Tag Archives: DWebCamp

DWeb: Let’s Look Ahead to Another Big Year

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

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 CourseGray 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

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.

Moving Together: Introducing the 2024 DWeb Fellows

Black and white image of DWeb Campers in a big group putting their hands in the center of a circle.

DWeb Fellows and Campers joining hands at Build Day, DWeb Camp 2023. Photo © Brad Shirakawa

Guest blog by ngọc triệu, DWeb Fellowship Director

The DWeb Camp 2024 theme is “Migration: Moving Together.”  Migration, in the context of decentralization, involves moving people and their data to a more open, secure, equitable, and accessible decentralized web. It is a call for collective action and resource gathering that will not only enable these migrations, but also surface and address the various issues that come with them.

Conversely, communities experience forced migration due to war, environmental degradation, corporate land grabs, and political forces beyond their control. Decentralized and distributed tools can offer significant benefits to these displaced populations by providing solutions to secure identity verification, access to resources and currency, censorship resistance, data sovereignty, and the preservation of cultural artifacts. We’ve learned this  through the story of the stateless Rohingya people and how they’ve overcome authoritarian controls to preserve their identity and culture, the story of how Maasai Tribespeople of Tanzania locate and map their oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning, and the story of how communities in repressive environments bypass censorship or maintain secure community-owned and operated networks in the face of Internet shutdowns and intermittent connectivity. 

Tools are better when they are built with the communities they are intended to serve. This is why the DWeb Fellowship Program seeks out people who work directly with marginalized communities, or in service to them. Often, our Fellows find themselves navigating the harsh realities of repressive regimes, striving to challenge and counteract the many oppressive forces at play. These exceptional individuals stand on the frontlines, harnessing technology to forge pathways to liberation, resilience, agency, and autonomy for those who need it most.

This year, we are honored to welcome 25 Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East — 21 of whom will be joining us in the ancient Redwoods of California, eager to share their knowledge, learn, and connect. 

Our Fellows represent a diverse tapestry of cultural and professional backgrounds. They are human rights activists, technologists, educators, community organizers, archivists, researchers, artists, musicians, scientists, cultural conservationists, civil society workers, and digital security experts. Through intersectional approaches to decentralization and decolonization, our Fellows fight for environmental and social justice. Together, they strive to ensure equal access to knowledge, enhance security and privacy, and uphold sovereignty and autonomy for their communities. Together, they spearhead the DWeb movement, moving toward a more just, inclusive, and accessible web.

Please meet our 2024 DWeb Fellows: 

Alex Zhang 

Alex Zhang is strongly passionate about research and activism in the areas of censorship measurement and circumvention. Over the past five years, the work he led has helped millions of users in China and Iran to bypass various emerging censorship challenges during politically sensitive periods of time. His work has thus received media coverage and several awards: the IMC 2020 Best Paper Runner-up, the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI community, First Place in the CSAW 2023 Applied Research Competition, and the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize in 2024. Additionally, Zhang has been contributing to the GFW Report, an English and Chinese website focused on studying and understanding censorship incidents in China.

Learn more about Alex’s work: 

Download Alex’s information deck

Visit Alex’s sessions at Camp: 

Exposing and Bypassing Emerging Censorship Technology in China 

Measuring, Exposing, and Bypassing Online Internet Censorship Effectively For Everyone

How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic 

Andreas Dzialocha (adz)

Andreas Dzialocha is an electric bass player, producer, composer and developer. His work consists of both digital and physical environments, spaces, festivals, software or platforms for participants and listeners. The computer itself serves as an artistical, political, social or philosophical medium, dealing with computer culture, machine learning, platform politics or decentralized networks.

He is member of the band Sun Kit with Jules Reidy, member of the Berlin-based community computing space offline, co-founder and core-contributor of the local-first protocol p2panda, co-founder of the music label Hyperdelia and the intermedial score platform Y-E-S. Sometimes he teaches artistic computer practices, recently at UdK Berlin. He studied art history, musicology, media philosophy and computer science in Berlin where he also lives and works.

