Tag Archives: DWeb

Group picture of DoD members and volunteers at ProtocolBerg v2.

Introducing Department of Decentralization, DWeb Camp 2026 partner

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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.

A flag with the DoD logo

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.

Raul from DoD speaking on stage at ProtocolBerg.

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.

Afri and Franzi on the main stage of ProtocolBerg v1

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.

Peter from DoD pointing out to a volunteer where to go, at ProtocolBerg

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.

A room full of people attending a talk, at ProtocolBerg v1

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.

Franzi smiling at Protocol Berg

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!

DWeb Fellows on stage at DWeb Camp 2024.

Roots System: Introducing the Pollinators of DWebCamp 2026

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

A photo of Alte Hölle during the summer
The pool of Alte Hölle at night

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.
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!

A music festival at Alte Hölle
Sunrays and people walking on the Alte Hölle field.

How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

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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.

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

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

Collective Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grounded in Place

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

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

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

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

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

Their question was straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

Partners with Principles

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

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

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

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

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

Building Across Borders

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

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

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

Welcome.

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

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

Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.

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

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

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

View the fireside chat with Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura.

DWeb in 2025: Looking Back at a Year of Decentralization

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DWeb Seminar Weekend participants sharing a meal in San Francisco.
(Image from Wendy Hanamura licensed CC BY-SA 4.0)

Our communities will continue to be shaped by digital networked technology, changing the way we work, learn, and go about our lives. DWeb is a community of people deeply engaged with these changes, earnestly grappling with what it means to design and build values-centered tech. It is a community that is not only reacting to shifting realities, but one that activates transformation — constructing alternative tools, languages, and approaches using our skills as technologists, organizers, designers, artists, and researchers. 

Last year, we decided that it was time to see how we could further decentralize the DWeb movement. By taking a year off from organizing DWeb Camp, our team of DWeb Core Organizers directed our energy toward attending and organizing focused events and workshops throughout 2025. Dweebs around the world were already convening locally and planning aligned events, we also wanted to support the growth of our international network of Nodes (more on their activities below).

We’re thrilled to see all that our community has done this past year: gathering, developing, and dreaming together. Here is a look back at the major events and happenings across the DWeb Network!

Conferences + Gatherings

RightsCon25

The first major event DWeb participated this year was RightsCon in Taipei, Taiwan. In February, Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton, co-organized a pre-conference workshop on community mesh networks with g0v, the leading decentralized civic technology community in Taiwan, focused on local community networks at the National Taipei University of Technology. We also participated in several sessions at the conference itself. Several other DWeb community members, including Ying Tong Lai and riley wong, organized and participated in a community privacy residency in the weeks surrounding the conference.

Read the recap of our participation at RightsCon

Group photo of participants at the DWeb x g0v Local Networks Workshop.
(Image by mai ishikawa sutton licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb Atelier at the FtC Berlin Forum

In early June, members of the organizing team, Ira Nezhynska and Arkadiy Kukarkin, set up the DWeb Atelier at the Funding the Commons Forum in Berlin. The cozy hang out area at the Forum was a space for new and familiar faces to give small talks and host emergent discussions on human-centered network infrastructures that center privacy, community, and digital autonomy. 

DWeebs hanging out at the DWeb Terrace at FtC Berlin Forum, 2025
(Image by Ira Nezhynska licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb Camp Cascadia

About 60 dweebs gathered this summer on Salt Spring Island for the first DWeb Camp Cascadia. The leaders of DWeb YVR (Vancouver) organized a beautiful three-day event from August 8-10. It included talks, demos, and workshops on topics ranging from local-first networks, mesh technologies, and open social webs

Read our recap of DWeb Camp Cascadia

Outdoor session on agroecologicy at DWeb Camp Cascadia 2025
(Image by mai ishikawa sutton licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb Seminar

In mid-August, 10 advanced peer-to-peer (P2P) developers and researchers, two research directors, one editor, and three stewards met for three days and nights in San Francisco to discuss the current state of local-first, P2P protocols and strategize to overcome the immediate challenges ahead. The premise was: brilliant minds + human connections = potential breakthroughs. The seminar concluded with the DWeb Weekend, with talks (recordings available here) showcasing the protocols and approaches to building offline-first, permissionless, trustworthy, and resilient networks.

Read our recap of the DWeb Seminar

Photo of DWeb Seminar Weekend participants on a hike in San Francisco.
(Wendy Hanamura, CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb Node Network

Since our first DWeb Camp in 2019 at the Mushroom Farm, dweebs have continued to gather locally around the world. The Node Network has grown, contracted, and shifted in the past six years. Some meet several times a month and some meet once or twice a year. As the DWeb Core team, we do what we can to support those organizing local meetups and encourage those with the commitment and capacity to more formally establish a Node in their city or region. 

Here are the Nodes that met in person to explore DWeb topics and projects as they relate to their local context:

DWeb YVR

Our most active Node, DWeb YVR organized DWeb Camp Cascadia and hosted more than 30 events in 2025! They have regular meetups on AT Protocol, mesh networks, Folk Tech, and more recently, a monthly book club. 

