Offline Camp Berlin
Offline First enthusiasts from around the world gather for a weekend outside Berlin
Offline Camp Berlin is a wrap! Monday marked the end of another awesome weekend of relaxation, collaboration, and discussion. As organizers, we were thrilled with the response to our first European event, which sold out in just 3 weeks. We couldn’t have been more thrilled with the third iteration of Offline Camp, which went a little something like this:
I’ve written before about what makes the camp format so special, but long story short, it’s the connections we make with others. This time around we were thrilled to have a more geographically diverse group than we’ve seen before, with campers hailing from across Europe, Africa, Australia, and North America. And as always, those campers brought a variety of backgrounds and perspectives to the table. From developers to designers, UX professionals, product managers, project coordinators, developer advocates, community leaders, open source project maintainers, and more, each attendee brought a unique perspective to contribute to our wide-ranging discussions.
As always, campers set the agenda for our discussions by voting on topics for unconference sessions, which ranged from philosophical to technical. Here are the topics officially covered at Offline Camp Berlin, which we hope to summarize for you in upcoming posts:
- Accessibility (A11Y) in Offline
- The User Experience (UX) of Offline First
- Security in Offline First
- CouchDB & PouchDB
- Offline First for the Developing World
- Lie-Fi
- Data Models / Migrations
- Decentralized Web & Peer-to-Peer (P2P): The Broad Picture & Solvable Use Cases
- Building the Offline First Community (and perhaps an Offline First Foundation)
- Offline First as a Social Movement
- Tools for Offline First
- CouchDB 3.0, 4.0 & Beyond: A Roadmap
- Art: Fun Ways to Promote Offline First
- Supporting Refugee Camp Needs for Software / Infrastructure
- Improving Transport Protocol in Lie-Fi Scenarios
We also got to enjoy a variety of short passion talks from campers on topics including:
- ROAR for Good’s Self Defense Wearable
- Creating with Constraints (Broad Strokes FTW)
- Remembering the Past to Find a Way Forward
- Learning from HTTP2 + Service Workers
- How to Fall in Love with Receipts
- Web MIDI
- Learning Communities
- Practice Makes Permanent
- My P2P Unicorn Land
- Kosmos
- Multicultural Teams
- Innovation Hubs in Refugee Camps in Uganda
- The Origins of Tech Culture
- Delete Your Webfont
Offline Camp is only a small part of the broader work we’re doing as an Offline First community, so we were excited to see various workgroups springing out of unconference sessions and passion talks, ready to tackle exciting new projects:
- Building a cross-platform local sharing app called PeerDrop
- Supporting refugee camps through Offline First solutions (join the working group here to get involved!)
- Developing a “sync matrix” to categorize tools currently in existence which support offline sync capabilities
- Investigating the formation of an Offline First Foundation (OFF) and better defining the mission of the Offline First movement to improve our communication and community-building efforts
We’re looking forward to sharing more detailed coverage of these projects, unconference sessions, and passion talks here on Medium in the weeks to come. Following this Medium publication and the OfflineCamp Twitter account are great ways to stay informed. In the meantime, our resources page has tips on where you can study up on Offline First through additional reading material, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and more. If you’d like to attend a future camp, you should also sign up here for updates. The quick form includes an opportunity to let us know where you think we should host our next event.
We have a lot of people to thank for the success of Offline Camp Berlin. First and foremost, our campers and the broader Offline First community, without whom none of this would be possible. In addition to the amazing team of organizers who pulled this event together, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to IBM Cloudant, Google Cloud Platform, and simplabs for their generous sponsorships, as well as Neighbourhoodie and Make&Model for their invaluable logistical support. We’re also incredibly thankful to videographer Aaron Ross and New Builders Podcast host Jim Young who’ll be spending countless hours curating media coverage of the event. Community building is a team effort, and we couldn’t do it without each and every one of you. ❤️
