-Loop for Who? will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Esther

More than ever, decentralized tools and protocols are necessary to protect the privacy and safety of vulnerable communities, such as those being currently targeted by the US fascist political regime. The rush of our professional and technical communities in computer science towards maximizing AI use has made the centralization and collection of our data by a few companies even more of a risk than before.

Esther is a postdoc in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She has deployed community networks around the world, and teaches technical networking at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB). Since 2019, she is a Founder and Director of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Local Connectivity Lab (LCL). Their Seattle Community Network (SCN) digital equity project builds DIY Internet infrastructure serving hundreds of users.

Project links: https://seattlecommunitynetwork.org/

Join her session at DWebCamp 2026: Seattle Community Network.

fauno

Internet in Latin America is specially centralized from the cabling up, similar to other media, like TV and radio. We’ve been part of community networks and autonomous infrastructure (alternative hosting providers) and we’ve always put this work in the context of community media and the right to communication. Folks have been building their own stations, and we do this with servers and WiFi.

It’s a big opportunity for us all to implement distributed services in an infrastructure that’s our own.

His work and activism is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure.

In the last seven 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.coop.ar/en). In 2024, he also became an organizer and facilitator at [Escuela Común](https://escuelacomun.yanapak.org/) and developer and sysadmin at [Red Abya Yala](https://abyaya.la/).

Project links: sutty.nl, sutty.coop.ar, https://dweb.sutty.nl, and escuelacomun.yanapak.org.

Escuela Común and Red Abya Yala – local infrastructure for land defense and Let’s host a Coopcloud server during camp! will be his sessions at DWebCamp 2026.

Luandro

Decentralized tools matter because communities should not have to depend on distant platforms, opaque policies, or extractive business models to communicate, organize, preserve knowledge, or care for territory. For many of the communities I work with, centralization is not an abstract technical issue; it directly shapes exclusion, surveillance, fragility, and loss of control.
My perspective has evolved from seeing decentralization mainly as a technical architecture to understanding it as a social and political practice. It is about governance, legibility, maintenance, and whether people can actually use and shape the tools that affect their lives. A system is not truly liberatory if it is decentralized in theory but unusable, unaffordable, or impossible to maintain locally.

Tinker, florester and admirer of originary cultures. Luandro believes and lives a better world where communities are empowered and self-governed, people have the time and spirit to tend their human and non-human peers and tools are hacked or built for the well-being of people and the planet.

Project links: https://Awana.digital

Join his sessions at DWebCamp 2026: Peer-to-Peer, AI, Other Buzzwords, and Technologies for a Thriving Planet and Peer-to-Peer, AI, Other Buzzwords, and Technologies for a Thriving Planet.

LX

If we continue to work and play in the centralized, captured, corporate web, we will be both impeded from making change in the world that does not serve the incentives of corporations and the governments they support. We will increasingly be not only surveilled but limited in the information we can access. However, just tools and technologies will not extricate us. We have to also practice and develop social, cultural, and interpersonal approaches that are not coercive and extractive, we will need different economic models, and we will need to have the emotional capacity to be with one another, and the corporate systems work against these goals as well, leading to isolation, substituting money for care, and making their own implicit goals seem synonymous with taking action.

LX Cast is a researcher, community convener, program designer, strategist, and product leader who has worked on communication and collaboration tech serving millions of people for over a decade. LX is currently co-founder of Spacious, a peer-to-peer group audio app. They are the steward of Folk Tech, a 2026 Voqal Fellow, Curator at DWeb Camp, Chair of the Board at Tech Fleet, a board member at Prosocial Design Network, a steering committee member of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion, a member of Aspen Institute’s Virtually Human working group, a space steward at DWeb Camp, a mentor with PDX Women in Tech, All Tech is Human, and Mentor Me Collective, and the teacher of The UX of Community. ~They work with organizations to develop communities of practice. LX is a founder at Changemaker PM, helping nonprofits develop product discovery practices. Past roles include Head of Research at Marco Polo, Sr. Product Manager at Notion, Chief Storyteller at Olark, Program Designer at AI Stewardship Practice Program, Practice Designer at the emergence network, Product Strategist at Lightningrod Labs.~ Resident Fellow in Community at Integrity Institute, a steward at Collaborative Technology Alliance, and the host of Belonging Builders. Belonging = Freedom = Responsibility is their core organizing principle. How we are with ourselves, our families and friends, our teams, our communities and our culture are interdependent and pattern one another. For this reason, they are committed to their own work in collective practice to be in right relation as a source of possibility for change.