Here is DWeb YVR’s very own 2025 recap with everything they’ve accomplished this year. 

“DWeb Vancouver’s first #lofiwknyvr was a big success in January, here Boris, David and Chad are starting us off with a welcome from the proprietor of ZSpace, a coworking hub with a lot of local DWeb overlap.”
(Photo and caption by Emily McGill, CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb SF-Bay Area

One of our founding and most active Nodes, DWeb SF-Bay Area has been organizing monthly meetups in San Francisco and the East Bay, on topics ranging from local-first tech, AT Protocol, and co-living. Here are the videos of the February 2025 Local-First Meetup and the May 2025 Meetup — How Do We Build the Digital Commons of Tomorrow?

DWeb Seattle

Our Node in the Pacific Northwest organized two meetups this year. You can view the recordings of the talks from the February meetup here.  

Title slide of one of the talks presented at the February DWeb Seattle meetup.

DWeb NY

Members of our Node in New York met up at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) in August at St. John’s University in Queens. They set up a DWeb table and shared what DWeb is about with the east coast hacker community. 

Rosalind, Charles, and Val tabling at HOPE_16 in August
(Image from DWeb NY, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0)

They also designed and printed these cool stickers!

Limited edited DWeb @ HOPE stickers at the DWeb table.
(Image from DWeb NY, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0)

DWeb Shanghai

Though they took a bit of a hiatus, Shanghai is one of our longest running Nodes. They organized a weekend meetup last month in November, in-person and online. Wendy Hanamura, our Senior Organizer, gave an introduction to DWeb, Brooklyn Zelenka gave a talk on local-first tech, and they also featured speakers on AT Protocol. 

New and Upcoming Nodes

We’re excited by the prospect of two new potential Nodes emerging! This month, dweebs in Tokyo met up for a kick-off meetup where they discussed the social implications and state of the current web, and played with meshtastic radios. 

Group hoto from the first DWeb meetup in Tokyo.
Clockwise from top left: Tora, Yuuya, Shotaro, Takumi, Seiya. Justus.
(Image by DWeb Tokyo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

And just last week, about 20 people met up at the Atlanta Blockchain Center for the first DWeb Meetup in Atlanta. Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton, had a fireside chat with 2023 DWeb Fellow, Blake Stoner, to discuss the DWeb Principles, and the future of the web.

Group photo from the first DWeb meetup in Atlanta
(Image from Blake Stoner, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0)

Virtual Meetups

To keep the conversation and ideas flowing across the DWeb Network, we organize virtual meetups for people to showcase their projects, ideas, and approaches. You can watch all of our virtual meetups from 2025 below.

DWeb Meetup – Bluesky & Beyond (February 2025) // On Bluesky, AT Protocol, and efforts to build an open interoperable ecosystem of social networks.

DWeb Meetup – Decentralized Tech to Resist Authoritarianism (July 2025) // On decentralized technologies and approaches people are using to resist authoritarianism. Speakers demonstrated tools in use today around the world that combat censorship, promote privacy, and strengthen peer-to-peer movements.

DWeb Meetup – The State of the DWeb: P2P, Local-First & Where to go from here (August 2025) // On the state of the decentralized web, through a specific lens of local-first and peer-to-peer approaches. 

DWeb Meetup – The Present and Future of Funding Open Source (September 2025) // On funding and sustaining open source projects, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

DWeb Virtual Meetup – Open Source Ag Tech for Small Farmer Sovereignty (November 2025) // On open source agricultural technologies that are built for/by farmers for sustainable and just food futures.

You can watch all of the recordings of our past meetups on our collection at the Internet Archive.

DWeb’s Decentralized Tech Stack

We always feel the need to use more of the DWeb tools that we nurture through our organizing work. This year, we were able to practice what we preach by decentralizing some of our infrastructure.

DWeb.Events

One major achievement was the launch of DWeb.events, our shared calendar hosted forked from open-web-calendar. It enabled anyone to see what’s going on in our community and subscribe directly to the events.

DWeb Websites

This year, we made getdweb.net and dwebcamp.org accessible through the decentralized web, thanks to Distributed Press. To check it out, visit ipns://getdweb.net from your favourite decentralized browser like Peersky, or just by installing the IPFS extension on a regular browser.

We were also able to update the software infrastructure behind the DWeb Camp website — made possible through the generous contributions of Justus Perlwitz (who also happens to be one of the organizers of the meetup in Tokyo!).

DWeb Discord <> Matrix Bridge

Our DWeb Core Team is constantly asked, “Discord isn’t decentralized, so why are you using it?” It’s a totally fair question. The reason is that we want to have a community chat that’s as friction-less to use and is a platform that meets people where they already are as much as possible. But we also do recognize that it’s not a values-aligned platform. 

We’ve long had a channel on Matrix as well — which is an open, decentralized real-time communication protocol. And now, these two services are bridged! Thanks to Hypha Worker Co-op who is hosting our Matrix server and bridging service. How can you get more decentralized than that? 

