Science Fair
Take a deeper dive into decentralized projects, protocols, and products at our Science Fair—held during the Opening Night Party at the Internet Archive, Tuesday, July 31 from 6-9 p.m. From the Great Room to the lawn, you will find 70 tables + 70 projects = countless innovative ideas.
Science Fair is a time for you to talk one-on-one with the builders of the Decentralized Web, ask questions, and try out the latest working code. Then, once you know the names, faces and projects, you'll be better set to chart your course through the Summit offerings the next day.
Who knows, you might just meet your next partner, employer, staffer or best friend in the process!

Science Fair
Incorporating:
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Javascript running in unmodified browsers
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IPFS, WebTorrent, YJS, HTTPS
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A open-source library we created to give a common API to multiple “transports”
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A decentralized hierarchical naming system
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A bootloader to boot http browser requests into a decentralized environment
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A gateway that lazily seeds the Dweb as resources are requested
Questions we grapple with:
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How to seed the Dweb without overwhelming it
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How to avoid duplication of large databases
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How to provide a usable UX on top of slow, and sometimes unreliable decentralization
Mitra Ardron is the technical lead for the decentralization work at the Internet Archive. Apart from building a decentralized version of the archive he is interested in how we can build tools that can work across different decentralized architectures, and has built small libraries for naming and authentication. Prior to the Archive, He co-founded the Association for Progressive Communications (apc.org), co-authored several internet standards, and was CTO on the first peer to peer video sharing system (which pioneered sharding and content addressing). His passions include renewable energy (ran solar payment networks across Africa); and mentoring innovators working to make the world a better place.
Mitra Ardron is the technical lead for the decentralization work at the Internet Archive. Apart from building a decentralized version of the archive he is interested in how we can build tools that can work across different decentralized architectures, and has built small libraries for naming and authentication. Prior to the Archive, He co-founded the Association for Progressive Communications (apc.org), co-authored several internet standards, and was CTO on the first peer to peer video sharing system (which pioneered sharding and content addressing). His passions include renewable energy (ran solar payment networks across Africa); and mentoring innovators working to make the world a better place.
How it works
Beaker adds support for a peer-to-peer protocol called Dat. It's the Web you know and love, but instead of HTTP, websites and files are transported with Dat.
Deploy a website from your computer — no server required! Visitors connect directly to each other, sharing your site's files and helping keep it online.
Files are transported with the peer-to-peer network instead of being locked away on a server, so you can explore all the files that make up a website or app.
Why build a browser?
Browsers are the gateway to the Web! By building a browser with experimental features and capabilities, we have the flexibility to explore how the browser can help uphold the vision of an open Web.
History
Paul released the Beaker prototype in August 2016 after participating in the inaugural Decentralized Web Summit, where he shopped his idea to integrate peer-to-peer protocols into a browser.
Tara made her first contribution in October 2016 and joined full-time in April 2017. As core developer of the Dat protocol, Mathias has always been a part of the Beaker community, but he officially joined the Beaker team in 2018.
Paul is the co-creator of the Beaker browser and an active contributor to the Dat protocol. Previously Paul helped found the Secure Scuttlebutt project, and has a history of working at small Web development agencies. He's here to talk about peer-to-peer computing and how the Web can become a live environment.
Mathias Buus is a self taught JavaScript hacker from Copenhagen that has been working with Node.js since the 0.2 days. Mathias likes to work with P2P and distributed systems and is the author of more than 650 modules on npm. He is also the Chief of Research at Beaker leading the technical work on the Dat protocol.
Tara is the co-creator of the Beaker Browser, a browser for exploring and building the peer-to-peer Web. She co-founded Blue Link Labs, the team of decentralization enthusiasts behind the Beaker Browser and hashbase.io. She's dedicated to building the Web of tomorrow as a Web for all.
Paul is the co-creator of the Beaker browser and an active contributor to the Dat protocol. Previously Paul helped found the Secure Scuttlebutt project, and has a history of working at small Web development agencies. He's here to talk about peer-to-peer computing and how the Web can become a live environment.
Mathias Buus is a self taught JavaScript hacker from Copenhagen that has been working with Node.js since the 0.2 days. Mathias likes to work with P2P and distributed systems and is the author of more than 650 modules on npm. He is also the Chief of Research at Beaker leading the technical work on the Dat protocol.
Tara is the co-creator of the Beaker Browser, a browser for exploring and building the peer-to-peer Web. She co-founded Blue Link Labs, the team of decentralization enthusiasts behind the Beaker Browser and hashbase.io. She's dedicated to building the Web of tomorrow as a Web for all.
bunsanweb's foundation is built on standard browser-side web technologies.
We view the web as a network of user agents (i.e. browsers) and hyperlinked resources, not a network of servers for their clients. We want the web to be a "web of something" where user agents communicate with document resources. Hyperlinks can directly link resources across web servers. However, in the status quo the web has become centralized and has become reliant on often opaque web services that act as intermediaries between user agents (i.e. people) and resources.
Our goal has been to create a decentralized web that takes back control from systems that have become increasingly monopolistic. We want to create an environment where browsers are enhanced with decentralizing features and where programming functionalities are provided for decentralized architectures. We want to return the web to one that emphasizes end-to-end principles and reduce, if not eliminate, centralizing intermediary factors from endpoints. We believe that web endpoints should become an endpoint of inter-person systems. In such a system the browser itself can become a resource and perform endpoint-scripts for system functions that are broken up in a decentralized manner.
bunsanweb attempts to provide the tools necessary to realize these goals. Namely,
1. Endpoint-scripting for mixing server-side scripting features into the client-side which allows for both accessing and producing Web resources.
2. A universal event stream for communicating with unspecified endpoint scripts without the need for specific centralized channels.
3. Endpoint-relative hyperlinked space where each endpoint views resources from each local link to the universal web. e.g. Where "personal data" is a relative resource for each person that can link to "friends" on the universal web.
We have created prototypes of these tools and more information and code can be found on our website and github repos.
Project Links
- Homepage: https://bunsanweb.github.io/ (work in progress)
- Github Organization: https://github.com/bunsanweb/
- Documentation: https://github.com/bunsanweb/bunsanweb
Repos
- Anatta Engine, a prototype JavaScript package of runtime environments for endpoint-scripting:
https://github.com/bunsanweb/anatta-engine
- Hashnet, a prototype JavaScript package of a **peer network** for universal event stream:
https://github.com/bunsanweb/hashnet
- GRP, a successor of the Anatta Engine's reverse proxy for scripts on vanilla browsers: https://github.com/bunsanweb/grp
Ryoichi's current interest is systems programming and programming languages.
He has worked for several companies to design and implement programmable architecture of systems.
He studied computer science from type theory to component architecture at Kyoto University and Tokyo University.
Ryoichi's current interest is systems programming and programming languages.
He has worked for several companies to design and implement programmable architecture of systems.
He studied computer science from type theory to component architecture at Kyoto University and Tokyo University.
COALA is an global community of blockchain experts across multiple disciplines working towards three core missions:
- Community building and interdisciplinary collaboration, through the organization of invite-only community workshops, public conferences, and policy roundtables.
- Legal analysis of blockchain technology and development of governance frameworks and techno-legal tools to resolve critical regulatory gaps;
- Research & development of foundational building-blocks, protocols and applications, with representation at key technical standards-setting bodies
COALA is an international multidisciplinary collaborative research and development initiative for blockchain technologies. We are a coalition of the leading academic research institutions from around the world, providing neutral, fact-based blockchain research to support policy development. Our working groups are composed of academics, lawyers, economists, protocol architects, security experts, technologists, and entrepreneurs.
COALA brings together diverse stakeholders in working groups and projects - from domain experts to global institutions - to facilitate the development and deployment of blockchain-based frameworks, standards, and applications alongside governance policies that enable innovation and evolution of legal and policy frameworks.
COALA represents the Dynamic Coalition on Blockchain Technologies” at the UN, COALA also has two W3c arms, including the W3C’s Working Group on Cryptoequity (blockchain-based web protocols) and Community Group for COALA-IP (open web protocol for sharing metadata for IP). COALA has also launched the IRTF Blockchain Research Group, responsible for coordinating blockchain-based Internet protocols.
As members of the UN’s IGF, the W3C, the IRTF, and representative of a coalition of leading academic research universities around the world, COALA’s collaborative, community-driven work drives blockchain policy, technical development, and next-generation applications at global scale.
Primavera De Filippi is a Permanent Researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, their potential to design new governance models and participatory decision-making, and the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).
Constance is one of the principal drivers of global, collaborative, multi-stakeholder initiatives (www.blockchainworkshops.org and www.coala.global) and her ongoing work is intended to foster sound public policy to allow blockchain technologies to fulfill the great social and economic promise of its technical ingenuity. Her company, Seven Advisory, also supports diverse public and private clients in global regulations, licensing and compliance, government advocacy, and strategic market development for blockchain technologies.