Learn more about Andreas’s work: 

Visit Andreas’s sessions at Camp: 

Batool Almarzouq 

Batool Almarzouq is a Research Project Manager for AI for Multiple Long-Term Conditions: Research Support Facility (AIM RSF) at the Alan Turing Institute and honorary research fellow position at the University of Liverpool.

Batool advocates for transforming cultural norms to facilitate the adoption of open research practices, tools, and ethos, while addressing the existing power dynamics and inequalities in knowledge production. She believes that Open science is fundamentally about decolonization by challenging the legacy of settler colonialism, which often marginalized indigenous knowledge systems, and by promoting the integration and respect of these diverse perspectives in the broader scientific discourse. She founded the Open Science community in Saudi Arabia (OSCSA), which introduces and contextualizes Open Science practices in Arabic-speaking countries.

Batool is actively engaged as a mentor and governance committee member for  The Open Life Science program. She is also a core contributor to The Turing Way and a member of the Open Science expert group organized by the International Association of Universities (IAU) where she co-develop a new approaches to assessments of and incentives for researchers to engage in Open Science in the Universities.

When she’s not coding, Batool loves going on spontaneous road trips to explore new places.

Learn more about Batool’s work: 

Visit Batool’s session at Camp

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi 

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi is a telecom engineer passionate about environmental protection, focusing on sustainable solutions to socio-economic and environmental challenges. Currently, Rachad is pursuing a PhD in digital and artificial intelligence for management.

As Technical Lead at Digital Grassroots, a youth-led organization enhancing local digital citizenship, Rachad led the Digital Rights Monopoly project, creating a virtual platform for decentralized power distribution and amplifying marginalized youth voices.

Rachad’s interest in internet-related issues began in 2016 with the Internet Society Benin, where he now serves as Secretary-General. At Digital Grassroots, he curated the Community Leaders Program for Internet Advocacy, focusing on democratic participation through the Internet. He also coordinated the universal access and meaningful connectivity working group for the Project Youth Summit. As an Open Internet Leader, Rachad collaborated with the AU-EU Digital for Development Hub to represent youth at the 17th Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

Rachad received the Youth Digital Champion Award and the Inaugural Paul Muchene Fellow Award, honoring an ICANN staff member dedicated to enhancing the Internet’s resilience. He advocates for youth inclusion in environmental and digital policies and aspires to become a policy analyst. His hobbies include agriculture, tourism, and football.

Learn more about Bendjedid’s work: 

Visit Bendjedid’s session at Camp: 

Billion Lee 

Billion is Taiwanese and a co-founder of Cofacts. She started this project in 2016 and she has been advocating for marriage equality and open freedom, dedicating herself to connecting different communities and providing empowerment courses to combat disinformation. She has previously visited PolitiFact in the United States as a fellow. She has exchanged and connected contributors from different countries, to collaborate on clarifying information. She manages a community working on OSINT fact-checking skills and media literacy. She likes cakes and cookies.

Learn more about Billion’s work:

Visit Billion’s session at Camp:

Evan Hahn 

Evan Hahn is a computer programmer based in Chicago. He works at Awana Digital (previously known as Digital Democracy) building Mapeo, a Hypercore-powered mapping app used by frontline communities to defend their environmental and human rights. Previously, Evan worked at Signal, the encrypted messenger.

Learn more about Evan’s work: 

Visit Evan’s session at Camp: 

fauno 

fauno’s work and activism focus on investigating, re-thinking, adapting, modifying, and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, especially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure.

He has been involved in free software and hacktivist communities since 2007, with a special interest in the intersection of technology and grassroots organization. This interest led him to work on technology development from intersectional, trans-feminist, anti-oppressive, decolonial, and ecological perspectives, along with many friends and colleagues.

In the last six years, he has been working almost exclusively on resilient websites and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty, which is also the name of the worker-owned cooperative through which he sustains this work.

This work has led him into the dweb space. Through his alliance with Distributed Press, the websites built at Sutty are available on several distributed protocols, and lately, he has enabled social interactions through ActivityPub, the protocol for the Fediverse.

Learn more about fauno’s work: 

Visit fauno’s sessions at Camp: 

Juan Cruz 

Juan Cruz was born in Venezuela and has been living in Colombia for 6 years. He’s currently a final semester student pursuing a degree in Systems and Computer Engineering. His journey with community networks began over two years ago when he joined Red Fusa Libre. What started as a quest for knowledge and a desire to contribute has grown into a deep passion for connecting marginalized communities with the world.