Here’s the link to join our Matrix server, and here’s the link to join our Discord server.

~

As we move into a new year, the DWeb Core Team looks forward to continuing to steward this community of people passionately committed to building a better Web. 

…and stay tuned for details on DWeb Camp 2026, coming soon!

DWeb Camp Cascadia 2025: Canada’s First Regional Decentralized Web Camp in the Pacific Northwest

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Banner for DWeb Camp Cascadia reads "Salt Spring Island August 8-10" over a blurry image of the venue, Farmers Institute

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. 

An image of a sunset from inside a tent, showing a blue cloudy sky over a field scattered with over a dozen other tents.
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.

An image of an audience of about 40 people sitting on benches outside, watching Member of Parliament Elizabeth May speaking on stage.
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. 

Image of Brooklyn Zelenka, standing on the opposite side of the room speaking to a large room of about 40 people sitting down.
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. 

An image of a butcher paper poster covered with marker writing and post-its for an unconference schedule.
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.

Two images: one on the left is of about 12 people walking down a path surrounded by tall redwoods, the one on the right of about 12 people on a dock near open water at sunset.
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.

Image of a group of 7 seven standing on a stage around a table singing. The wall above them has a big banner of musical notes.
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. 

Photo of a farm looking space with a field in the background, the sky is blue and orange with a sunset.
Sunset over the Farmers Institute, the venue for DWeb Camp Cascadia on Salt Spring Island, Canada

~

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/

The Adjacent Possible in the Decentralized Web

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Applied Cryptographer, Ying Tong Lai, presents her unconference topic at DWeb Weekend

As I understand it, the concept of the “adjacent possible” describes changes just within reach given the current state of a system’s knowledge, resources, and components. It’s a “shadow future” of the possibilities on the edge of the present. The adjacent possible asks: what can you learn from existing building blocks to create new ones?

That is, at heart, what the DWeb Seminar set out to do.

The recipe for DWeb Seminar

THE EXPERIMENT: Over the course of three days and nights, in a house in the Presidio of San Francisco, can you take 10 core peer-to-peer (P2P) developers, 2 research directors, 1 editor, and 3 stewards, mix them up, expose them to provocative prompts, and see if some breakthroughs in understanding and technical consensus are possible?

THE PRECEDENT: The inspiration and format of the DWeb Seminar comes directly from Professor Christian Tschudin’s P2P Basel, the annual workshop he runs at the University of Basel for offline-first, P2P researchers and protocol builders in Europe. Over the course of five P2P Basel annual gatherings, Christian and his associate research director, Erick Lavoie, have honed the recipe: 10 participants (not more), cooking and doing dishes together (a key lubricant), in a smallish space (no escape!), for three days (it’s exhausting!). 
At DWeb Camp 2024, I heard from DWeb Fellow Andreas Dzialocha (P2Panda) that this three-day workshop in Basel had been a turbo-charging event for his work. To be in a place where everyone understands intimately what a CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) is, has a basic grasp of cryptography — that allows the participants to move fast and deep very quickly. I wondered: could we replicate what the folks in Europe were doing in the Americas?

THE RAMP UP: In August 2024, on the balcony of the Hackers Hall at Camp Navarro, I approached Christian Tschudin with an idea: would he work with me to create a DWeb version of his workshop, across many DWeb projects and specialties? I started to introduce him to DWeb protocol builders and he attended their technical talks to begin understanding developers’ focus areas in the DWeb ecosystem. We sought to have representatives from every part of the tech stack, and luckily, at DWeb Camp 2024 you can find many accomplished protocol builders just chatting around the campfire.

The Japanese have a core concept called nemawashi – preparing the roots – which is critical to any venture’s success. It’s a time of informal listening, building relationships, coming to a shared vision before any formal announcement is made. Late 2024, Christian and I started our nemawashi. We needed to create a budget, raise the money, so eventually we could hire an Associate Research Director, an editor for an eventual publication, and stewards for the process.  I wanted to add on a DWeb Weekend, where the public could contribute ideas and learn from our participants.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, was enthusiastic about sponsoring the event from the get-go. He has always been about building working code, testing it in the wild, making tools that are useful for people. So a week-long event anchored at the Internet Archive, dedicated to deepening our understanding of what remains to be built – that resonated with his call long ago to create a “third path” for developers who want to use technology to help humanity. Brewster and his wife Mary Austin even allowed 16 of us to use every nook and cranny of their house, to camp in their backyard, cook in their kitchen, and debate around their dining table long into the night.

The recipe for a successful seminar called for meals prepared together at Brewster & Mary’s house

THE EXECUTION:  We decided to title the DWeb Seminar “Current Science & Grand Challenges” to map the current and future DWeb landscapes, and from August 13-15, 2025, we gathered some of the top researchers and builders in the Americas. There were experts in object capabilities (David Thompson/Spritely Institute) and applied cryptography (Ying Tong Lai.) Our editor, Dmitri Zagidulin brought with him deep knowledge of data types and decentralized identity (DID) standards. Some were founders of venture-backed startups (Brendan O’Brien/iroh) or worked for well-funded P2P companies (Rae McKelvey/Ditto).  Matthew Weidner studied CRDTs for his PhD (now on hold.) Others worked on grants and contracts, in small teams or in universities. Many were experts in the data layer of the stack, able to debate the ideal decentralized stack like few others in the world could. We sought a group with a shared vocabulary, diverse specialties, collaborative temperaments, and a willingness to listen to others. 