Project links: https://folketechnology.org, https://dwebyvr.org and https://spacious.audio

Building Folk Tech will be their session at DWeb Camp 2026.

Michael

Our communities face extreme challenges: deliberate internet blackouts, severe kinetic and surveillance threats from the SAC, rugged mountainous topography, and the Monsoon factor that destroys traditional hardware.

Developing decentralized tools is vital because centralized systems optimize for profit and control, leaving rural populations vulnerable. My perspective has evolved dramatically from purely seeking connectivity to engineering digital sovereignty and survival. Initially, ASORCOM aimed simply to bring Wi-Fi to the Siyin Valley. However, after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, the state weaponized centralized infrastructure by cutting fiber lines and cellular towers to blind communities. Now, my focus is on building fail-graceful systems. If a network requires external cloud authentication or state power grids to exist, it is compromised. We need decentralized protocols like LoRa mesh and HF SDR to operate below the noise floor, evading Deep Packet Inspection and surveillance by the State Administration Council (SAC). Decentralization ensures that when the outside internet is cut, local community knowledge and coordination stay alive.”

Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak is the Founder of eimiAI and the Founder & Director of Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities (ASORCOM). A two-time recognized DWeb Fellow, Michael dedicates his work to building resilient, decentralized technologies for marginalized, stateless, and deep-rural communities. Through ASORCOM, he facilitates the deployment of community-owned, offline-first mesh networks that thrive despite severe hardware and power constraints. With eimiAI, Michael is pioneering localized, sovereign artificial intelligence designed to break down linguistic barriers and provide accessible tech for populations traditionally ignored by centralized tech giants. He is a passionate advocate for bottom-up infrastructure, ecological awareness, and ensuring the decentralized web truly serves the rural edge.

Project links: https://eimiAI.com & https://asorcom.net

Join his sessions at DWebCamp 2026: Voices of the Edge: How to Build Low-Resource Language AI for Rural Communities and Building Local Networks & Marginalized Public AI at the Rural Edge.

Nádia

Especially in the global south, where we are working to establish systemic decolonization, it makes no sense to replicate centralized digital infrastructure. Both in terms of resource consumption and political organization, this model is not appropriate for the relationships we are trying to build between users and their tech.

We dream of Freirean schools where we can build and manage our systems in local contexts, so having a decentralized architecture is important for making the digital system more aligned with the social one. It is important and necessary to develop, discuss, exchange, co-create tools and protocols that enable our community to take collaborative care of the tools we own, and horizontally address the challenges we face, in terms of digital technology.

With an electrical engineering background, Nádia transitioned to the agtech field through photovoltaic irrigation systems. In contact with organic farmers and Brazilian agro-ecological movement, she started to orient her perspective towards digital systems that support collective work, while diving in the hacker culture and politics. She lives in a small farm in southeast Brazil.

Project links: https://www.tekopora.top

Social aspects of communities that build sovereign technologies will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Riley

Infrastructure is political, and I believe in developing decentralized tools and protocols by and with communities who are most vulnerable to risk and repression. Right now in the US that includes communities of trans people, immigrants, and organizers, especially those of color. With technofascism on the rise, mass deportations of immigrants, transgender people having their IDs invalidated and revoked, adoption of digital identity systems and biometric surveillance, privacy protections for vulnerable communities are as urgent as ever. I see decentralization as a framework for privacy, equity, and resilience, enabling tools for democratic processes, censorship resistance, power redistribution, and community privacy.