He is dedicated to community networks stems from witnessing firsthand the transformative impact of internet access in underserved areas. Through his work at Colnodo, Juan has been involved in implementing and supporting various community-driven initiatives across Colombia. These experiences have not only sharpened my technical skills but also taught him invaluable lessons in empathy, collaboration, and resilience.

Juan is committed to advocating for decentralized technologies and believes in empowering communities through digital inclusion. His goal is to leverage technology to bridge the digital divide, ensuring that everyone has equitable access to information and opportunities.

Learn more about Juan’s work: 

Visit Juan’s sessions at Camp:

Marie Kochsiek 

As a software developer and sociologist, Marie Kochsiek (she/her) is particularly interested in the intersections between societies, technologies and sexual health. She is an active member of the Heart of Code, a feminist hackspace in Berlin. With a team of three she started the drip app, a free and open source period and fertility tracking app.

Learn more about Marie’s work: 

Visit Marie’s sessions at Camp: 

Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz

Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz is a prominent Zapotec communicator, activist, and researcher from the community of Yagavila in the Rincón de la Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. He is a co-founder of SURCO, Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca, A.C. where he has worked to support community media projects, access to information, open source technologies, and community education.  He is currently contributing to the INDIGITAL initiative, a collaborative project focused on ensuring access to information in indigenous languages and data.  He was a 2023 participant in the LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry) Líderes Program on Internet Governance, and will be a Digital Civil Society Lab Technology & Racial Equity Practitioner Fellow with the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University during the 2024-25 academic year.

Learn more about Kiado’s work: 

Visit Kiado’s session at Camp: 

Nádia Coelho 

Nádia Coelho (she/her) is an electrical engineer, who’s been studying regenerative agriculture for the last five years. After spending three years visiting and researching alternative farming experiences throughout Brazil, she established herself in the Atlantic Rainforest in the State of São Paulo. There, she co-founded Tekoporã, a project focused on building tailor-made digital systems for agroecological social organizations, using proper tools with free software and hardware.

Learn more about Nádia’s work: 

Visit Nádia’s sessions at Camp: 

Nat Decker 

Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist interrogating the politicality of the alienated body/mind networked within a call for collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer :::as a portal::: as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice. They reflect on the virtual as a space of potential requiring contestation for the ways it mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility, collectivism, and friction as generative mediums.

Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology. They render the mobility device/disabled body as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics, as formal object laden with stigma while freedom-giving, sterile and metallic while sensual and soft, (un)aestheticized while interacting with designations of usefulness, function, and capitalistic innovation.

Nat is a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, a Y10 member of NEW INC and was a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also a community organizer and access worker. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies.


Visit Nat’s sessions at Camp: 

Muhammad Noor 

Muhammad Noor, a Rohingya visionary and the founder of the Rohingya Project, is a pioneer in blockchain for social and financial inclusion for stateless communities. His multifaceted role extends to founding and directing impactful institutions, including the globally acclaimed Rohingya Vision (RVISION) TV broadcast station, watched by millions worldwide. With vast expertise in journalism, humanitarian work, and corporate leadership, Noor actively uses technologies such as Blockchain, AI, Crypto, Metaverse, Data Science, security, and privacy to benefit marginalized people. He also mentors students and has given talks on refugee issues and technology at universities throughout the world.

Visit Noor’s sessions at Camp: 

Sarah Grant 

Sarah Grant is an American media artist and educator based in Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Weise7 studio in Berlin and Lecturer in the Digital Arts program at Die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters of Professional Studies in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her teaching and media art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. With a focus on radio art and computer networking, she researches and develops artworks as educational tools and workshops that demystify computer networking and radio technology. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Visit Sarah’s sessions at Camp: 

Senka Hadzic

Senka Hadzic is a telecom engineer, researcher and public interest technologist working on affordable connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. She is part of the iNethi team, a Cape Town based project enabling decentralized content distribution in community networks, and collaborating with Grassroots Economics to bootstrap circular economy in the communities by using a locally-owned network and community inclusion token as a catalyst.