DWeb Seminar 2025 Participants – Missing: Rae McKelvey
The “mantras” of collaborative exploration can be found at https://dwebseminar.org/seminar/

THE PHILOSOPHY: Whenever you gather a small group of highly knowledgeable people, some intimidation and fear can creep in. Many confessed later that they harbored feelings of “impostor syndrome,” and feared that they wouldn’t be able to keep up or be understood.  But anticipating this, our research directors, Christian Tschudin and Andreas “adz” Dzialocha created a set of “mantras.” 

When I asked our organizing team what they hoped to create, they replied, “A safe space,” “a house with good food, and interesting conversation,” “a caring environment” for growth.

I believe if you create a container where people feel safe, they will feel free to argue, and from that friction often comes accelerated progress. What I wanted was for this deeply talented group of people, who often feel alone and unsupported, to know that others share their burdens, encourage their successes, and are there to help burnish their ideas. In this comfortable house, filled with delicious home-cooked meals, what kind of heat could we generate from the clash of ideas about how to build the DWeb?

THE PROCESS:  We started the proceedings with a “keynote” talk by Danny O’Brien and Kurt Opsahl, both formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and now with the Filecoin Foundation, who tried to set the regulatory scene for our builders. When you are heads down in your code, it’s hard to keep your eyes trained on the tech policy regimes in each country. Kurt and Danny were both encouraging. “You have the power to create the rules,” Danny emphasized.  “Dreams are what our stuff is made of,” declared Kurt. “Think a lot about how to build good values into your code.”

Dmitri Zagidulin (center) guides the group through the Seminar unconference days

On the first day, each participant gave a 15-minute “input” talk about a topic of their choosing. They ranged from “Invariant-centric threat modeling”  by Ying Tong Lai to “Homomorphic Quantum-resistant Proxy Reencryption (aka Recrypt)  by Duke Dorje (Identikey). Rae McKelvey traced her decade-long career from PhD student, DAT developer, Awana Digital developer, Ink and Switch researcher, to venture-backed team manager. She recognized that her throughline is “purpose built apps” that solve societies’ problems with code. Brendan O’Brien (iroh) shared tips for picking partners to build the “Cozy Web, “ while Eric Harris-Braun (Holochain Foundation) explained why social coherence is his “Big Why” for building decentralized tech. Around the dining room table, our group came to understand a little better where each person was coming from. Were we brave enough to share not only our conceptual frameworks, but also the problems we were having trouble solving?

Greg Slepak of OK Turtles Foundation leads a session outdoors
The group narrowed topics to seven sessions.

Days 2 and 3 were pure unconference, as the group curated rounds of discussions on topics they wanted to dive into deeply. Redesigning an “Internet 2” stack drew from every area of the group’s expertise; UI Patterns for Peer-to-peer, and collaborative data model requirements were other hot topics.

Over homemade falafel and fudge brownies, the group powered through topic after topic. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) blended nicely with barbequing vege-kebabs and much CRDT work (aka –Cooking Real Delicious Tri-tip) was accomplished by all. Matthew Weidner proved he had mastered decentralized collaboration, at least with his partner Tiffany as they whipped out fruit galettes. We discovered the best conversations occur over a basin of soapy dishes.

Master chef, Scott “Nanomonkey” Garrison and Brendan O’Brien contemplate BFTs over the grill
Tiffany and Matthew prepared fruit galettes to keep the group going long into the evening.

THE PUBLIC: Next this group brought their core questions to the public in the DWeb Weekend (August 16-17) at the Internet Archive.  Day 1 focused on unconference-style discussions, while Day 2 was devoted to talks and hands-on workshops. Across five spaces and three sessions, the community brainstormed on topics such as Christian Tschudin’s table of contents for a DWeb Textbook, and Commons Infrastructure with Dmitri Zagidulin. Duke Dorje led us through a simulation of a future-state in which censorship, statelessness, and dissolving trust are answered in part by new forms of cryptographic key management. 

Associate Research Director Andreas Dzialocha adn Dmitri Zagidulin, editor, kick off the DWeb Weekend unconference day at the Internet Archive in San Francisco

On Sunday, people got the chance to play with apps built on Holochain’s Moss or send small packets from device to device using Tiny SSB. In one room was a debate with HyperHyper Space’s founder, Santiago Bazerque, and in another were coders testing out Greg Slepak’s (OK Turtles Foundation)  Shelter Protocol and its first implementation, Chelonia. David Thompson (Spritely Institute) explained the nuts and bolts of object capabilities, helping a roomful of CRDT experts imagine how they might build on top of Spritely.  Later, Matthew Weidner drew from his academic work to show how collaborative editing might be possible in the DWeb. Akhilesh Thite demoed his Peersky Browser, a browser that natively runs decentralized protocols like IPFS, IPNS, and Hypercore. And rounding out the day, Ying Tong Lai took us through a threat modelling exercise with an eye to the fact that the EU is rolling out digital IDs in just a few years.

