Offline Camp Oregon, Take 2
Sharing diverse perspectives from the Offline First community
Offline Camp Oregon 2019 is a wrap! As organizers, we were incredibly grateful to our attendees for their patience and understanding when we had to postpone the the fifth edition of the event due to a local wildfire. Although we lost some of our registered campers due to the reschedule, we gained others, and ultimately on September 27–30 we returned to Cascade Mountain Ranch (home of our 2017 event), outside of Grants Pass, Oregon, gathering 22 awesome humans for another fabulous weekend of relaxation, collaboration, and discussion. In the end, the fire ban was lifted just in time for us to offer our traditional s’more-making evenings around our own campfire.
Offline Camp is an opportunity to gather the growing Offline First community for a discussion about development and design practices that can counter the effects of inherently spotty or non-existent network connections. I’ve written before about what makes the camp format so special, but long story short, it’s the connections we make with others. And as always, our 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, decentralized web advocates, and more, each attendee brought a unique perspective to contribute to our wide-ranging discussions.
Discussion Sessions
At the heart of Offline Camp are our unconference discussion sessions, centered on topics proposed and voted on by our campers. As always, campers had a hard time selecting which sessions to attend, so we shared summaries with each other, and hope to share them with you as well. Here are this year’s 15 discussion topics, ranging from technical to philosophical, many of which you’ll see summarized in upcoming posts in this publication:
- Open Source Funding and Business Models of Offline First Apps
- Best Offline First Tools
- Decentralized Identifiers + Autonomic Data
- Offline First for Refugee Camps
- Collaborative Design of Resilient Architecture
- UX Challenges of Offline
- Let’s Get Scuttling (SSB Sync Party)
- Bad Actors in Distributed and/or Offline Apps
- How Would You Build an Offline Chat App?
- Building for Low- to Middle-Income Countries
- Schema Migration in a Decentralized World / Versioning Immutable Data Structures
- When Not to Use a PWA (Native v Mobile)
- Effective Beginner-Friendly Messaging for DWeb
- P2P Mobile
- Inventive Alignment & Power Dynamics
Passion Talks
Another highlight of camp are passion talks, an opportunity for campers to share 5 minutes of insight on any topic they’re excited about, from Offline First to the broader tech world and beyond. This year’s passion talk topics included:
- RSS and the Open Web
- 3 Use Cases for Local First
- 90s Aesthetics in Modern Tech
- Community Control of Modern Tech
- Retrospective and Hopes for the Offline First Community
- Cross-Platform Offline File Transfers with PWAs
- Braid HTTP State Sync Demo
- Oregonion: A Non-Profit, Encrypted Transit ISP
- Digital Freedom of Assembly
- Mass Migrations
- Git: Not Just for Code
- Quest for Combining Sneakernet and Internet
- Empathy
- It’s Not Enough if It’s Just Used by Enthusiasts
- The Climate is Changing. Why Aren’t We?
- Farm: A Programmable Offline Space
- Organizing Tech Resources
Upcoming Content and Events
We’re looking forward to sharing more detailed coverage of our 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. (Not sure if Offline Camp is for you? Check out our video highlighting our campers’ take on the unique experience.)
Community Support
We have a lot of people to thank for the success of Offline Camp Oregon 2019. 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 Protocol Labs and MongoDB for their generous sponsorships, as well as Make&Model, FizBuz, and Technocation, Inc. for their invaluable logistical support. Special thanks to Zak and Michael of Protocol Labs who made our videography possible! Community building is a team effort, and we couldn’t do it without each and every one of you. ❤️