Currently, Senka is an Information Controls Fellow supported by the Open Technology Fund and hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Lab, where she investigates digital security aspects and resilience of last mile solutions, such as community networks.

Learn more about Senka’s work:

Visit Senka’s sessions at Camp: 

Shadrach Ankrah 

Shadrach Ankrah is an Information Technology (IT) Specialist and the Founder and Executive Director of Connect Rurals, a nonprofit organization focused on bridging the digital divide in rural and underserved communities in Ghana. The organization provides digital skills training including coding and graphic design, and is committed to connecting rural communities to the Internet to provide access to various opportunities. He advocates for Internet access and has actively participated in Internet governance discussions and initiatives since 2017. He has mentored and guided over 150 youths on Internet governance issues, helping them navigate the ecosystem and contribute to the development of the Internet. He is affiliated with various global Internet organizations, including the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Shadrach has been a fellow at ICANN72 & ICANN77, AFRINIC-31, and the 2019 Hackathon@AIS (Africa Internet Summit). His vision is to see rural and underserved African communities have access to decentralized technologies and tools that provide them with Internet access, digital literacy, and job opportunities. 

Learn more about Shadrach’s work 

Visit Shadrach’s sessions at Camp

Stacco Troncoso 

Stacco Troncoso is an avid synthesizer of information and a radical polymath working towards elemental, people-led change on a burning planet.

Stacco lives, breathes, teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralized governance, blockchain and more as part of DisCO.coop, Commons Transition and Guerrilla Translation.

Learn more about Stacco’s work:

Visit Stacco’s sessions at Camp: 

Tanveer Anoy 

Tanveer Anoy (They/Them) is a Bangladeshi queer author, academic, archivist, and human rights activist. Anoy has provided leadership and edited several queer print productions. As a writer, Anoy addresses critical socio-political issues such as the gender binary, bullying, and religious violence. Anoy is the founder of MONDRO, the first and largest Bangladeshi queer archive that collects and preserves the artistic and cultural history of communities of marginal gender and sexual diversities. Anoy also established Bangladesh Feminist Archives, a comprehensive digital platform dedicated to preserving, documenting, and promoting the intersectional feminist movement in Bangladesh.

Learn more about Tanveer’s work: 

Visit Tanveer’s session at Camp: 

Wassim Z. Alsindi 

Wassim Alsindi is the founder and creative director of the 0xSalon, which conducts experiments in post-disciplinary collective knowledge practices. A veteran of the timechain, Wassim specializes in conceptual design and philosophy of peer-to-peer systems, on which he writes, speaks, teaches, and consults. He has an editorial column at the MIT Computational Law Report, and he co-founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems journal and conference series. Wassim has curated arts festivals, led a sculptural engineering laboratory and published experimental music, satirical theater, fiction, games, poetry, and speculative scripture. Wassim holds a Ph.D. in ultrafast supramolecular photophysics from the University of Nottingham.

Learn more about Wassim’s work: 

Visit Wassim’s session at Camp: 

Ziye Zhang 

As a Gen-Z artist, Ziye Zhang leverages diverse digital tools and mediums to delve into contemporary culture and the nuances of social life in the digital era, highlighting the unique challenges encountered by the Digital Native Community. Additionally, Ziye has a high level of expertise in emerging technologies in VR, virtual production, and motion capture.

Ziye also uses his game design knowledge to encourage people to solve social issues through games and hosts board game design workshops at MIT, NYU, etc. In addition, Ziye is an invited guest speaker by Hasbro China.

Now, he is conducting field research and studies for his new works, which will discuss individual consciousness neglected on the internet through interactive installations, continuing to refine his theoretical research and artistic language.

Learn more about Ziye’s work: 

Visit Ziye’s session at Camp: 

Zoe Moore 

Zoe is a software consultant, open source advocate, and conference organizer. Her work often focuses on underserved communities. She is currently working to restart Oakland’s Sudomesh network. Away from tech, her hobbies include photography, fixing bicycles, and flying and maintaining experimental aircraft.