Santiago Bazerque (center) leads a discussion “From ‘conflict free’ to ‘conflict resolution’: a case for a BFT distributed database”

THE OUTCOMES:  The DWeb Seminar was structured with a tangible output in mind: that the participants would produce a paper synthesizing what happened during our time together. Christian mused it could capture a “timestamped zeitgeist” so that in a decade we can look back at what this group thought was important. 

The idea of a DWeb Textbook is being nurtured as an open source, community collaboration, with the assets to be stored in the DWeb’s Gitlab. A group of a half dozen people stepped forward to get the ball rolling.

Conceptual models of the base CRDT layer
The group is refining their schema for decentralized, offline-first systems

Among the Seminar participants, there seems to be emerging a first rough consensus on how a “Base CRDT” could be configured. From concept drawings to presentation slides, our group is sharing their architectural ideas with the wider public, refining the principles, soliciting feedback.

As I helped do the final cleanup of our homey venue, the post-its left behind formed a patchwork quilt of key challenges to solve: Pruning, Composability, DAGs, BFTs, Authorship Provenance. These are the “shadow future” on the edge of our DWeb present. But the real impact of our week is undoubtedly human. Can Andreas run P2Panda over David’s Spritely?  Should this group be building atop Brendan’s iroh stack? Now that Eric and Santiago share a common vocabulary, is collaboration more likely?  Only time will tell. The mission of the DWeb is to “connect people, projects and protocols to build a decentralized web,” but there is a reason we put “people” first. 

Seminar organizers Wendy Hanamura, Scott Garrison, Christian Tschudin, Kevin Nguyen, Andreas Dzialocha. Missing: Dmitri Zagidulin

THE WHY:  When Brewster asked me to produce the first Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, we featured the “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, and the “Father of the Web” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, pioneers in the brave, new online world we now inhabit. The original 80 people we invited to Builders Day included the next generation of builders of a radical redesign of Web 2.0. Today, nine years later, yet another generation of P2P architects is sketching out the stack they hope others may one day come to use. I believe this week of deeply esoteric conversations has brought us a few steps closer. (Brilliant minds + human connections = potential breakthroughs.)

But why do I commit myself to this vision? In 2023, I retired from the Internet Archive, and yet here I am camped out in a house with 15 developers. It doesn’t take a seer to imagine our near future: massive amounts of data are erased from the Web; truth fractures; climate change and war create people who are stateless and without official identities; the chasm between the powerful and powerless grows ever wider. These problems are creating demand for new and better tools. Users are looking for alternatives in the marketplace. Our friends at Bluesky could not have predicted Elon Musk’s Twitter take-over, but fortunately, their protocol and app were relatively ready for the moment when millions flocked to them away from X. We need to be ready.

The moment for local-first, P2P working code is here. As Larry Lessig said, “Code is Law” and if you write good values into the code, perhaps that can combat the seemingly intractable power imbalances before us. Maybe not. But I want to do everything in my power to support those who are speaking righteously through their code. I believe the adjacent possible is attainable.

NOTE: to watch the talks from DWeb Weekend please visit https://archive.org/details/DWeb-Seminar-2025

DWeb and Digital Rights: A Report Back from RightsCon in Taipei

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Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton, in front of the RightsCon25 sign

In late February, members of the DWeb Core Team and the DWeb community were in Taipei to attend the 13th edition of RightsCon, the largest global summit on human rights in the digital age. Namely, we were there to connect with the digital rights community. We wanted to participate in an event where thousands of people travel from around the world to discuss the current and future state of the internet, and to meet others who were involved in building decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer network technologies.

Thus we took the opportunity to organize activities before and during the conference: a local networking workshop co-organized with g0v, sessions on both DWeb organizing and how fiction can better depict surveillance technologies, a DWeb dinner, as well as a final day of tabling in the halls of the venue.

DWeb x g0v Local Network Workshop 

Michael Suantak, Cheng of g0v, and mai standing in front of National Taipei University of Technology where the community network workshop took place

We partnered with g0v, the leading decentralized civic technology community in Taiwan, to co-organize an event focused on local community networks at the National Taipei University of Technology. When we met with them several months ago, g0v leaders told us that they wanted to connect with those building and stewarding community networks. Such networks are controlled directly by communities, especially in places where internet access is non-existent or undermined, in order to maintain local network services and ensure internet connections are available or affordable. In Taiwan, these types of decentralized network infrastructures are a potential lifeline, as internet shutdowns in the country remain an ever-present threat.

DWeb standing banner in front of the classroom where the workshop took place

Our event, “Building Resilient Connections: A Hands-on Local Network Workshop” dove into the core concepts of community networks, their technical setups, and the ways they’re making a difference in under-served communities worldwide.