Greg is Chief Policy Officer at ascribe.io and BigchainDB.com. Before joining ascribe, Greg spent five years as a lawyer with one of Canada’s top class action law firms, where he worked on class actions against Facebook and the Government of Canada alleging privacy violations, and against Teranet alleging copyright infringement. Greg is on the Board of Directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and the author of the BCCLA handbook on laptop and smartphone searches at the Canadian border.
Primavera De Filippi is a Permanent Researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, their potential to design new governance models and participatory decision-making, and the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).
Constance is one of the principal drivers of global, collaborative, multi-stakeholder initiatives (www.blockchainworkshops.org and www.coala.global) and her ongoing work is intended to foster sound public policy to allow blockchain technologies to fulfill the great social and economic promise of its technical ingenuity. Her company, Seven Advisory, also supports diverse public and private clients in global regulations, licensing and compliance, government advocacy, and strategic market development for blockchain technologies.
Greg is Chief Policy Officer at ascribe.io and BigchainDB.com. Before joining ascribe, Greg spent five years as a lawyer with one of Canada’s top class action law firms, where he worked on class actions against Facebook and the Government of Canada alleging privacy violations, and against Teranet alleging copyright infringement. Greg is on the Board of Directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and the author of the BCCLA handbook on laptop and smartphone searches at the Canadian border.
Web monetization and refactoring the Web Economy
The Internet’s ‘original sin’, as coined by Ethan Zuckerman, describes the current problem that there is no obvious way to monetize the web without workarounds such as advertisement, data selling or obtrusive paywalls. As a result we are starting to see the consequences of these models - ranging from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal to ad-blocker/ad-blocker-blocker wars between publishers.
Micropayments has often been discussed as a potential model to support content-creators and others such as Netflix have created subscription services that bundle content. However since these are often closed systems, they have often failed to capture the majority of content on the web, particularly for small-medium sized creators.
Coil uses the Interledger protocol to provide a third option outside of the aforementioned payment options. Through a flat rate subscription, Coil will be the first company to use Web Monetization (a new standard for how browsers can pay websites using Interledger) to pay out to websites in whatever currency they choose.
Web Monetization is a proposed browser API that uses ILP micropayments to monetize a site. It can be polyfilled by extensions, or can be implemented directly into an ILP-enabled browser. It is designed for continuous payments and to have minimal user interaction. As a result , we imagine that a variety of content can be paid for, ranging from static sites to video streaming.
Coil can essentially be fighting against the monopolization of the Web and kickstart a more diverse, healthier Internet.
Stefan is the Founder and President of Coil, a San Francisco based startup that wants to create a better business model for the Web. Prior to Coil, Stefan was a prominent figure in the blockchain movement. As an early Bitcoin contributor, he produced the popular “What is Bitcoin?” video, introducing millions of users to Bitcoin and created BitcoinJS, the first implementation of Bitcoin cryptography in the browser. As CTO and one of the first employees at Ripple, Stefan built new protocols for cross-border payments, now used by banks all over the world. He has also worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop Mojaloop, an open-source national payment switch that connects mobile wallets in developing markets.
Ben is CTO and Co-Founder at Coil, a startup that aims to fix monetization on the Web. In addition to Web Monetization, Ben has contributed to the design and implementation of Interledger, an interoperability protocol for money. Before Coil, Ben worked as an engineer at Ripple.
Andros is currently a software engineer at Coil, where he works on the flat rate monetization product across different platforms/devices and building Codius, Coil’s open hosting protocol. Previously he was a software engineer at Ripple.
Stefan is the Founder and President of Coil, a San Francisco based startup that wants to create a better business model for the Web. Prior to Coil, Stefan was a prominent figure in the blockchain movement. As an early Bitcoin contributor, he produced the popular “What is Bitcoin?” video, introducing millions of users to Bitcoin and created BitcoinJS, the first implementation of Bitcoin cryptography in the browser. As CTO and one of the first employees at Ripple, Stefan built new protocols for cross-border payments, now used by banks all over the world. He has also worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop Mojaloop, an open-source national payment switch that connects mobile wallets in developing markets.
Ben is CTO and Co-Founder at Coil, a startup that aims to fix monetization on the Web. In addition to Web Monetization, Ben has contributed to the design and implementation of Interledger, an interoperability protocol for money. Before Coil, Ben worked as an engineer at Ripple.
Andros is currently a software engineer at Coil, where he works on the flat rate monetization product across different platforms/devices and building Codius, Coil’s open hosting protocol. Previously he was a software engineer at Ripple.
The DID Universal Resolver is first major project of the 30+ members of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF). DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) are a foundational standard for decentralized, blockchain-based identity. A DID method is a spec that defines how DIDs are created, read, updated, and deleted (revoked) on a specific blockchain or distributed system. DID methods have been implemented for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Sovrin, IPFS, Veres One, and Blockstack. The Universal Resolver uses Docker-based modules to plug different DID methods into a single codebase. This session will cover the W3C DID specification, the architecture of the Universal Resolver, the primary features of different DID methods, and where the Universal Resolver fits in the fast-moving decentralized identity ecosystem.
Markus Sabadello has been a pioneer and leader in the field of digital identity for many years and has contributed to cutting-edge technologies that have emerged in this space. He has been an early participant of decentralization movements such as the Federated Social Web, Respect Network, and the FreedomBox. He has worked as an analyst and consultant at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the MIT Media Lab's Human Dynamics Group, at the World Economic Forum, and at the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. Markus has spoken at dozens of conferences and published papers about both the politics and technologies of digital identity. In 2015 he founded Danube Tech, a consulting and development company that contributes to Sovrin Foundation, the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and various self-sovereign identity projects around the world.
Markus Sabadello has been a pioneer and leader in the field of digital identity for many years and has contributed to cutting-edge technologies that have emerged in this space. He has been an early participant of decentralization movements such as the Federated Social Web, Respect Network, and the FreedomBox. He has worked as an analyst and consultant at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the MIT Media Lab's Human Dynamics Group, at the World Economic Forum, and at the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. Markus has spoken at dozens of conferences and published papers about both the politics and technologies of digital identity. In 2015 he founded Danube Tech, a consulting and development company that contributes to Sovrin Foundation, the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and various self-sovereign identity projects around the world.
Digital Democracy’s mission is to empower marginalized communities to
use technology to defend their rights. As technology becomes cheaper
and more accessible, we believe it can and should be used to bring
more voices to the table. Digital Democracy helps our partners achieve
transformative change and works toward a world where all people can
participate in decisions that govern their lives.
Over the past eight years, we’ve seen firsthand that change does not
come from technology, but from how people use it. Our local partners
represent marginalized communities around the globe. We have worked
with communities from Haiti to Burma to Peru. Working at the
intersection of human rights and technology, Dd supports local leaders
with the strategic use of tools to catalyze community-driven
solutions.
Our process is both technology and issue agnostic – that is, not bound
to one platform or cause. We recognize that our partners’ issues are
diverse, but many of the challenges they face are shared. Using a
listening-based, human-centered design process, Dd helps to strengthen
our partners’ access, communication, resources and reach.
Equipped with the tools they need, our partners become better
storytellers, advocates and leaders. Together, Dd and its partners are
empowering communities to become their own voice for change. Digital
Democracy works in three primary ways:
Direct Implementation: We train communities to use basic digital
tools, such as cameras, mobile phones, maps and data collection tools.
We conduct ongoing support and capacity building for our partners
whose projects are designed to defend their human & environmental
rights.
Tool Building: We co-create tech solutions with our partners and help
them adapt existing tools to their needs. We also collaborate with
other technologists to support the greater eco-system of open-source
tools which can support our partners’ needs.
Local-to-Global Engagement: We scale our impact beyond our direct
partners. Through events, workshops, and tool-kits, we build bridges
between our work and the work of advocates and decision-makers around
the world.
Karissa McKelvey is an open source software developer, writer, project manager, and activist supporting an equitable web. She develops and maintains a wide variety of tools and services for Digital Democracy. She is also a board member of Code for Science and Society. Formerly a data scientist, her work studying online political communication resulted in multiple peer-reviewed papers and press in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to an experienced software and web developer, she leads teams to success with diverse projects in academia, non-profits, and industry. In her spare time she plays the trumpet and volunteers at The Debt Collective as a technology consultant.
Stephen Whitmore works with Digital Democracy to build useful open tools that raise the bar of the commons, especially for marginalized communities.
Stephen creates and maintains open technology that enables self-determination; honors people, not profit; is sustainable for the communities that adopt it; and is maximally accessible regardless of resources or technical background. Stephen is based in Oakland, CA, USA.
Karissa McKelvey is an open source software developer, writer, project manager, and activist supporting an equitable web. She develops and maintains a wide variety of tools and services for Digital Democracy. She is also a board member of Code for Science and Society. Formerly a data scientist, her work studying online political communication resulted in multiple peer-reviewed papers and press in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to an experienced software and web developer, she leads teams to success with diverse projects in academia, non-profits, and industry. In her spare time she plays the trumpet and volunteers at The Debt Collective as a technology consultant.
Stephen Whitmore works with Digital Democracy to build useful open tools that raise the bar of the commons, especially for marginalized communities.