Visit Zoe’s sessions at Camp:

REMOTE FELLOWS

Jean Louis Fendji

Fendji is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Ngaoundere, Cameroon, and Research Director at Afroleadership. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany. Post-Ph.D., he collaborated with German cooperation initiatives in Cameroon to establish community networks in the northern regions of the country. With APC funding, he proposed a regulatory framework for community networks in Francophone African countries.

Fendji’s recent research interests include artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing, sustainable agriculture, education, and addressing bias and ethical issues. He collaborated with the Alan Turing Institute on the ADJRP project and held sessions at the Mozilla Festival. In 2021, he facilitated the UNESCO Forum on Youth and AI in Yaoundé.

He has been awarded fellowships at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. Fendji is a member of the ICT and AI Commission at the National Committee for Technology Development in Cameroon and mentors in the African track of the Scaling Responsible AI Solutions project led by CEIMIA and GPAI.

Learn more about Fendji’s work: 

Michael Suantak

Michael Suantak, also known as Pumsuanhang Suantak, is a distinguished social innovator and entrepreneur known for his impactful work in Myanmar and India. He founded and directs ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities), where he has established community wireless networks connecting over 20 remote jungle villages in Myanmar’s Chin State, providing vital educational content and local news. Beginning his career as a founding member of the Burma Information Technology (BIT) team in 2002 and later serving as an organizational manager in New Delhi, Suantak has also become a prominent digital and cybersecurity trainer. His expertise includes policy development, law, and integrating modern technology into education across Asia. As a DeBoer fellow, he leads digital and cybersecurity research at ASORCOM, enhancing community development through strategic internet and wireless technology use.

Learn more about Michael’s work:

Nzambi Kakusu

Nzambi is an experienced and skilled professional with a strong background in data collection, operations, program support, and project Implementation. Her work has involved collaboratively designing, implementing, and coordinating projects with data, technology, and design components, making her well-equipped to contribute to the DWeb ecosystem.

She is a techie who believes that her passion for using technology to address societal issues, combined with her strong project management and research capabilities, makes her a valuable asset in the pursuit of a more decentralized, equitable, and inclusive web. She looks forward to engaging with the DWeb Community and exploring ways in which she can collaborate to advance the DWeb movement.

Learn more about Nzambi’s work:

Shalini A

Shalini finished her Bachelors of Engineering in Tumkur and joined Servelots and Janastu soon after. And that was 15 years ago. After realizing that her role is essential for keeping the programs of working with communities alive she decided to get involved with all activities of the organizations including keeping the account books ready! Now she is working with the village women in various capacities — craft center to local mesh deployment, while also handling the overall management of activities of the organizations. One of them being the decentralization of a platform that caters to keeping the local knowledge, much of which also has personal stories of women. Shalini works with the women, listening to their stories and keeping it for next iteration. In the meantime, the stories are shared with the people the women trust and annotated so they can get back fast to things that are of interest to them. This also means that the annotations will be media that will be tagged. Most women are not literate so we have a way of asking them to associate with a person who they trust and can use the system. Shalini and her team are looking at ways to include them as first class users of the system – with face and voice recognition to start.

Learn more about Shalini’s work: 

Taslim Oseni

Taslim is a software engineer at eQualitie, an open-source company dedicated to developing tools for online freedom and privacy. He contributes actively to the company’s open-source browser, Ceno Browser, which aims to provide secure access to online content for all users worldwide.

Learn more about Taslim’s work: 

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We want to extend our deep gratitude to the sponsors who made this Fellowship program possible: Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, Ethereum Foundation, and NextID.

DWeb Fellows: Where Are They Now? (Part 1)

Guest blog by ngọc triệu from the DWeb Camp Core Organizing team. 

Since the program kicked off in 2019, the DWeb Fellowship has welcomed 62 fellows from more than 20 countries across five continents, spanning North America, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. 

Recently, I had the opportunity to reconnect with some of the DWeb Fellows from previous cohorts. We caught up on how we’ve been since our last encounter, delved into our current projects, and reminisced about our shared experiences at DWeb Camp.

In this post, let’s join Stacco (Fellow 2023), Remy (Fellow 2022), and me in our conversations below!

*Please note that the conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

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Q1 ngọc: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today! Can you start by introducing yourself and sharing what you’re working on right now?