We had a great turnout: attended by more than 35 people. Since we had a survey built into our registration form, we knew what topics the participants were interested in learning about and tailored the workshop to them. These included community networks’ key challenges and opportunities, technical overview and tools, and issues surrounding their ethics, privacy and security. 

Cheng introducing g0v at the community network workshop

Notably, we had community network leaders from Myanmar, Taiwan, and Indonesia present case studies on their community networks, from the technologies they use to the ways they govern and manage the networks. We were lucky to be able to bring Michael Suantak to lead the presentations and the workshop on locally-hosted services. He was a 2024 DWeb Fellow, but for visa reasons he was not able to attend DWeb Camp in person, so we were happy to learn from him in person! 

Michael Suantak giving a presentation on local community networks

Sean of Mesh TWC also gave a presentation and workshop, as well as Gustaff H. Iskandar of Common Room who joined us from Indonesia. The sessions were not recorded, but you can view their notes and slides below (note: these are Google docs and Google slides).

Presentation by Michael Suantak

Presentation by Gustaff H. Iskandar (Common Room)

Presentation by Sean (Mesh TWC)

Slide from a presentation by Gustaff of Common Room on community networks

We ended with a few hands-on activities with Meshtastic LoRa devices and local-first services, as well as a discussion on the role of community networks in digital literacy and empowerment.

Group photo of the community networks workshop who stayed until the end!

Attending RightsCon 2025

RightsCon brings over 3,000 people from all corners of the globe to discuss the most pressing concerns facing people’s digital rights today. At a sprawling convention center in Taipei, hundreds of sessions took place across the last week of February, on issues related to free expression, privacy, and innovation and creativity online — specifically surrounding organizing tactics, policy advocacy, and sustaining movements in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide. There was also notable interest in decentralized web solutions to these crises, with sessions led by DWeb Camp attendees, the Social Web Foundation, Equalitie, Project Liberty, Open Future, WITNESS, Open Archive, and Creative Commons.

RightsCon25 Opening Ceremony

Round Table DWeb Workshop

We led a workshop discussion on strategies for decentralized, transnational organizing. Approximately 25 people attended and came to learn about the DWeb community. We shared our approach to building trust and solidarity between projects and individuals working to create a decentralized web that is usable, secure, and people-centric, all in spite of the exploitative and profit-driven status quo of the Internet. We spent the hour strategizing effective tactics for transnational organizing. Namely, how to use in-person and online gatherings to organize, share resources, and build enduring connections to strengthen our efforts.

Stop Surveillance Copaganda Workshops

Lia Holland of Fight for the Future and I co-facilitated three workshops on the Stop Surveillance Copaganda project, a partnership between Fight For the Future and COMPOST Magazine. The discussions centered around how we better support fiction that depicts futures and alternate realities where privacy is a universally respected human right. Attendees shared useful resources and analyses of surveillance tech’s impacts, as well as real-world tactics to resist illegal surveillance. Everything we gleaned from that week will go into a toolkit for authors and artists to more justly depict surveillance technologies. 

Stop Surveillance Copaganda Session at RightsCon25

RightsCon Booth 

We signed up to table at RightsCon in order to introduce ourselves to the digital rights community and meet those working to build alternative, decentralized technologies. Dozens of new and familiar faces stopped by to grab our stickers and zines, and to learn about what the DWeb community has been doing to build our movement.

Senior Organizer, mai, tabling at RightsCon25

DWebbers Dinner

Mid-conference, we organized a DWeb hot pot dinner for those of us in town for the event!

Group photo of DWebbers having hot pot!

Attending RightsCon this year felt incredibly productive and worthwhile. We’ll likely be there at the next one — in order to build better webs and learn from the past, it’s crucial that we connect with those directly confronting the pervasive challenges of the mainstream internet. That has always been our north star: to build decentralized technologies that help solve real world problems, not just in the future, but now.

DWebbers & friends at a Buddhist temple in Taipei

DWeb: Let’s Look Ahead to Another Big Year

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Looking back at 2024 and a summary of ideas for what comes next

Photo of about 20 people sitting under the redwoods discussing how to decentralize DWeb.
Photo of Campers sitting under the redwoods discussing how to decentralize DWeb.

This year marked the eighth year of DWeb – since 2016 scores of us have gathered in the redwoods, in the halls of Greco-Roman buildings, on the beaches of California and Brazil, in hackerspaces, on the Playa — and online, spanning international time zones, languages, expertise, and interests. Over these years, DWeb has become a dynamic community of dreamers and builders creating alternatives to the dominant, centralized and corporate internet. We want to build a web that manifests trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. And DWeb is a space for thoughtful conversation and finding the collaborators and resources to bring decentralized, distributed, and local-first networks to life. 

DWeb Camp 2024

By many accounts (and feedback survey responses), DWeb Camp 2024 was our most successful camp yet. It was our fourth Camp, with more than 520 people flying from all corners of the world to meet in the redwoods of Navarro, California. We held our first Demo Night Market, where 32 projects showcased their working code, allowing campers to try out and provide meaningful feedback to builders. We held over 420 sessions and workshops over five days and this year we brought 25 DWeb Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East.

