Community Spotlight: Meet Antonio

In our most recent community spotlight we meet Antonio: runner up in the ‘Building the permaweb’ hackathon, and creator of Bookweave — a platform that allows for the sharing and storing of e-books on the permaweb. When Antonio isn’t busy adding datasets from the likes of Project Gutenberg, he’s busy searching for new ways in bringing book collections to the wider public, using decentralised technology. Read on to find out more about Antonio…

Name:

Antonio Furtado

Country of residence:

Canada

Occupation:

Software Engineer

What do you like to do with your spare time?

I would say climbing and cycling are two of my favorite activities.

How did you find out about the Arweave permaweb?

At first, I discovered Arweave on Devpost. I then went on to find out more about the project through its white paper, and the pretty active Discord channel.

What piqued your interest in decentralisation and the blockchain space, and when?

My interest in particular, is driven towards the huge potential for digital preservation efforts. The ability to replicate and query content tied to the monetary incentivization of the network nodes seems like a very good strategy towards achieving this goal.

Why did you choose to build Bookweave?

It felt natural that there should be a repository that exists for public book collections, which are maintained and distributed by the general public. It is great that we currently have organizations behind the maintenance of centralized mirrors as well, but I feel we shouldn’t solely rely on them. In the end, it is in everyone’s best interest to preserve these collections.

You recently added a subset of the Project Gutenberg to Bookweave, do you plan on adding more datasets to the platform in the future?

I intend to extend the Gutenberg collection in the future, mostly because it is a great resource, but also for demonstration purposes. I hope it will incentivize other individuals to share their own collections as well through the publishing tool, which is also made available on GitHub. It may even lead to useful feedback that I can use to improve next releases of the tool!

If you could build any Dapp, what would it be and why?

I guess it would be interesting to have an entire multimedia repository made easily accessible through a Dapp. One of the biggest challenges would be making the searching and discovering of assets user friendly.

What does a decentralised future look like to you?

A decentralized future should offer more autonomy and control for individuals over their data, identity, finances, etc. Naturally, new technical challenges will arise along the way because many projects are trying to solve problems that are more simply addressed by a central authority. However, I believe that as projects mature, we will see a larger number of great decentralized alternatives to many of the services we use.

Where can people follow your work?

Github username: @MarcoJrFurtado

Twitter: @MarcoJrFurtado