Stephen creates and maintains open technology that enables self-determination; honors people, not profit; is sustainable for the communities that adopt it; and is maximally accessible regardless of resources or technical background. Stephen is based in Oakland, CA, USA.
Accelerating adoption of distributed applications (dApps) easier with the introduction of EOS blockchain platform by providing an operating-system-like set of services and functions that dapps can make use of. EOSdAppStore adds value to the plaform by provideing services to make the developer experience safer, cheaper to deploy, support, and promote
The idea behind EOS is to bring together the best features and promises of the various smart contract technologies out there (e.g. security of Bitcoin, computing support of Ethereum) in one simple to use, massively scalable dapplication platform for the everyday user to empower the impending blockchain economy.
Implementer of BIOS, DOS, WinCE, Windows for embedded devices
Founded Special Computing, integrating thousands of embedded platforms
Microsoft MVP (embedded) for 12 years
Microprocessor Reference Platform Design, training, and certification
Organizer of Community groups (Makers of Phoenix with 3000+ members)
Founded EOSdAppStore to accelerate adoption of distributed applications
Implementer of BIOS, DOS, WinCE, Windows for embedded devices
Founded Special Computing, integrating thousands of embedded platforms
Microsoft MVP (embedded) for 12 years
Microprocessor Reference Platform Design, training, and certification
Organizer of Community groups (Makers of Phoenix with 3000+ members)
Founded EOSdAppStore to accelerate adoption of distributed applications
Mozilla
Browser extensions with libdweb
You've built a distributed application platform that will change everything... but where is everyone? Browser extensions can lower the barrier to entry for early-adopters and developers to try your project.
We’re developing a set of experimental APIs for building dweb applications using the WebExtension framework in Firefox - protocol handlers, TCP/UDP sockets, filesystem access and more.
Come by to see demos and talk to us about what you need to build dweb apps in browsers.
Prototype in the browser to experiment with what the future of the web can look like.
Andre is a Mozilla TechSpeaker focused on decentralization technologies and is an active member of the Secure Scuttlebutt community. In the recent years he published books about Firefox OS and managed a Web Literacy program in vulnerable neighborhoods of Rio. He is a firm believer in empowerment through technological experimentation. His home is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives with his wife, cats and more IoT boards than he can ever put into use.
Dietrich Ayala is a developer advocate at Mozilla, the non-profit makers of the Firefox web browser, where he's been working for internet freedom and shipping open source software to hundreds of millions of people for over a decade.
Andre is a Mozilla TechSpeaker focused on decentralization technologies and is an active member of the Secure Scuttlebutt community. In the recent years he published books about Firefox OS and managed a Web Literacy program in vulnerable neighborhoods of Rio. He is a firm believer in empowerment through technological experimentation. His home is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives with his wife, cats and more IoT boards than he can ever put into use.
Dietrich Ayala is a developer advocate at Mozilla, the non-profit makers of the Firefox web browser, where he's been working for internet freedom and shipping open source software to hundreds of millions of people for over a decade.
GIF 1987 file format born to make history
GIF 1989 animation capability extends GIF
GIF LOOPS play magic moments for eternity
GIF SIMPLE easy to copy paste play
GIF 30 years old already, trillions of plays
GIF DISTRIBUTION out the wazoo already
GIF 2018 BILLIONS serve daily 24/7/365
GIF 2030 BAZILLIONS to serve future, how?
GIF SECRET containers tiny.cc/gifspec
GIF CONTAINERS plaintext application comments
GIF PLAINTEXT data like yaml hash etc
GIF APPLICATION in/out plaintext/data
GIF COMMENT wut?
GIF PROGRAM upgrade GIF how?
GIF CAPABILITIES like security and stuff
GIF AUDIO sound sync
GIF VISUAL switch pix for any sound
GIF TEXT sync vocals, transcripts
GIF WIKI sync definition context
GIF LINK sync ordered context lists
GIF HYPERCARD user programmable
GIF BET on programs you want
GIF QUORUM SENSING crowd power bet pools
GIF LEDGER distribute consensus
GIF PICOPAY use floating decimal point
GIF MAKE MEANING with skin in game
GIF OWN program
GIF MEMORY superabundant local cache storage
GIF 512GB solid state SD card $150 2018
GIF PARADIGM SHIFT to abundant local memory
GIF ENDLESS OS for example
GIF TRUST immutable verification chains
GIF NETWORK more open, programmable
GIF NAMEDATA NETWORK LAYER for example
GIF SECURE where all packets self-certify
GIF SIMPLE way more general network model
GIF FAST instant info, no latency
GIF AUDIOVISUAL high bandwidth communication
GIF ATTENTION trade truly scarce resource
GIF ECONOMY meme alignment
GIF SUPERDISTRIBUTION upgrade 'I, Pencil'
GIF PLAYER OWN GAME tiny.cc/deehock
GIF github.com/ggif @dukecrawford
Duke Crawford figured out how to sync audio with GIF. He syncs GIF with audio visual wiki context at th.ai and thinks GIF can learn to host an attention economy where players own the game.
email: duke@th.ai twitter: @dukecrawford.
Duke Crawford figured out how to sync audio with GIF. He syncs GIF with audio visual wiki context at th.ai and thinks GIF can learn to host an attention economy where players own the game.
email: duke@th.ai twitter: @dukecrawford.
GUN is an open-source decentralized database service that allows developers to build fast peer-to-peer applications that will work, even when their users are offline. It has raised over $1.5 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates. Other investors include Salesforce’s Marc Benioff through Aloha Angels, as well as Boost VC, CRCM and other angel investors.
The project originated 4 years ago, mostly because the founder saw the database behind his early projects as a single point of failure. The idea behind GUN is to offer a decentralized database system that offers real-time updates with eventual consistency.
One can use GUN to build a peer-to-peer database or opt for a multi-master setup. In this scheme, a cloud-based server simply becomes another peer in the network. GUN users get tools for conflict resolution and other core features out of the box and the data is automatically distributed between peers. When users go offline, data is cached locally and then merged back into this database once they come online.
Today, the system has been used to build a decentralized version of Reddit that can handle a few million uniques per month and a similarly decentralized YouTube clone.
Mark is a mathematician turned programmer. He runs a VC backed Open Source company and has traveled to 30 countries. The diverse cultures he has experienced fuels his passion for learning, sharing, and creating open technology freely for all.
Priya is an Indian-born, San Francisco based entrepreneur. She has built revenue-generating ventures across India and US in open-source hardware, real estate, and software domains. She was the founding Managing Director for Arduino in India. She is the author of the book "Arduino for Kids" and is also a visiting faculty teaching Rapid-prototyping with Fondazione Agnelli in Turin, Italy. She is now working full time in the dweb space, with GUN as a core team member.
Bitcoin's first collaborator. Creator of Identi.fi and head of identity @GUN. Voluntaryist.
Mark is a mathematician turned programmer. He runs a VC backed Open Source company and has traveled to 30 countries. The diverse cultures he has experienced fuels his passion for learning, sharing, and creating open technology freely for all.
Priya is an Indian-born, San Francisco based entrepreneur. She has built revenue-generating ventures across India and US in open-source hardware, real estate, and software domains. She was the founding Managing Director for Arduino in India. She is the author of the book "Arduino for Kids" and is also a visiting faculty teaching Rapid-prototyping with Fondazione Agnelli in Turin, Italy. She is now working full time in the dweb space, with GUN as a core team member.
Bitcoin's first collaborator. Creator of Identi.fi and head of identity @GUN. Voluntaryist.
Standards for a Self-Sovereign Technology Stack
Trustee.AI innovates in two aspects of personal data management: decentralized governance and a standards-based self-sovereign technology stack, using blockchain-based decentralized identifiers (DID), W3C Verifiable Credentials, and User Managed Access (UMA) authorization standards. Decentralized governance and self-sovereign technology are linked because in the case where the underlying infrastructure is fully standardized, the only grounds for competition or differentiation are in governance structure and policies. . These concepts stand in contrast to first-generation personal information management that is typically not standards-based and is governed by a central authority..
Health records will be our first use-case as an alternative to current governance practice of how data is used and monetized by state (typical in EU), hospital (typical in US), or vendor (e.g. Google or IQVIA) oligopolies. Trustee.AI represents a fourth alternative with technology as fiduciary to each patient. Our initial proof-of-concept is a health record for the homeless in collaboration with Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare Network. The patients will have full control over access policies for records that include allergies, current medications, diagnoses, encounter notes, labs, imaging, insurance status, emergency contacts, and provider lists. Public blockchains help manage access credentials and accountability independent of any particular institution.
Expected audience: The talk will not be particularly technical. It will show our reference implementation of UMA, uPort, and FHIR health records in a context familiar to anyone who has had some medical encounters. The talk will address challenges in governance for self-sovereign technologies and personal data management, and these topics are relevant in many domains, not just healthcare..
Notes: Adrian Gropper, MD is the main presenter. As a long-time participant in Rebooting Web of Trust, W3C, and UMA standards. All of the Trustee.AI code is open source on GitHub.