Riley Wong is the Principal of Emergent Research, a research lab and consultancy investigating digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent. Their work explores the intersections of cryptographic tooling, cooperative governance, and community-led design, with a particular focus on how communities facing surveillance and repression can build and govern their own community infrastructure.

Riley co-founded the Community Privacy Residency in Taipei and Berlin, convening an international network of experts to co-create privacy infrastructure by and with vulnerable communities. Their background spans privacy-preserving data governance, consent infrastructure, and decentralized collective governance at Metagov, 0xPARC, and DWeb; machine learning engineering and AI ethics at Google; and award-winning investigative data journalism at ProPublica. Their work has been published or presented at MIT, Harvard Kennedy School, Yale, and Penn.

Project links: https://www.emergentresearch.net/blog/community-infrastructure-for-privacy-agency-and-consent

Join their session at DWebCamp 2026: Community Infrastructure for Privacy, Agency, and Consent.

Senka

Reliable, affordable internet access depends on building equitable tech policy. The focus is shifting from grassroots advocacy into high-level government discussions regarding digital inclusion and community-centred connectivity. Integrating decentralization into these early frameworks is vital to prevent replicating old, top-down monopolies. Ultimately, decentralized networks ensure communities maintain reliable and inclusive access, even when major providers prioritize profit over people.

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.

Project links: https://www.inethi.org.za/

The Art of Not Being Invisible will be her session at DWebCamp 2026.

Shadrach

Decentralized tools and protocols give users the autonomy to decide on the platform, infrastructure, and features they want and even build their own infrastructure. Compared to corporate ones, decentralized tools are built with shared community values, such as inclusivity, trust, care, and a collaborative spirit.

For my community, decentralized infrastructure is an enabler. It ensures equitable access to the internet, civic participation, local ownership, financial inclusion, and long-term support and sustainability of community infrastructure.

Shadrach Ankrah is an IT Specialist and the Founder of the Africa Rural Internet and STEM Initiative (AFRISTEMI) based in Ghana. He works at the intersection of technical deployment and policy advocacy.

He currently focus on deploying community-owned Wi-Fi mesh networks in remote communities. These networks are built by the community, owned and managed by them, fostering accessibility and affordability, hence allowing user control. The local communities he serves are mainly remote, rural, and underserved, facing many challenges, including poor education, poor health, and ICT and infrastructure.

Project links: https://afristemi.org, https://snetgh.org, https://one4allalliance.org/ and https://isoc.gh/

Join his sessions at DWeb Camp 2026: Building the People’s Internet: Mesh Networks and Policy Advocacy in Ghana and Root to Rise: Morning Aerobics & Movement.

Tzu Tung

China’s interference — from the South China Sea to sustained information warfare against Taiwan — has made information protection urgent, now in direct tension with the openness decentralized communities have long championed. Decentralized communities have shifted accordingly: from encouraging open organization and surveying democratic opinion, to preserving it and building network resilience against censorship, severed cables, and legal intimidation.

War is deeply masculine in its logic, and so is much of our technical imagination. As an artist working within this landscape, the next focus is to feminize decentralized tools — in how they are conceived, narrated, and made accessible to different bodies, vulnerabilities, and ways of caring for one another.

Lee Tzu Tung (李紫彤) is an artist and curator whose work integrates anthropological field research, political action, and economic critique. Their work explores how global majorities queer up current authoritarian and colonial systems through open-source methods, decentralized tools, and participatory projects.

Politically active, Lee has organized Café Philo Chicago (2016– 2018), and participated in Overseas Taiwanese for Democracy. They were also a key organizer for major rallies in Taiwan’s 2016 civic movements – including Anti-Black Box Education, Equality of Same-Sex Marriage, and Passage of Time (Indigenous protest) – and have spoken out in Taiwan’s #MeToo movement.

A graduate of MIT and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received the New Artist Society Scholarship and Transmedia Storytelling Fellowship. Lee’s works have been shown widely, including at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MIT Museum, Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing, Asymmetry Foundation UK, and Skövde Museum Sweden. They are also the founder of Tinyverse NPO, which supports transdisciplinary art and organizes Hackathon for Artists.