You can read some of the reflections about this year’s camp here, here, and here. While we are taking a break from holding Camp in 2025, stay tuned for details on DWeb Camp 2026.

As we close out 2024, let’s look back at the other highlights of the year.

DWeb 2024 Highlights

Virtual Meetups — We held eight virtual meetups this year, with topics covering governance, cryptography, AI, project funding, and more. You can check out all of the recordings of our past meetups.

Local Node Meetups — Across our local Nodes, there were over 12 in-person meetups in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Hanoi, Buenos Aires, Burning Man Playa. See more below on ways we’re planning to grow the DWeb Node network next year!

What were some other notable happenings in our ecosystem?

DWeb For Creators Course — Gray Area designed and offered its first online course focused on DWeb history, principles, and practice in the spring. If you missed it, you can find all the open source content and also take the course again this coming spring 2025.

Bluesky’s Massive User Growth — Many of the core team of leaders and developers at Bluesky have been a part of the DWeb community. The network relies on content-addressed content and is working towards making “credible exit” possible, especially in light of the major exodus from X-Twitter. So while it’s debatable whether it’s truly a decentralized social network from a technological perspective, we cannot help but feel like this is a big step forward for the DWeb movement (note: the back and forth written exchange between Christine Lemmer-Webber and Bryan Newbold is worth checking out ICYMI).

We’re sure we missed some other highlights from 2024 — tag us on our social networks so we can boost your successes from the year on Bluesky (@dweb.bsky.social) and on the Fediverse (@dweb@social.coop)!

What’s Next for DWeb in 2025

When the DWeb organizing team decided to take a year off from holding Camp in California, a big part of our decision was weighed by our desire to work towards decentralizing the movement. Our vision in 2025 is to support the growth of DWeb nodes around the world, empowering and aiding them in hosting DWeb gatherings big and small. Rather than focus on one big convening in Northern California, we will be supporting smaller regional gatherings in Vancouver, Taiwan, Healdsburg, and Brazil. 

But we want to hear directly from the DWeb community and understand what you want to see happen in the coming year. So at last month’s virtual DWeb meetup, we asked: how could DWeb better support our community’s goals in building a decentralized/distributed Web? And how do we each want to contribute to help support this network? 

One of the walking paths across the river at Camp Navarro.
Photo: Navarro Path © 2024 by mai ishikawa sutton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Following a short presentation from core organizers about the events and projects we’d like to pursue next year, we opened the floor for an open discussion. Following that, the 60 or so of us present divided into small groups and discussed what we’d like to see next for DWeb. You can find the recording of the whole meetup here. 

Here are the highlights of what we heard:

Let’s Walk Our Talk

Many expressed the desire for us to do more to highlight the projects and best practices for replacing the “centralized, attention hijacking, surveillance technology” of the dominant internet with “decentralized technology that supports human values including autonomy, personal data protection, privacy, etc.”

People felt that we should find ways to encourage participatory design by building bridges to communities to better map needs to solutions, and solutions to needs. A key to this (repeated by many across) was that people find it really helpful to receive feedback on their projects. They want to understand how their tools can work better, and how they can get collaborators and financial support. One of the main ways people find value in the DWeb community is to allow people to share their projects to make them more usable and viable. Offerings by people included holding branding / UX design workshops and working with the DWeb Principles to make them more robust and actualized.

DWeb has a robust website with resources on DWeb technologies and analysis, but it currently needs some brushing up and updating. One person desired specific resources for counter-surveillance measures for high-risk communities including indigenous and queer communities. These types of resources would be critical in showing how DWeb can be immediately useful for those who are in urgent need of alternatives. 

DWeb Project Directory

An oft-repeated desire that we’ve heard is for a DWeb Project Directory, where people can find aligned projects, affinity groups, and potential collaborators. People want to know where the DWebbers are! 

Such a curated directory could map individual people’s skills, interests, and locations for people to interact and post topics/needs/projects for them to find each other. It was particularly noted that it should include non-developers, with people skilled in communications, UX design, organizational and governance design, fundraising, community management and more. The directory could be shaped by select community members, and also be used to shape an ecosystem map to visualize the domains of decentralization happening across the network stack. 

Nodes Network and In-Person Gatherings

There were calls for decentralizing the technological infrastructure of DWeb. One of the main ways we hope to achieve this is by growing our Nodes network – where people within a region can meet in-person and have regular local get-togethers. We’ve heard that a toolkit and support system would be helpful for those wanting to get their local Node off the ground. One person said that they wanted to help set up local nodes around the DWeb Principles “that go beyond the technology layers to involve social governance and way[s] of living / growing.”