Presenter: Adrian Gropper, MD
Patient Privacy Rights Foundation
Adrian Gropper, MD is CTO of the non-profit Patient Privacy Rights Foundation where he brings training as an engineer from MIT (ME ‘74) and physician from Harvard Medical School (MD ‘78) followed by a career as a medical device entrepreneur including launch of AMICAS, a major radiology PACS business, out of MGH. More recently, his paper won a prize at ONC’s 2016 Blockchain Health competition. His current project, HIE of One Trustee, uses public blockchains, standards and open source software to enable patient-controlled independent health records that can last a lifetime. He is active in blockchain standards development for identity, credentials, and reputation.
Policies and practices about control of patient health records is a growing issue for clinical, research, and economic reasons. It directly impacts the work of HHS to implement the interoperability mandates of the 21st Century CURES Act, the work of NIH to implement the All of US research initiative, the CMS API into the Medicare records, and the VA systems APIs with private-sector EHRs and health information exchanges. Patient health records are also the essential feedstock for machine learning and artificial intelligence in medicine as in this very short talk to the 40th reunion class at Harvard Medical School http://bit.ly/HMS78Talk .
Adrian Gropper, MD is CTO of the non-profit Patient Privacy Rights Foundation where he brings training as an engineer from MIT (ME ‘74) and physician from Harvard Medical School (MD ‘78) followed by a career as a medical device entrepreneur including launch of AMICAS, a major radiology PACS business, out of MGH. More recently, his paper won a prize at ONC’s 2016 Blockchain Health competition. His current project, HIE of One Trustee, uses public blockchains, standards and open source software to enable patient-controlled independent health records that can last a lifetime. He is active in blockchain standards development for identity, credentials, and reputation.
Policies and practices about control of patient health records is a growing issue for clinical, research, and economic reasons. It directly impacts the work of HHS to implement the interoperability mandates of the 21st Century CURES Act, the work of NIH to implement the All of US research initiative, the CMS API into the Medicare records, and the VA systems APIs with private-sector EHRs and health information exchanges. Patient health records are also the essential feedstock for machine learning and artificial intelligence in medicine as in this very short talk to the 40th reunion class at Harvard Medical School http://bit.ly/HMS78Talk .
Advancing composability in P2P software utilizing DHT solutions to build an agent-centric internet.
A demo and open discussion on how agent-centric models in P2P applications can lead to greater composability, and how reinventing "old" technologies can unleash new transformative shifts in social coordination, economic outcomes, and realizing shared visions on a global scale.
Jean Russell and Sami Van Ness of Holo/Holochain will host small rolling demos of DHT-based P2P software solutions, and then open the floor for small person-to-person physical exercises which will replicate the functions of a DHT using real-life social coordination.
From there Jean will host lightingtalk-style discussions on using P2P agent-centric applications to layer innovations into “social plugins” which enable new emerging ways of sharing resources, unleashing new forms of wealth, and distributing data, goods and services without centralized middlemen.
In parallel Sami will host more technical lightningtalk-style discussions on using P2P agent-centric applications to layer innovations into software modules utilizing WebAssmembly, Rust, and the Unity Engine to transform what we think of as “browser plugins” or “applications”, and even how we think of modeling traditional business software like calendars when the restrictions of 2D are removed.
About us:
Jean Russell and Sami Van Ness both work for Holo, a distributed cloud hosting platform built on Holochain, which rewards users in cryptocurrency for giving up part of their devices’ spare resources to host distributed applications. Holochain is an Open-source DHT-based blockchain alternative and, infrastructure technology for distributed peer-to-peer applications, and Holo is the flagship application to be built on top of it. The purpose of Holo is to act as a bridge between the budding community of distributed Holochain apps, and the current centralized web. By creating an ecosystem and currency that enable distributed hosting services provided by peers, Holo brings access to distributed applications to the familiar web browser.
Although we are both representing the company while here, this talk requires no knowledge of our products or services, and is aimed at a more general audience from technical to non-technical. The concepts that make up our platform are not new, they are recompositions of existing technologies, and that composability is actually the core of our talk.
Sami Van Ness is a veteran Digital Marketer and Full-Stack Web Developer with over a decade in experience in data-driven marketing automation and brand identity management working with organizations such as Smuckers, Jif, Folgers, Sony, Best Buy, Porsche, Exxon Mobil, and more. Through an interest in cryptography and data privacy she has been involved in the cryptocurrency space for over 5 years. Prior to Holo, she did initial brand identity prototyping, web asset management, white paper and logo design for the project Promether (promether.com), and web asset management for Demonsaw(demonsaw.com).
Cultivator of Flows, Jean Russell passionately transforms ideas into thriving organizations, always looking for the highest leverage points for us to shift from the world we have toward the world we want. Jean is a culture hacker, facilitator, speaker, and writer creating the future today at the intersections of technology, money, identity, and social transformation. Currently her culture hacking comes in the form of leadership within Holo and Holochain, transformative technologies for building the next internet with an eye toward building the economy for the next era.
As a founder of the thrivability movement, Jean plays with social innovators, technologists, and edge-riders from Malmo to Melbourne, and London to San Francisco. Demonstrating collaboration, she curated, "Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch" in 2010. She wrote "Thrivability: Breakthroughs for a World That Works" (Triarchy Press, 2013). Then she published, with Herman Wagter, "Cultivating Flows: How Ideas Become Thriving Organizations" (Triarchy Press, 2016).
Sami Van Ness is a veteran Digital Marketer and Full-Stack Web Developer with over a decade in experience in data-driven marketing automation and brand identity management working with organizations such as Smuckers, Jif, Folgers, Sony, Best Buy, Porsche, Exxon Mobil, and more. Through an interest in cryptography and data privacy she has been involved in the cryptocurrency space for over 5 years. Prior to Holo, she did initial brand identity prototyping, web asset management, white paper and logo design for the project Promether (promether.com), and web asset management for Demonsaw(demonsaw.com).
Cultivator of Flows, Jean Russell passionately transforms ideas into thriving organizations, always looking for the highest leverage points for us to shift from the world we have toward the world we want. Jean is a culture hacker, facilitator, speaker, and writer creating the future today at the intersections of technology, money, identity, and social transformation. Currently her culture hacking comes in the form of leadership within Holo and Holochain, transformative technologies for building the next internet with an eye toward building the economy for the next era.
As a founder of the thrivability movement, Jean plays with social innovators, technologists, and edge-riders from Malmo to Melbourne, and London to San Francisco. Demonstrating collaboration, she curated, "Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch" in 2010. She wrote "Thrivability: Breakthroughs for a World That Works" (Triarchy Press, 2013). Then she published, with Herman Wagter, "Cultivating Flows: How Ideas Become Thriving Organizations" (Triarchy Press, 2016).
InterPlanetary Wayback (IPWB)
A Distributed and Persistent Archival Replay System Using IPFS
Sawood Alam, Mat Kelly, Michele C. Weigle, and Michael L. Nelson
Old Dominion University, Department of Computer Science, Norfolk, VA - 23529
{salam,mkelly,mweigle,mln}@cs.odu.edu
InterPlanetary Wayback (IPWB) facilitates permanence and collaboration in web archives by disseminating the contents of WARC files into the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) network. IPFS is a peer-to-peer content-addressable file system that inherently allows deduplication and facilitates opt-in replication. IPWB splits the header and payload of WARC response records before disseminating into IPFS to leverage the deduplication, builds a CDXJ index with references to the IPFS hashes returns, and combines the header and payload from IPFS at the time of replay.
The figure above illustrates the indexing and replay process. The indexer extracts records from the WARC store one record at a time, splits each record into HTTP header and payload, stores the two pieces into IPFS, and generates a CDXJ record using the returned references and some other metadata from the WARC record. The replay receives request from users containing a lookup URI and optionally a datetime, queries for matching record in the CDXJ, fetches the corresponding header and payload from the IPFS Store (using references returned from the index record), combines them, and performs necessary transformation to build the response to the user. The software is available at https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb under MIT license.
Sawood Alam is a PhD Student of Computer Science at Old Dominion University, USA. Sawood received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Engineering from Jamia Millia Islamia, India in 2008 and his M.S. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, USA in 2013. His Master’s Thesis title was "HTTP Mailbox – Asynchronous Restful Communication". Sawood is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation titled, "A Framework of Web Archive Profiling for Efficient Memento Aggregation". Apart from his academic research in Web Science and Web Archiving field, he has a keen interest in various fields including Linux Containerization, Decentralized Web, Machine Learning, and solving technical challenges of Urdu and other Right-to-Left complex script languages. Sawood actively follows latest Web technologies.
Sawood Alam is a PhD Student of Computer Science at Old Dominion University, USA. Sawood received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Engineering from Jamia Millia Islamia, India in 2008 and his M.S. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, USA in 2013. His Master’s Thesis title was "HTTP Mailbox – Asynchronous Restful Communication". Sawood is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation titled, "A Framework of Web Archive Profiling for Efficient Memento Aggregation". Apart from his academic research in Web Science and Web Archiving field, he has a keen interest in various fields including Linux Containerization, Decentralized Web, Machine Learning, and solving technical challenges of Urdu and other Right-to-Left complex script languages. Sawood actively follows latest Web technologies.