Project links: tzutung.com

Temple of the Wandering Daughters will be their session at DWebCamp 2026.

Introducing the DWeb Camp 2026 Venue: Alte Hölle

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Tommi Marmo

As our group of DWeb Camp organizers arrived at Wiesenburg station, frazzled by countless train delays in Berlin, a light rain and a blossoming gray winter sky welcomed us.

Moments after our arrival, a car and a van swooped up in front of us. Two of Alte Hölle’s stewards, Marv and Störte, had come to pick us up. During our days at this former forest hotel, we heard a common refrain: Imagine this place greener and warmer. Still, we did not have to stretch our imaginations very far. From the very first moment we laid eyes on Alte Hölle e.V., the only thing we could see was DWeb Camp 2026.

“We are just starting to wake up,” Marv told us while we looked across the property in late February. Just a couple of weeks earlier, snow levels reached an almost record 71 cm, and temperatures sank to double digits below zero. We arrived at this Brandenburg event space as bare trees, families of wild boars, and humans alike were emerging from their winter hibernation.

A photo of the main building of Alte Hölle during our Winter visit

Alte Hölle has a very special history. Originally built in the 1800s as a Prussian forestry administration center, it later became a recreational facility for the Secret Service of communist Eastern Germany. Then a woman purchased it in the 1990s and managed it for three decades as a forest getaway spot. By 2021, the hotel wasn’t making a profit and she was searching for successors to take over. The full potential of this historic venue was yet to be recognized and realized.

At the same time, a diverse ensemble of friends who met at Chaos Communication Congress got together, looking for a place to establish a physical base to gather, build and host events and festivals. The old forest hotel was finally seen by the right sets of eyes, imagining it in a new light!

The façade of the hotel at night, lit by coloured lights

These ardent builders and dreamers booked the whole hotel for a week, coming up with ideas and ways to infuse the space with new life. After witnessing their process, the original owner slowly decided that selling her life’s work to a loose group of DIY enthusiasts was really the best option.

In 2021, this group purchased Alte Hölle, transferring the property to an association to ensure its long-term stability as individual involvement shifts and changes. Ownership by an association establishes Alte Hölle as a collectively-run physical commons. The members of the collective chipped in smaller amounts to secure a long term loan, thus collectivizing and decentralizing ownership and financial risk.

Rural Brandenburg isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot attracting scores of young people. Yet, for the Alte Hölle collective this place offers an opportunity to usher in change and a new cultural presence in the Brandenburg area. We don’t want to be a group of happy dropouts isolated from society, Störte explained to us. Our intention is to look outward, participating in local initiatives, bringing people to this place, and being a backbone for community organising and democratic practice.

The Alte Hölle collective welcomes open involvement in decision-making and shaping the future of the project. Alte Hölle’s governance model is non-hierarchical and based on consensus. It’s hard to distinguish between who lives there and who doesn’t: people come and go, but they still actively contribute to decision-making and developing Alte Hölle’s infrastructure. We want to blur the lines as much as possible between who is here and who is not, because not everyone can afford to work remotely and stay long term, but this should not influence their sense of belonging to the project, says Franzi, one of the stewards of the venue.

Alte Hölle runs as a seminar hotel for a broad variety of groups. Other collectives come there to organize retreats, literary groups hold reading events on the grounds, bike enthusiasts come for week-long workshops. And from July 8-12 2026, Alte Hölle is welcoming DWeb Camp.

How did we select this unique place an hour southwest of Berlin? It becomes clear if you look back at the history of Camp and the principles that guide our decisions.

Since our first outdoor convening, we’ve aspired to work closely with our venue’s stewards to help improve the land. We did so at the Mushroom Farm in 2019, when we brought stable internet to the remote California coastal location by building a tower and installing antennas across the property to establish a local mesh network. We want DWeb Camp to be firmly grounded in a place. A place with history, community, strong values, and aspirations. A place that shares our principles of giving agency to people, distributing value and power broadly. DWeb seeks to achieve this in the digital realm; Alte Hölle does so in a collectively-run 100,000 square meters of forest and field.