Stacco: Hi, yes! I’m Stacco from DisCO.coop, which is the project I represented at DWeb Camp 2023. DisCO is a cooperative intersection of feminist and anticapitalist responses to a lot of things like DAOs, what we want to do in the workplace, and how we want to spend our time productively. And it’s also a critical approach to designing technology. DisCO was founded in 2018, but it came out of the experience of a cooperative that we founded on distributed principles, called Guerrilla Media Collective. And a lot of the stuff that we prototype in Guerrilla Media Collective with economics and governance have led into DisCO.

Remy: Hey there, I’m Remy, from the 2022 cohort. I’m currently working at the Open Technology Fund as a programme specialist. I’ve worked kind of on an array of projects, but we get a series of applications that focus on circumventing Internet censorship in authoritarian contexts, whether that be research projects, community, convenings and so on. 

Q2 ngọc: What’s one thing from DWeb Camp that you’ve taken with you into your current work?

Remy:  When reflecting on my experience at DWeb Camp, I find two significant takeaways: 

The first one being that, at that time, I was coming from a very academic space. So, most of the work that I was doing was really focused and consolidated within academia, which was a fairly small realm of people. It was mainly archivists that I was working with, so we had kind of a narrow lane and scope. 

However, upon engaging with the broader web community, I was exposed to a diverse array of individuals working on directly related projects, each with intersecting identities and roles. I remember meeting a speculative fiction author, and I was like: “Wow, this is kind of an interesting addition to this cohort of people that I don’t think I would have naturally included in a conference!”. I also got to unlearn what a conference is and looks like, you know, I’m going to show up with my little briefcase and give my presentation, because that’s what academia looks like. And then coming in, it was a much more kind of relaxed vibe and open conversation with an array of different people. So I thought that was really interesting and opened my eyes like, wow, we do need to include more people in these conferences that we’re at, because designers play just as big a role as researchers and developers. 

And then I would say, the second thing that I learned was really what it takes from the ground up to develop a mesh network. I always kind of come back and think about that — all the love and time that it takes, and the patience to care for these systems. It really got me on a whole journey about thinking of systems of care, and what those look like in technical spaces.

Stacco: Following DWeb Camp 2023, I invited brandon (Fellow 2022, 2023) and mai (DWeb Fellowship Director 2019-2023) to Spain for a meeting called “DisCO Remastered”, which mai covered in an article. From this experience, we developed two prototypes, including one called “community supported digital commons,” inspired by the principles of community-supported agriculture. We have people who are more conscious about the food they eat and where it comes from. So how about we have that type of consciousness for the digital tools that mediate our daily lives? Having community funding and accessibility for digital commons is very important to ensure fair compensation for labor and improve accessibility to technology. 

Additionally, collaborating with brandon, we aim to explore cooperative alternatives to platforms like Spotify, but going much further. What if the musicians could develop their own technology with torrents? What if they could take full control of their work and earnings? 

Also for me, I really love the diverse age ranges, genders, sexual orientation, and provenances of DWeb Camp, especially among the Fellows. The Fellows was a super varied group and it was really fascinating to engage with people whose experiences differed from mine. I’m like, “Oh, your background is totally different from mine, let me find out about it!” There was like this commonly held space, and that really inspired me. When I was writing the introduction for our newly released website, I was actually thinking of the Fellows! 

Q3 ngọc: We’re gonna get a little bit retrospective here, what motivated you to apply (or reapply) for the Fellowship? Did the program meet your expectations and were you able to accomplish what you set out to do as a Fellow? 

Stacco: Yeah, absolutely. So the first time I couldn’t go. The second time, I applied again because I wanted to get a taste of what the decentralized community is like. More than the projects, I wanted to see what the humans behind them are like. There were a lot of contradictions which I also saw at Camp that were very interesting: There were projects which I had no interest in whatsoever, and there were other projects that I found really interesting. There’s also humans that I wanted to meet. I had been collaborating with brandon from Resonate Coop for four years and it was a great chance to meet him in person. It really was maybe like the best week I had last year. I was really, really happy. And I was really happy because of the human connections. 