Introducing ixo: The Blockchain for Impact
Problem space:
We want to fundamentally address a) the dearth of high quality data measuring impact, and b) the consequent high costs and low liquidity of impact investing and results-based finance instruments.
The ixo solution
We enable any project to cost-effectively collect, verify and measure its impact, enabling funding to be linked to Proof of Impact. We provide a shared data layer and audit trail that documents claims about service delivery and outcomes. Verified impact data is tokenized as digital assets called Impact Tokens, which represent proof of achievement of a project-defined impact metric, milestone or outcome.
Impact Tokens can be traded and exchanged for funding in a variety of contexts:
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Impact Token triggers payment clause in a service contract tied to proof of delivery of vaccines
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Impact Tokens triggers outcome payment in an impact bond tied to proof of outcome
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Impact Token may be a carbon token representing a carbon offset which can be traded in the carbon markets
Impact Tokens may open new markets for trading new forms of impact assets such as health tokens or gender tokens, as quantified standards and methodologies are adopted in other fields. The funder or purchaser of the Impact Tokens would receive access to each project’s underlying impact data, providing greater transparency and accountability.
In the same way that Ethereum is a platform for user-generated ERC20 tokens, ixo is a protocol for user-generated Impact Tokens, which enable impact data to be shareable, tradeable and valuable. Imagine an ETF comprised of a portfolio of Impact Tokens, or an impact exchange where participants trade liquid impact bonds. Impact investing can become a true financial asset class, unlocking greater capital for projects. Marketplaces for impact data will grow, leading to better program optimizations.
Key functions of the ixo Protocol:
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Data collection using Web3C standardized data templates called impact claims, which are cryptographically signed using decentralized identifiers (DIDs). This allows data to be interoperable across databases. Data is accountable as it resolves to identifiers while preserving privacy. Data is collected from a variety of interfaces e.g. mobile, IoT, data oracles, drones.
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Scaling of impact evaluation through use of data triangulation and software algorithms.
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Global Impact Ledger that allows anyone to see and search high level project-based impact data.
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Tokenization of verified impact data which enables the data to be monetized, shared or traded.
Why the ixo matters:
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Audit trail and shared data layer for accountability and tracking of impact “value chain”
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Richer data and greater transparency increases the fundamental value of impact investments and results-based finance instruments like carbon offsets and impact bonds
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Impact Tokens can have better liquidity and lower transaction costs through peer-to-peer trading
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Tokenization can spawn new asset class creation and new markets for social finance, unlocking greater capital to fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals
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Access controls to data, which may contain personal identifying information, in order to be compliant with data privacy laws e.g. GDPR in EU
Traction:
Our first project in South Africa, Amply, was UNICEF’s first blockchain investment, which has, since November 2016, tokenized more than 60,000 pre-school attendance records that are exchanged for government subsidies. We have been awarded technical partner with the first social impact bond in South Africa to fund home-based education services. We are working with UBS Optimus Foundation on tokenizing an impact bond for girls education in India. We are also working with Gold Standard Foundation to originate carbon tokens from cookstove projects using IoT sensors. We also developed a mobile identity SDK with Microsoft that enables anyone to create digital identities.
Additional info:
1) Website: ixo.network
2) Fast Company article
3) Podcast where Amply is featured as UNICEF's first blockchain investment
4) Podcast discussing idea of impact tokens
5) Our Github where we make all our code open source
6) Our white paper executive summary (non-technical)
7) Our full technical whitepaper
8) Our Medium blog
Fennie is a lawyer turned entrepreneur in the blockchain field, as cofounder of ixo, which is a blockchain protocol for scaling impact measurement and tokenizing any project’s impact data into digital assets that can be funded, traded or exchanged.
Fennie is a US-qualified securities lawyer, who practiced in New York and London. When not working on ixo, she is involved in legal advocacy for the emergent token economy, as an advisor to New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim and the New York City Economic Development Corporation on blockchain affairs, as well as working group coordinator at COALA, a cross-disciplinary blockchain technology policy group.
She started her career at JPMorgan. In between Wall Street and law school, she founded a legal services non-profit in Uganda. She holds a law degree from Columbia, and degrees in business and legal studies from Berkeley.
Fennie is a lawyer turned entrepreneur in the blockchain field, as cofounder of ixo, which is a blockchain protocol for scaling impact measurement and tokenizing any project’s impact data into digital assets that can be funded, traded or exchanged.
Fennie is a US-qualified securities lawyer, who practiced in New York and London. When not working on ixo, she is involved in legal advocacy for the emergent token economy, as an advisor to New York State Assemblyman Ron Kim and the New York City Economic Development Corporation on blockchain affairs, as well as working group coordinator at COALA, a cross-disciplinary blockchain technology policy group.
She started her career at JPMorgan. In between Wall Street and law school, she founded a legal services non-profit in Uganda. She holds a law degree from Columbia, and degrees in business and legal studies from Berkeley.
Jolocom uses blockchain and other decentralized technologies to build a virtual infrastructure that supports self-sovereign identity management by any subject, entity, or object connected to a network.
The open source protocol is a universal framework for interactions involving identity verification over the internet and is designed to drive adoption of self-sovereign identity at global scale as a common resource. Anyone and anything with an identity - companies, consumers, public institutions, state citizens, machines - benefits from a system that allows subjects of identity to control and truly own their digital selves. Jolocom’s protocol for self-sovereign identity management finally makes it possible. Our protocol will manifest the following activities related to digital identity management:
● creating a self-sovereign identity for use by humans, organizations, and machines;
● attaching meaningful information to identities in the form of verifiable credentials;
● easily requesting and consuming verified information about identities in an automated fashion.
The vast majority of digital identities in existence today are not interoperable. That means there are currently millions of digital identity systems siloing personal data that serve no utility outside a single, isolated service environment. This system makes sensitive information vulnerable to hacks, which can cost a company billions, a government an election, and an individual his life and reputation. It’s time for a new system, one that fosters healthy, productive relationships between us and our data.
Digital identities created using Jolocom’s protocol are decentralized, making them portable: subjects of identity can carry their digital selves with them at all times for use across an unlimited number of networks and applications. Our model for digital identity effectively prevents a number of problems inherent to solutions employing centralized management, such as siloing sensitive user data on private servers (conducive to massive data breaches), redundancy of identity data and verification processes, and captive personal data. There’s no limit to the number and scope of specialized software implementations our infrastructure can support, making the protocol an invaluable utility to businesses and consumers alike.
These product features set Jolocom apart from other identity management solutions on the market that effectively lock customers into relying on a standalone service that issues them their digital identity. An identity created with Jolocom’s protocol can
persist across different networks and service environments - that’s the key to a smart identity system.
With a team of just seven full-time employees, we have since 2014 led a wide array of implementation projects using and informing Jolocom’s protocol and advanced several influential research studies concerning identity management (self-sovereign solutions in particular). An early contributing member of AGILE, a European Commission Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation project, Jolocom provided specifications for machine interactions in IoT environments. We partnered with Fraunhofer FOKUS to conduct research on identity on the blockchain for the public sector. As part of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs blockchain working group, Jolocom successfully built and implemented the identity layer of a prototype operating stack service that allows developers to build a decentralized backend in a matter of minutes; that prototype won Bosch Connected World 2018 logistics challenge.
In fact, we already offer a mobile identity management application that lets smartphone owners meaningfully interact with other people, services, and connected objects using our protocol; an alpha version of the Jolocom SmartWallet is available for Android devices (iOS forthcoming).
To find out more about Jolocom and our work in digital identity and decentralization, visit our website or check out our code.
Projects we integrate with at DWeb: Ethereum, IPFS, BigchainDB, DID & VC standards (DIF)
Joachim Lohkamp is an entrepreneur and tech-enthusiast with a heart for activism. He is obsessed with knowledge, change and innovation. Currently, he is Founder and CEO of Jolocom, a Berlin-based startup building decentralized tools that lets you generate your own digital identity to assist linkage and attribution of data. Besides that Joachim is a connector for Ouishare, currently curating the content for the Decentralization & Blockchain track of the next Ouishare Fest in Paris. Also he organizes GETDcent and is an active member of the Agora Collective in Berlin.
Eugeniu is a full stack developer at Jolocom. His passion lies in Self sovereign identity systems and architectures. He designed the architecture of both the Jolocom protocol and smart wallet application. His experience stretches from blockchain technology (Ethereum, IPFS) to React, Redux, Reflux, Express, among others. Eugeniu is leading also Jolocom in the Horizon 2020 initiative named AGILE of the EU, building an adaptive IOT gateway for managing devices and visualizing data in real time and exporting data to cloud providers and personal data stores.
Natascha is a full stack developer at Jolocom (React, React Native, JavaScript, Typescript) and on decentralized technologies (Ethereum, IPFS). She has several years of experience in leadership and project management. Beyond this Natascha has 7 years of working experience in the energy sector with a focus on the intersection of IT and energy related topics.
