Decentralized WebCamp 2019 Experience | PLAN Systems
Arrival At The Mushroom Farm | Beauty, Intention, & Regeneration
The Internet Archive led DWeb Camp took place on the coastline of California, around 40 miles south of San Francisco — hosted by a majestic organic farm community focused on regenerative solutions. While previous DWeb events have occurred, not much was known about exactly what would unfold at what was ultimately a highly intentioned camp experience. Without this prior knowledge, we dedicated our full effort to prepare and participate in forging new connections and relationships.
What IS DWeb?
DWeb is a series of events driven by local communities of developers, designers, information architects, activists, policymakers and journalists toward a global goal — building the web we deserve.
The Web we use today is not private, reliable or free from censorship. It lacks a memory, a way to preserve our digital record through time. Decentralization offers security. By distributing data, processing and hosting across millions of computers worldwide with no centralized control, a new Decentralized Web has the potential to be open, empowering users around the globe to control and protect their own personal data better than before.”
— DWeb Founding Nodes Berlin & San Francisco.
Volunteering Time + Participation = Experience
We arrived to the event on Monday 15 July to a highly capable, energized event staff, and joined the volunteer effort to help finalize preparations of the activity spaces and campgrounds. From preparing the glamping option tents, helping with meals, organizing traffic flows & parking, to putting the final touches on the various rooms made available for participants to gather, the work was made easy by many hands. By Thursday afternoon the setup efforts were nearing completion, and the arrival of 400+ participants began to turn from a trickle to a steady stream.
Technology for Humanity and Future Solutions
From Thursday to Sunday we engaged in countless conversations, demonstrations, and were witness to so many complementary projects in various phases of development. From discussions on humane technology and decentralization, to experiencing immersive virtual reality environments, the depth of character, professionalism, and concentrated brain power was quite simply off the charts. The event was an experiment in sociological development, technologic expression, and (my own personal take) was a canvas for exploring solutions needed for people to thrive.
PLAN Systems — Community Collaboration Tools
To provide some context to our participation, Drew O’Meara and I co-founded PLAN Systems (www.plan-systems.org), a new technology non-profit dedicated to helping people overcome significant challenges in human communications, logistics, and self-organization. PLAN is an integrated technology stack with a 2D/3D interface built for realtime productivity, spatial planning, and data visualization. The work and mission of the Internet Archive has long been an inspiration to us, so we immediately saw DWeb Camp as a chance to connect with a solutions & knowledge accessibility oriented community. At the heart of PLAN is a community’s archive and shared knowledge space, so there is a profound mutuality in our approach as non-profits.
PLAN Prototype Premiered At DWeb 2019
From our team’s perspective, DWeb Camp was the backdrop of a decisive accomplishment on our development roadmap. During the event, Drew O’Meara (Chief Architect of PLAN) worked tirelessly to instantiate the PLAN data-model and client interface layers into a functioning prototype. After nearly a year and a half of dedicated engineering & development, meeting this critical milestone allowed us to demonstrate our core technology for the first time; we could not be more pleased that this was the group of folks to see it happen. We’re very proud to announce that our prototype, the PLAN data-model paired with Unity’s 3D engine, is now up and running with initial implementations of spatial messaging, spreadsheets, links and space channels.
DWeb Camp was an impressive fusion of highly technical engineers, developers, organizers, and artists. Such a wide array of activities and dozens of projects came together to bridge culture, community, and open source technology from around the world. A tremendous THANK YOU goes out to the DWeb Camp organizers, the folks from the Internet Archive, all the amazing Mushroom Farm organizers and event volunteers for this experience.
Here’s a sampling of some of the projects and topics represented at DWeb 2019.
- Build a Linked Data ImageGraph
- Building Bridges: Connecting Tech Stacks for Humane UX
- BYOB: Build Your Own Browser
- Collaboration Art Creation
- Decentralized Voting & Zero-Knowledge Proofs
- Economic Network Constellation Co-design Session
- From Humans to Machines, and to Humans again
- Gathering of People Working on Devices for Remote and Off-grid Areas
- Holochain and HoloREA’s Architecture
- Narrowing the Digital Divide
- Identity, Privacy & Decentralization
- Mindmapping DWebCamp in Virtual Reality
- Scuttlebutt Reunion
- Self-organized Discussion on Peer-to-Peer Database Approaches
Check out the full list of the projects at DWeb 2019!
Visit The Internet Archive’s -> DWeb Camp 2019 Gallery
DWeb Austin Coming Soon
We’re currently developing an Austin DWeb node in cooperation with the Internet Archive, along with the founding Berlin and San Francisco nodes! Stay tuned for more information on these developments by visiting PLAN-Systems.org. We look forward to connecting with more people and projects focused on delivering better internet technology intended for everyone.
Joachim Lohkamp opened our Berlin chapter in September 2014:
“I started the first GET Decentralized (GETD#1) hackathon to bridge the community of change-makers around Ouishare with those of tech. My guts drove me to SF to hold GETD#2 (https://youtu.be/-YgOYjOGZuQ) at the Red Victorian. This is when I met with Wendy and Brewster the very people who shared the same values and had the energy to bing this initiative to a whole level. DWeb was born.”
DWeb Berlin is the origin meetup node and DWeb San Francisco is the West Coast meetup node. Find out what Meetups these groups have ongoing here:
https://www.meetup.com/dwebsf/
https://www.meetup.com/dweb-berlin/
Read up on the origin story here: https://decentralizedweb.net/about/
Links From Participating Projects And Interesting Conversations We Had During The Event:
- The Internet Archive https://archive.org/
- ScuttleButt Offgrid Social Network https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
- The Happening https://happening.net/
- Beaker Browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
- Dat Protocol https://www.datprotocol.com/
- The Eco Techie https://www.ecotechie.io/
- Learning Equality https://learningequality.org/
- The Humane Technology Project https://humanetech.com/
- Ace Volkov Studio Page https://acevolkovstudio.tumblr.com/
- EGX Secure Solutions https://egx.org
- Quorum Control https://quorumcontrol.com
- Earth Species https://earthspecies.org/
- Miro Collaboration Tools https://miro.com
- Protocol Labs https://protocol.ai/
- Value Flow Social Economics https://valueflo.ws/
- REA Technology http://reatechnology.com/what-is-rea.html
- Open Value Network wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Value_Network
- Citadel Open Source Collaboration http://www.citadel.org/doku.php
Special thanks to Wendy, Benedict, Joanna, Nadeem, Bill, and Honey Bear for making this such an impactful event!