On that note, there’s a growing contingent who would like to see a kind of DWeb residency, where people would go to a place for a period of time to work on a project together and co-create the experience, much like Camp. There have been Hacker Houses that have done something similar, and they tend to meet alongside related events such as Ethereum DevCon. There are a few folks in our midst who are already (or are interested in) experimenting with co-living. They said that they’d like to try a similar model with the residency using a benefactor model, where people could live somewhere for a certain period, with all their expenses paid, so they could collaborate in person on building DWeb infrastructure. This would also entail building relationships with people on the ground who live there, who want and need the kinds of tools that would be created through the residency. 

Many would also like to see a DWeb Calendar, which people could add events to and subscribe to directly with their calendar app of choice. One person said “it would be incredibly supportive for dweb as an attractor of brilliance and credibility to endorse distributed events who apply for said endorsement.”

Virtual Gatherings and Communications

DWebbers want to continue to see virtual meetups happen throughout the year. Some suggested that the virtual meetups can be more experimental, with meet and greets where people can be invited to share asks and offers. But a few people suggested that in lieu of meeting at Camp, there could be a big virtual summit that takes place to bring people together virtually for a few days — much like DecentSocial from a few years back.  

We could also do a better job of providing ongoing news, updates, and publications across the DWeb ecosystem. Many echoed the fact that they wanted to make sure that they didn’t miss any big updates. So people suggested a DWeb News Digest – where people could also describe their needs, request specific help, post or offer jobs and opportunities. It was noted that it would help to establish a habit amongst the community to see this as a kind of clearinghouse for DWeb news. This would likely have to interface with the Directory mentioned above. 

And lastly, the topic of storytelling came up across the groups. Those new to the space don’t quite understand what DWeb is and its community’s values and approaches. DWeb regulars note that they continue to participate in DWeb because it energizes both the “heart and the head” and that they’ve come to know the community for being “rigorous intellectually and generous in openness”. A regular DWeb Blog with writings and media could help better reflect how our values can be embodied in the technologies that we build.  

*~*~*~*~*

With all the challenges in the world and a shifting landscape in the U.S., we don’t know what’s in store for us in 2025. But as the DWeb Organizing Team, we truly look forward to continuing the conversation and maybe even seeing you at some of the events planned in the new year. 

Upwards and onwards!

With gratitude,

DWeb Core Organizing Team

Coming to DWeb Camp? Archive a Memento at the Migration Station

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We have a new pop-up space at DWeb Camp this year: the Migration Station, a space for archiving migration mementos and self-organized workshops. The exact location is TBD, but it will be located near the Library and rock climbing station.

Planned layout of the Migration Station

Our theme of this year’s Camp is Migration: Moving Together — to touch upon what is a pertinent reality for so many worldwide, and relate their experience to the DWeb. Beyond a poetic metaphor for moving people from the centralized web to the decentralized web, we’d like to acknowledge how masses of people are displaced due to war, genocide, climate change, and other reasons, for the sake of survival. We want to reflect on how network technology can address their needs amidst catastrophe.

And along this theme, we’re inviting all Campers to bring a small memento (up to 5×5 inches/120×120 mm) to reflect on their own personal, or resonant, migration stories. At the Migration Station, you will be able to photograph the item, write a note, and record an audio story using the Custodisco and Audiovisco kiosks.

Photo of the Custodisco Kiosk, where you can photograph and add your migration story to the digital memento archive.

Over the course of the week, you will have an opportunity to add your objects and stories. After Camp, we will take this archive, as well as a carefully selected set of small objects folks are willing to part with, and create both a digital and physical time capsule to be buried for 24 years and unearthed in 2048. The physical time capsule will be buried at the Internet Archive. The digital time capsule will be preserved using a variety of different DWeb tools and protocols in order to practically test different approaches for cultural preservation.

The exact location where we’re planning on burying the physical time capsule, at the Internet Archive garden.

Memento Ideas

Possible mementos include: A copy of family photo or historical document; a shawl, scarf or other textiles that was worn or used to carry objects; hand made art, small statues, talismans or other religious artifacts; an interesting rock from a special place; jewelry, baskets, bags, or even an old key and the story of what it once unlocked.

If you’re unable to bring a memento, you can always visit the Art Barn to create something at Camp.

A very limited number of objects will fit into the time capsule, so if you’d like your object to be considered for inclusion, please bring a memento that is no larger than a CD and is robust enough to survive for 24 years underground (i.e. no low quality paper or organic material). If your object is larger than a CD, or you don’t want to part with your object for sentimental reasons, you will still have the opportunity to create an entry in the digital archive recording your object and its story.

Above is a photo of DWeb Camp’s Executive Producer, Wendy Hanamura’s grandmother and grandfather. Wendy will be archiving the story of how both of her grandmothers came to the United States as picture brides through Angel Island in California.  

Migration Station Workshops

Throughout the week, the space will also offer self-organizing workshops, including:

  • Collective story sharing/listening
  • Archive exploration sessions
  • Discussions on archiving experiences
  • Map drawing workshops
  • Working with the archival material (ex. noise cleaning, translations)
  • Reviewing favorite archived materials
  • Discussions on the future significance of the archive

We hope you bring your mementos, stories, and dreams.

See you at the Migration Station.