Joachim Lohkamp is an entrepreneur and tech-enthusiast with a heart for activism. He is obsessed with knowledge, change and innovation. Currently, he is Founder and CEO of Jolocom, a Berlin-based startup building decentralized tools that lets you generate your own digital identity to assist linkage and attribution of data. Besides that Joachim is a connector for Ouishare, currently curating the content for the Decentralization & Blockchain track of the next Ouishare Fest in Paris. Also he organizes GETDcent and is an active member of the Agora Collective in Berlin.
Eugeniu is a full stack developer at Jolocom. His passion lies in Self sovereign identity systems and architectures. He designed the architecture of both the Jolocom protocol and smart wallet application. His experience stretches from blockchain technology (Ethereum, IPFS) to React, Redux, Reflux, Express, among others. Eugeniu is leading also Jolocom in the Horizon 2020 initiative named AGILE of the EU, building an adaptive IOT gateway for managing devices and visualizing data in real time and exporting data to cloud providers and personal data stores.
Natascha is a full stack developer at Jolocom (React, React Native, JavaScript, Typescript) and on decentralized technologies (Ethereum, IPFS). She has several years of experience in leadership and project management. Beyond this Natascha has 7 years of working experience in the energy sector with a focus on the intersection of IT and energy related topics.
Knapsack for Hope is a satellite filecasting technology that uses common satellite equipment to deliver digital content without relying on access to the Internet. It distributes content that would otherwise be inaccessible to those who have limited or no internet access due to censorship, internet cost, living in a remote location, government-backed shutdowns, or unreliable technical infrastructure. Furthermore, it requires no hardware other than the conventional home TV satellite set-top box and a free-to-air satellite dish.
Digital content and data is uploaded to a satellite and then encoded on a TV channel to users’ satellite TV dish. Users record this TV channel from their satellite set-top box to a USB drive. Upon transferring the USB to a smartphone or computer, Knapsack software decodes the transmitted content from the recorded TV channel to its original form, whether that be PDFs, JPEGs, HTMLs, MP3s, or others.
Knapsack is currently deployed in Iran and the Middle East as Toosheh - the Persian word for “knapsack.” Over 150,000 known users have downloaded Toosheh as means to gain access to content otherwise censored by the Iranian government. However the beauty of the technology lies in its ability to be adapted to a myriad number of environments (e.g. refugee camps or disaster recovering regions) and technologies (e.g. Peer-to-Peer sharing). In addition, Knapsack has successfully passed the first round of Mozilla’s NSF Wireless Challenge.
Mehdi Yahyanejad is founder of Balatarin.com, the largest user-generated news website in Persian and a crucial information source in the 2009 pro-democracy protest movement in Iran. He is the co-founder and director of NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit organization that delivers curated digital content via satellite to regions of the world with limited internet access. He is also a researcher at USC researching new anti-censorship technologies.
Sarah Bowers works as an Outreach Coordinator for NetFreedom Pioneers. With a background in international education and nonprofit work, Sarah’s passion lies in cross-cultural inquiry and analyzing the ethics and effectiveness of international development efforts. With these interests she has joined NFP in rethinking the social impact of technology.
Evan (AliReza) Firoozi is a former student activist and journalist who was imprisoned by the Iranian government for more than a year, six months of which he spent in solitary confinement. He has collaborated with several organizations and universities to translate to Farsi technical articles and applications related to internet security, privacy, and anti-censorship. While simultaneously pursuing his education in Computer Science, Evan currently works at NetFreedom Pioneers on the development and implementation of Toosheh/Knapsack, a service and application focused on the distribution of data through satellite connection.
Shadi Sharifi is an Iranian lawyer who practiced family law for four years before moving to the United States. Shadi is an innovator and coordinates NetFreedom Pioneers’ Toranj project - an android application that supports those at risk of experiencing violent or abusive circumstances.
Camelon Baker currently works as the Senior Engineer at NetFreedom Pioneers. He has been responsible for the development and implementation of NFP’s primary project: Toosheh, an offline technology that distributes content through satellite datacasting. Camelon has been a computer engineer for the past 20 years.
Mehdi Yahyanejad is founder of Balatarin.com, the largest user-generated news website in Persian and a crucial information source in the 2009 pro-democracy protest movement in Iran. He is the co-founder and director of NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit organization that delivers curated digital content via satellite to regions of the world with limited internet access. He is also a researcher at USC researching new anti-censorship technologies.
Sarah Bowers works as an Outreach Coordinator for NetFreedom Pioneers. With a background in international education and nonprofit work, Sarah’s passion lies in cross-cultural inquiry and analyzing the ethics and effectiveness of international development efforts. With these interests she has joined NFP in rethinking the social impact of technology.
Evan (AliReza) Firoozi is a former student activist and journalist who was imprisoned by the Iranian government for more than a year, six months of which he spent in solitary confinement. He has collaborated with several organizations and universities to translate to Farsi technical articles and applications related to internet security, privacy, and anti-censorship. While simultaneously pursuing his education in Computer Science, Evan currently works at NetFreedom Pioneers on the development and implementation of Toosheh/Knapsack, a service and application focused on the distribution of data through satellite connection.
Shadi Sharifi is an Iranian lawyer who practiced family law for four years before moving to the United States. Shadi is an innovator and coordinates NetFreedom Pioneers’ Toranj project - an android application that supports those at risk of experiencing violent or abusive circumstances.
Camelon Baker currently works as the Senior Engineer at NetFreedom Pioneers. He has been responsible for the development and implementation of NFP’s primary project: Toosheh, an offline technology that distributes content through satellite datacasting. Camelon has been a computer engineer for the past 20 years.
MaidSafe was founded by David Irvine in 2006 with the mission to improve privacy and security for everyone on the planet. The solution is the SAFE (Secure Access For Everyone) Network, the world’s first autonomous data network that prioritises the security and privacy of users’ data, managing all our information without human intervention.
The SAFE Network
We need an autonomous network - one that manages all our data and communications without any human intervention or intermediaries.
The simplest way to think about an autonomous data network is one that configures itself. All data on the Network is automatically split into chunks and encrypted (utilising self-encryption) before being uploaded and then stored at random locations selected by the Network alone. There's no need for an IT administrator. Instead, nodes are free to join the network anonymously around the world. Upon joining, each node is moved into and out of small groups at random by the Network, again with no human intervention. These Close Groups now work together and make decisions on behalf of the Network (such as where to store data, who has authority to access data etc.).
The SAFE Network is also self-optimising as it creates additional copies of popular data in order to ensure greater availability of popular data requests. This feature also enables SAFE websites to actually speed up as they receive more visitors - unlike today's web where sites slow down, or even crash, if they receive too many visitors. Should the network split for any reason, for example through loss of power, it will merge as power is restored, and it will correct faults, such as detecting corrupt data chunks and automatically replacing them with good copies as a result of the networks ongoing data integrity checks.
Our design approach has been inspired by the humble ant whose millions of years of evolution influenced the network’s design. Ant colonies exhibit complex and highly organised behaviour without a central authority based on a simple rule set whereby each ant fulfils different duties based on the needs of the colony. Nodes on the SAFE Network function in a similar manner carrying out different functions based on the types of messages they receive.
The ant colony shows us that this self-managing and self-organising behaviour is possible on a massive scale. Building a Network that doesn't require humans overseeing operations is necessary because humans at our worst get tired, emotional and make mistakes. Many data breaches are caused by human error and attackers rely on human interaction to carry out attacks. Human error has also played a significant part in problems with Silicon Valley’s best known companies. Not only are humans prone to mistakes, it also reminds us that we rely on service providers to get access to our accounts and our data. We do not really own our information - access to our own data can be removed at any time by the providers either mistakenly or at the request of others. This is what we're looking to change with the SAFE Network.
Security
The SAFE Network is one in which data cannot be deleted, changed, corrupted, and/or accessed without the data owner’s consent. This is possible because we are removing humans from the management of data so that storage locations are unknown to anyone but the network, whilst the user cannot be identified.
Any service where data is stored on servers, federated servers, owned storage locations, or on identifiable nodes, cannot ensure the security of data and brings us no closer to real unfettered ownership of our data. This also includes blockchain-based solutions.
Autonomous things are already starting to have a huge benefit across a number of industries and we are just scratching the surface in finding out how they can positively impact upon our relationship with our data. Rather than making data more secure, the human element unfortunately has the opposite effect and can lead to data loss, theft, inaccessibility and a fundamental lack of ownership.
A change for the better, for us all - this is what we're building with the SAFE Network.
David has in excess of 23 years experience in IT and 15 years running companies. He is the designer of one of the World’s largest private networks (Saudi Aramco, over $300M). He is an experienced Project Manager and has been involved in start up businesses since 1995 and has provided business consultancy to corporates and SMEs in many sectors. He has presented technology at Google (Seattle), British Computer Society (Christmas Lecture) and many others. He has spent many years as a lifeboat Helmsman and is a keen sailor when time permits. David is also a published author on papers in the fields of complex networking, distributed computing and cryptography related technologies. His is the author of 30 patent applications in the field of computer networking.