With brandon king, I did a presentation that was quite successful. It was very great because we spoke about technology in a critical way and we mixed it with music, the audio, and the video. Then we left all the devices behind and we walked into the forest. That was really special. Some of the human connections that were fostered have carried on. That’s the quality time that you can only get, especially post-pandemic, by sharing a physical space. 

We were also really privileged. If you think about it, at least for the Fellows, for a week, we didn’t have to think about money or anything. We ate, we slept, we walked, we rested, we played guitar, and we danced. And that took money to do. Only that didn’t come from Mars, but money, which is like a pittance compared to some of the budgets that are being handled. So it makes you think, well, with about the distributions of value, what would life be like if it was more like DWeb all over? 

Remy: I remember, I found the Fellowship through a mutual colleague who worked at the Internet Archive. And at the time, I was really interested in the Internet Archive because I was working at a small human rights organization. We were using the Internet Archive all the time and I thought it was a really cool project. I was interested in finding out who these people that run it are and what does it look like?

And then the Fellowship popped up. At that time, I had been inhabiting a tiny little bubble that no one else really understood: I was a master’s student caught between an archivist school and public policy and people were kind of looking at me cross-eyed for talking about distributed archives or decentralised archives. So when I found out the Fellowship, I was like, wow, here’s a group that I really like and admire, and they are talking about the same thing I’ve been talking about. That’s kind of what motivated me — maybe I can learn from a lot of these people who are probably much more developed in the work than I am, and I can share this small use case that I’ve been doing and working on. 

When I read the blurb about DWeb Camp, I was like, it’s a group of people going to the woods and talking about tech. I thought it didn’t even seem real. I was wondering, like, is this real? I didn’t have much of an expectation rather than a feeling that I am going to meet really interesting people that are really smart and working on interesting projects. And then I was pleasantly surprised by how many projects I had been aware of, there were projects I’d written about in my papers as things to look at, and then I was able to meet them at the DWeb naturally. 

I mean, you’re just chatting, and then you were like: “Your project sounds really familiar. What’s it called?” And then you were like, “Whoa, that’s crazy. I was writing about your project!” I was just shocked that I was naturally coming across those people in the space, it felt like a very surreal moment. I got to meet Mark, who’s the director of the Wayback Machine. And subsequently, I’ve seen him so many times at other conferences that we’ve been to. And it’s always like, I just get so excited and happy and like, want to give him a big hug. It takes me back to that special time that we all spent together. 

ngọc: What’s one piece of advice or recommendation you’d like to share with the future cohort? 

Remy: Well, that’s a good question! I’d say, be confident in your ability and skills that you’re bringing and know that it’s a space of people that want to collaborate and work with you. It can be incredibly intimidating, walking into a space where you don’t know anyone and sometimes it feels like maybe there’s pre-existing communities of people that already know each other, but have the confidence to just walk up and start talking to them and know that it’s a very open community and everyone is really welcoming.

It just sometimes takes the courage within you to make that first step forward and just walk into a circle of people and say: “Hi, this is who I am.” I know it’s always easier said than done, but I have thought that that was when the most natural conversations happen. And you know, be kind to yourself. A lot of these conferences can feel like a marathon sometimes and it can feel like you’re missing out on this or that, but the experience is always there so if you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed or burnt out, just step out. Some of my favourite moments from Camp were sitting with the Fellows and making buttons and just giving ourselves a second to breathe outside of everything else that was going on. 

So be confident, be courageous, and be kind to yourself when you’re there experiencing it. Another thing that I found really helpful was journalling. I journaled two or three times a day to help remember how I was feeling and what I was doing. And that was a really interesting experience to look back and read on. That would be my tips for people going to DWeb. 

Stacco: I’d advise people to not go crazy and try to join every talk or session at Camp. Just be where you are and you’ll find interesting people to talk to and interesting projects to collaborate on. While you’re there, make yourself known. In addition, don’t be shy and don’t be afraid to challenge people in a friendly way. The most special thing are the Build Days, when you’re setting up camp and we’re getting to know people. Don’t miss it, that’s my recommendation! 

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Thanks to Remy and Stacco for joining the conversation and sharing their experience as a DWeb Fellow. 

We’re currently at the final stage of reviewing all 2024 Fellowship applications. Stay tuned to meet our new cohort in June!