In November, we sent an email to share our ideas and explore the possibility of hosting Camp at Alte Hölle. Marv was the first to see our inquiry. As I read that email, a few things immediately just clicked. The right values, talks and workshops with interesting content and initiatives. I sent a very enthusiastic reply, and a couple of weeks later we were walking the place together with a first exploratory delegation from DWeb.

Then in February, a dozen members of our team convened to survey the site and start planning the details.

Marv of Alte Holle pointing out power, connectivity, and other features of the 100,000 square meters of the property.

So now, the organizing machine is in full motion. We are meeting the vibrant culture of Alte Hölle with the joyful spirit of DWeb Camp. Not only will we have a lot of infrastructure to build, but also many things to make! Using wood sourced from local forests, we plan to craft benches, tables, and some other key structures we’ll need at camp.

The DWeb and Department of Decentralization organizers and the Alte Hölle community are looking forward to welcoming you to this land of rich history and abundant promise.

As Franzi shared, I love the idea and the principles behind DWeb Camp, and I am really looking forward to having an international event with many people coming from all around the world!

Sunrays and people walking on the Alte Hölle field.

How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

Posted on April 2, 2026 by Wendy Hanamura

At the legendary c-base, technologists, activists, and artists gathered to shape the next chapter of the decentralized web.

c-base is a space station that “crashed” and is being reconstructed along the Spree river by a group of Berlin hackers. Some call it the mother of all hackerspaces.

On a gray February morning in Berlin, people wandered down a dark ramp into a space station.

Not a metaphorical one—at least not entirely. c-base, with its blinking lights, maze of cables, and decades of hacker lore, has long described itself as a space station that crashed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Since the mid-1990s it has been a gathering place for coders and tinkerers who prefer to build the future themselves rather than wait for it to arrive.

On this particular morning, they had come to design something new.

In February, an invitation had circulated across Europe’s decentralized technology networks: come to c-base and help shape the next DWeb Camp, a five-day gathering that will take place this July in the forests of Brandenburg.

There was no fixed agenda, and no finished plan.

Just a question.

If we were to build the next version of DWeb Camp together, what might it look like?

Before long, the room filled. Peer-to-peer developers had come from Edinburgh, free-software advocates from Berlin, privacy-first technologists from Shanghai, and policy thinkers from Copenhagen. Artists, funders, open-source builders, and organizers filtered in carrying laptops and winter coats. Most of them had never met before.

They had come not just to attend—but to help build something.

The timing was not accidental. Across the world, the systems shaping the internet—and increasingly public life—are consolidating. Governments tighten control. Platforms encroach on our privacy. The internet as we know it is splintering, and along with it, our consensus about what is true. For many in the room that morning, the pressing question was can we restructure the web before it hardens into something more destructive than its early architects ever imagined?

DWeb Camp, first held in Northern California in 2019, grew out of that concern. The gathering was conceived as a place where technologists, artists, organizers, and policymakers might come together to begin building a more decentralized web.

A web built less like a pyramid and more like a forest. Distributed. Resilient. Sharing resources underground.

This summer, DWeb Camp’s theme is “Root Systems,” and it moves to Europe for the first time. The meeting at c-base was an early step in imagining what might grow there.

For an hour, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle answered the questions of DWeb Sr. Organizer, Wendy Hanamura, in a wide-ranging chat about public AI, his successes and failures, and the imperative for decentralization in this political moment.

Origins of a Decentralized Gathering

“It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.

“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

Collective Intelligence

“It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

Collective Intelligence

At c-base, Kahle and a dozen core organizers didn’t arrive with a finished program. Instead they facilitated breakout conversations, solicited unconference topics, and most importantly, listened.

Throughout the day, small circles formed across the space station, and similar themes surfaced again and again.

Not everything, participants suggested, needs to scale to billions of users. Perhaps some of the most important decentralized tools will serve smaller networks—families, communities, groups of collaborators who know one another. An intimate web, as some people called it, rather than the global one.