Having graduated in Aerospace Engineering and Astronautics CTO Vivekanand Rajkumar worked as a Server Specialist at IBM before joining MaidSafe. He has extensive expense leading UX teams as well as being a certified Mobile platform engineer. Viv’s experience with IBM and his 6 years at MaidSafe ensure that he is capable of leading all aspects of development. In his time at the company he has been pivotal in refining development processes and helping to build the development team.
Nick Lambert, started his working life in project management roles with IBM, before a change in tack led him into senior marketing positions with a diverse range of companies. He has co-authored papers on decentralised networks, presented at several international conferences and holds an MSc in Marketing from Strathclyde University.
David has in excess of 23 years experience in IT and 15 years running companies. He is the designer of one of the World’s largest private networks (Saudi Aramco, over $300M). He is an experienced Project Manager and has been involved in start up businesses since 1995 and has provided business consultancy to corporates and SMEs in many sectors. He has presented technology at Google (Seattle), British Computer Society (Christmas Lecture) and many others. He has spent many years as a lifeboat Helmsman and is a keen sailor when time permits. David is also a published author on papers in the fields of complex networking, distributed computing and cryptography related technologies. His is the author of 30 patent applications in the field of computer networking.
Having graduated in Aerospace Engineering and Astronautics CTO Vivekanand Rajkumar worked as a Server Specialist at IBM before joining MaidSafe. He has extensive expense leading UX teams as well as being a certified Mobile platform engineer. Viv’s experience with IBM and his 6 years at MaidSafe ensure that he is capable of leading all aspects of development. In his time at the company he has been pivotal in refining development processes and helping to build the development team.
Nick Lambert, started his working life in project management roles with IBM, before a change in tack led him into senior marketing positions with a diverse range of companies. He has co-authored papers on decentralised networks, presented at several international conferences and holds an MSc in Marketing from Strathclyde University.
Matrix is an open network and protocol for secure, decentralized, real-time communication.
Imagine a world where it is as simple to message or video call anyone as it is to send an email, where you can communicate without being forced to install the same app, where your data is secured by end-to-end encryption, where you can choose who hosts your communications, where you can easily share any kind of real-time data over the Internet: this is Matrix! Matrix is defined as an open standard with reference implementations of servers, clients and SDKs, providing the tools to build real-time communication applications and services which are not controlled by single corporations (like Facebook or Google), but by the users themselves.
Matrix can be used for:
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decentralised group chat with fully distributed persistent chatrooms with no single points of control or failure;
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WebRTC signaling as a web-friendly signalling transport for interoperable WebRTC calls;
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Internet of Things use cases, by exchanging and persisting data between devices and services;
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VR calling, messaging and collaboration, by providing an open universal communication layer;
... and anywhere else you need a common data fabric to link together fragmented silos of communication. Our focus is on simplicity, security, and supporting the fullest feature set.
Matrix’s initial inspiration and goal is to fix the problem of fragmented IP communications, but its real potential and ultimate mission is to be a generic messaging and data synchronisation system for the web - allowing people, services and devices to easily communicate with each other securely whilst maintaining full conversation history.
The Matrix.org Foundation is currently being incorporated as non-profit initiative in the UK. It acts as a neutral guardian of the Matrix spec, nurturing and growing Matrix for the benefit of the whole ecosystem. Matrix's original core team has been building custom VoIP and Messaging solutions for mobile network operators since 2006 with extensive experience in SIP and XMPP, and created Matrix to provide a simpler web-friendly alternative to the wider world.
Matrix's success depends on the wider community’s feedback and uptake: please come to Matrix.org and take a look at the Matrix spec, or come and talk to us at #matrix:matrix.org, or check out the code and run your own Matrix server!
Amandine is the co-founder of Matrix.org, a unique initiative aiming to democratise secure online communication and solve the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email, and brings the power back to the user on choosing who they trust with their data and how they want to communicate. It defines a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releases open source reference implementations of the protocol. Amandine is also Head of Operation and Products for New Vector, the company behind Riot (https://riot.im), an open source, secure and interoperable collaboration tool built on Matrix. She previously set up and led product management for the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs and has more than 10 years of experience in mobile services and telecommunications. Amandine has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon as well as an EMBA from ESC Rennes.
Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of Matrix.org: a not-for-profit open source project focused on solving the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. By defining a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releasing open source reference implementations, Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email.
Matthew juggles Matrix with the roles of CEO and CTO of New Vector, the company behind Riot.im, the flagship collaboration app built on Matrix. Previously, as a technical lead at MX Telecom (acquired by Amdocs in 2010), Matthew designed & architected Amdocs’ next-generation Video/VoIP client and network infrastructure, and draws on his Internet background to rapidly deliver carrier-grade enhanced communication solutions to network operators. He has specialised in interactive video and telephony applications for over 16 years, including co-founding a digital marketing startup, and contracting roles at Accenture and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He has a BA in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has lectured on VoIP at Imperial College London.
Matthew believes in the virtues of open collaboration. We live in an era where we can benefit very easily from cross-industry inputs to foster innovation and we don't make enough out of it. He wants to change the world to give access to communication and privacy to everyone while keeping the user's experience at the heart of every new product and leaving everyone the choice of their provider.
Amandine is the co-founder of Matrix.org, a unique initiative aiming to democratise secure online communication and solve the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email, and brings the power back to the user on choosing who they trust with their data and how they want to communicate. It defines a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releases open source reference implementations of the protocol. Amandine is also Head of Operation and Products for New Vector, the company behind Riot (https://riot.im), an open source, secure and interoperable collaboration tool built on Matrix. She previously set up and led product management for the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs and has more than 10 years of experience in mobile services and telecommunications. Amandine has a degree in telecommunications engineering from Ecole Supérieure de Chimie, Physique et Electronique de Lyon as well as an EMBA from ESC Rennes.
Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of Matrix.org: a not-for-profit open source project focused on solving the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. By defining a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releasing open source reference implementations, Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email.
Matthew juggles Matrix with the roles of CEO and CTO of New Vector, the company behind Riot.im, the flagship collaboration app built on Matrix. Previously, as a technical lead at MX Telecom (acquired by Amdocs in 2010), Matthew designed & architected Amdocs’ next-generation Video/VoIP client and network infrastructure, and draws on his Internet background to rapidly deliver carrier-grade enhanced communication solutions to network operators. He has specialised in interactive video and telephony applications for over 16 years, including co-founding a digital marketing startup, and contracting roles at Accenture and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He has a BA in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has lectured on VoIP at Imperial College London.
Matthew believes in the virtues of open collaboration. We live in an era where we can benefit very easily from cross-industry inputs to foster innovation and we don't make enough out of it. He wants to change the world to give access to communication and privacy to everyone while keeping the user's experience at the heart of every new product and leaving everyone the choice of their provider.
The assets of a majority of the world's population are physically visible, but economically and politically invisible. This project estimates that 2.5 billion people have access to formal property rights. This formalization gives them access to the value of their properties whether in the form of credit or credentials. The other 5 billion have no access, and, thus cannot tap into the value of the land they manage, use, and own. Medici Ventures is using blockchain among other technologies to bring property ownership information to light and connect it to the global economy.
Making informal property records global, transparent, and resistant to corruption will make use of the decentralized and immutable properties of blockchain technology. Using Open Index Protocol (OIP), Medici Ventures is developing a data model for property rights information that works with OIP defining indexable metadata for any property-related content. The data model organizes property information into party, spatial unit, and tenure artifacts. Additionally, the model provides for endorsements, which allow for affirmations of claims. All information is supported with a source artifact that provides references to files stored in decentralized storage.
Chris Chryosostom is a senior software engineer at Medici Ventures on the DeSoto project. His experience developing software ranges from inventory management and finance applications to distributed supply chain systems. His current interest is making property rights visible by recording them on blockchain.
Chris Chryosostom is a senior software engineer at Medici Ventures on the DeSoto project. His experience developing software ranges from inventory management and finance applications to distributed supply chain systems. His current interest is making property rights visible by recording them on blockchain.
Meshstream demonstrates:
- Live video streaming over content addressable storage (IPFS)
- Sharing of multimedia content over a peer-to-peer social network (SSB)
- Mesh networking over long-range wireless links using open hardware (LibreRouter)
Each physical node consists of a LibreRouter + a Raspberry Pi, running software developed by Toronto Mesh that use IPFS and SSB. One node will stream video off of a Raspberry Pi camera, publishes to the private IPFS and SSB network formed by these devices, then other nodes can view the embedded player on the SSB timeline of the video publisher. The user experience is similar to streaming a YouTube video and sharing the link on your Facebook, then your friends discover that video via their social feed and view the live stream from the embedded player.
More details here: https://github.com/tomeshnet/meshstream/issues/1
Benedict is an engineer working on mobile software and mesh networks. He is a contributor and organizer at Toronto Mesh, currently focused on meshing with single-board computers and building deployment tools and literacy around peer-to-peer applications.