Others spoke about shared infrastructure in a broader sense: not just software, but the resources communities could distribute. Buildings. Time. Convenings. Knowledge. The question, several people suggested, was not simply how to build better tools but how to sustain the ecosystems that allow those tools to exist.

Hölke Brammer, of the Hypercerts Foundation, offered a framework that drew nods around the table.

“It’s said, first you need the values,” he recited.
“Then governance.
Then the right incentives.
And finally the technology to build it.”

DWeb Camp tries to bring all of those layers together in the same place at the same time. Which means inviting not just engineers but researchers, economists and storytellers.

Marek Tuszynski, co-founder of Tactical Tech, offered a wry observation about how the technology world often divides itself.

“They say technology is inspired in San Francisco,” he recounted. “It’s built in China. And criticized in Europe.”

The challenge, he suggested, was to move beyond those boxes—to collaborate across them.

Later, when participants were asked what would make the camp most valuable, one answer surfaced repeatedly.

“To find the people I want to work with after Camp,” someone said, “and figure out how to keep working together on an on-going basis.”

Grounded in Place

Franzi and Marv, two of the stewards of the Alte Holle Collective, share the terrain of the 100,000 sq. meters retreat site.

DWeb Camp has always been shaped by the places where it occurs.

When organizers began looking for a European site, they eventually settled on Alte Hölle, a forested property in Brandenburg about an hour southwest of Berlin.

The decision had as much to do with the people stewarding the land as with the landscape itself.

In 2021, a collective of friends who met at Chaos Communications Camp purchased the property—once a Stasi recreation site—with the intention of turning it into a long-term gathering place for artists, hackers, and activists.

Their question was straightforward.

Why build a camp only to dismantle it a few days later? Why not create infrastructure that could remain?

Two of the site’s stewards, Franzi and Marv, joined the gathering at c-base. Rather than simply presenting the site, they participated in the discussions, listening carefully to the people who will soon gather there.

“We share a lot of the same values,” they said. “We are a volunteer group that supports [you] and is an ally for [your] event.”

The goal, for DWeb organizers, is not merely to occupy Alte Hölle but to contribute to it—to plant something, rather than simply passing through.

The field where some 700+ campers will pitch their tents in Brandenburg.

Partners with Principles

Afri of Department of Decentralization demonstrates the programmable badge his team is developing for DWeb Camp. Via radio waves, you will be able to talk person to person at Camp, without going to the cloud or WIFI.

Strong collaborators don’t just support your vision. They push you to live up to it.

Berlin’s Department of Decentralization (DoD)—a collective formed after organizing ETHBerlin in 2018—has encouraged DWeb Camp organizers to align our tools more closely with our principles. That means prioritizing open-source infrastructure wherever possible.

Tickets will be sold through PreTix.
The schedule will run on PreTalx.
Collaborative documents will live on CryptPad.
Camp communications will be via Matrix.

Tools designed with privacy and security in mind. Not just talking about decentralization, but practicing it.

Building Across Borders

Some of the organizers of DWeb Camp from Alte Hölle, Department of Decentralization and the Internet Archive came together at c-base in February to plan for July.

Based across North America and Europe, the organizers of DWeb Camp 2026 have lineages that span the globe—Nigeria, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, and the United States. We come from different political contexts. Different assumptions about technology. Different cultural norms. The challenge–and the promise–is to weave those perspectives into something coherent, yet distinct.

Toward the end of the day at c-base, Kahle returned to a theme that was disarmingly simple.

Welcome.

“This is a really special community…they welcomed me twenty years ago,” he said. “You may not be aware of the effect you have by saying ‘welcome’ to somebody from a foreign place. I think it is a hallmark of a community that is living and thriving.”

That small gesture, he suggested, can shape the direction of entire communities. “I hope that DWeb Camp is to your liking, if it’s not, say so, and let’s basically make it better. Let’s build something together.”

Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.

It is something closer to a living system. It’s shaped by the people who show up, the relationships they form, and the ideas that take hold.

And in the forests of Brandenburg this July, those connections—technical, social, and human—will begin to spread beneath the surface.

Like any root system, their real strength may lie in what we cannot see.

View the fireside chat with Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura.

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