Benedict is an engineer working on mobile software and mesh networks. He is a contributor and organizer at Toronto Mesh, currently focused on meshing with single-board computers and building deployment tools and literacy around peer-to-peer applications.
Namecoin is the first naming system that is simultaneously global (everyone gets the same result for the same lookup), decentralized (no central party decides which names map to which values), and human-meaningful (names aren’t just a hash or something similarly opaque to humans). Previous naming systems such as the DNS, .onion, and .i2p are unable to simultaneously achieve all 3 of these properties.
Namecoin achieves this by recognizing that Bitcoin’s achievement of a decentralized consensus (via a Nakamoto blockchain) has applications outside of the financial system, including naming. Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin (we forked Bitcoin before it was cool), and extends Bitcoin’s blockchain validation rules to allow coins to represent human-readable names with arbitrary values attached. The Namecoin blockchain validation rules enforce that all transactions in the blockchain honor uniqueness of names, and that only the owner of a name can update its value. Namecoin’s threat model is very similar to that of Bitcoin: like Bitcoin, Namecoin is mined via Hashcash-SHA256D proof-of-work, and inclusion in the blockchain of a transaction (even if checked via a lightweight client) implies that miners have verified the transaction’s correctness.
Namecoin’s current and proposed use cases include a more censorship-resistant and privacy-respecting alternative to the DNS, a decentralized public key infrastructure for protocols like TLS, OpenPGP, and OTR, a DNS-like functionality for darknet protocols such as Tor onion services, I2P, and Freenet, and single sign-on for website users.
Namecoin has been endorsed by WikiLeaks, has been favorably mentioned in a technical report by ICANN, is funded by NLnet Foundation’s Internet Hardening Fund using funding originating from the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs, and (for a 48-hour period in 2017) had higher hashrate than Bitcoin. Namecoin has an international development team, and is always looking for new contributors. We’d also love to collaborate with your project.
More information is available at https://www.namecoin.org/
Jeremy is Lead Application Engineer and Community Organizer of Namecoin, a naming system (currently used for DNS and identities) which backs authenticity of records with the same algorithms and code used to back financial transactions in Bitcoin. Jeremy wears many hats at Namecoin but spends much of his time working on applications which enhance online privacy.
Jeremy is Lead Application Engineer and Community Organizer of Namecoin, a naming system (currently used for DNS and identities) which backs authenticity of records with the same algorithms and code used to back financial transactions in Bitcoin. Jeremy wears many hats at Namecoin but spends much of his time working on applications which enhance online privacy.
Ninja
the anonymous exchange of anything
The evolution of trade and exchanges is one of the most significant stories in the journey of mankind. Here’s our addition to the newest chapter - a decentralized platform that allows ninjas (its users) to discover different exchanges built by other ninjas (its developers), and to trade crypto assets on these exchanges directly with each other, anonymously, and trustlessly.
Developers, think of Ninja as the modern day version of the App Store. Instead of developing apps, you’ll build decentralized exchanges for crypto assets. Keep it free, use your own in-exchange tokens, or charge transaction fees.
Users, Ninja is the modern day version of Craigslist. Ninja users will be able to trade different crypto assets with one another anonymously and trustlessly — with no central authority or middlemen.
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Ninja is anonymous. Ninja uses public/private keypair for authentication. No download required. You can use Ninja with complete privacy.
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Ninja is peer-to-peer. Ninja doesn’t require middlemen, which means no fees, no bureaucracy, and no restriction.
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Ninja is trustless. Agreements programmed as smart contracts replace reluctant trust with cryptographic proof. Anonymous users from anywhere in the world can now enter in an agreement without the need for a trusted third party.
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Ninja is permissionless. Ninja allows anyone to create an address and begin interacting with other people on the Ninja network. Anyone can build and launch exchanges.
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Ninja is decentralized. Designed with the new decentralized Internet primitives Ethereum (code) and IPFS (storage), Ninja aims to provide a product without a single point of failure, that also ensures users can safely own their data.
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Ninja is transparent. The entire development of Ninja is open-sourced on Github.
The first two Exchanges are now live.
Prediction Exchange allows parties to directly bet against each other without going through a central authority or bookmaker. The management of bets and the settlement of winnings are carried out collectively by the blockchain network, protecting users from any single point of failure. Prediction Exchange has unique properties that allow exciting use cases, previously impossible under any traditional betting mechanism
Read more about Prediction Exchange here.
Cash Exchange is a decentralized, anonymous, peer to peer (P2P) cryptocurrency exchange, which allows users from all over the world to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. You don’t need a bank account to use Ninja. This means that in addition to benefiting users that prefer not to leave a paper trail, over 2 billion unbanked people in the world, who are currently restricted when it comes to using traditional platforms will now be able to join the movement towards the decentralized future of money.
Read more about Cash Exchange here.
Coin Exchange and Goods Exchange will be introduced in Q3 2018.
Duy is the founder of Ninja, an anonymous peer-to-peer exchange, more casually known as the crypto version of Craigslist. Prior to that, Duy was the founder of Autonomous, which creates smart office products based on AI and Robotics technologies.
Offline, Duy lives in NYC and enjoys boxing, cycling, and bagels.
Duy is the founder of Ninja, an anonymous peer-to-peer exchange, more casually known as the crypto version of Craigslist. Prior to that, Duy was the founder of Autonomous, which creates smart office products based on AI and Robotics technologies.
Offline, Duy lives in NYC and enjoys boxing, cycling, and bagels.
Ouinet is a Free/Open Source technology which allows web content to be served with the help of an entire network of cooperating nodes using peer-to-peer routing and distributed caching of responses. This helps mitigate the Web's characteristic single point of failure due to a client application not being able to connect to a particular server.
The typical Ouinet client node setup consists of a web browser or other application using a special HTTP proxy or API provided by a dedicated program or library on the local machine. When the client gets a request for content, it attempts to retrieve the resource using several mechanisms. It tries to fetch the page from a distributed cache (like IPFS), and if not available, it contacts a trusted injector server over a peer-to-peer routing system (like I2P) and asks it to fetch the page and store it in the distributed cache.
Future accesses by client nodes to popular content inserted in distributed storage shall benefit from an increased redundancy and locality, which translates in increased availability in the face of connectivity problems, increased transfer speeds in case or poor upstream links, and reduced bandwidth costs when access providers charge more for external or international traffic. Content injection is also designed in a way which allows for content re-introduction and seeding on extreme cases of total connectivity loss (e.g. natural disasters).
The Ouinet library is a core technology that can be used by any application to benefit from these advantages. Ouinet integration provides any content creator the opportunity to use cooperative networking and storage for the delivery of their content to users around the world.
Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer is a member of eQualitie, a company that develops open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, online security, and information management. He works on the development of technologies enabling unfettered access to the World Wide Web for netizens operating in some of the most restrictive Internet environments.
Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer is a member of eQualitie, a company that develops open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, online security, and information management. He works on the development of technologies enabling unfettered access to the World Wide Web for netizens operating in some of the most restrictive Internet environments.
P2P Models
Decentralized Blockchain-based Organizations for Bootstrapping the Collaborative Economy
P2P Models is a large research project to build Blockchain-powered organizations which are decentralized, democratic and distribute their profits, in order to boost a new type of Collaborative Economy (tweet thread). The project has three legs:
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Infrastructure: Provide a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for Collaborative Economy organizations that do not depend on central authorities.
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Governance: Enable democratic-by-design models of governance for communities, whose rules are, at least partially, encoded in the software to ensure higher levels of equality.
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Economy: Enable value distribution models which are interoperable across organizations, improving the economic sustainability of both contributors and organizations.
The Collaborative Economy is rapidly expanding, but it is dominated by centralized web platforms which hold user data and concentrate all decision-making power and profits.
P2P Models is a 1.5M€ EU-funded interdisciplinary research effort for bootstrapping the emergence of a new generation of self-governed and more economically sustainable peer-to-peer Collaborative Economy communities. It is a 5-year project (2017-2022) which will be based in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), with Principal Investigator and advisors from the Berkman Klein Center (Harvard University).
The project will contribute to the Blockchain ecosystem, from a commons-oriented approach (not focused on finance). It will build software modules, grounded on social theory, for the easy building of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations that aim to support collaborative communities. You may get a deeper insight of the project in this 5-page project summary.
Antonio Tenorio-Fornés is a free software developer and researcher. He holds a 5 years CS/Eng degree and a Master in Research in Computer Science. He is currently developing his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, funded by an institutional scholarship, and working for the awesome P2P Models project. His research aims to provide decentralized governance tools for Commons-Based Peer Production communities. In the past, he was a core part of the technical team of the P2Pvalue European research project. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Kozminski University. His experience developing decentralized web tools includes Teem, SwellRT and Decentralized.science, using technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS. Recent related work also include the proposal a framework for decentralized applications using IPFS and Blockchain and the design and development of decentralized.science, a project that aims to disintermediate and open scientific publication.
Antonio Tenorio-Fornés is a free software developer and researcher. He holds a 5 years CS/Eng degree and a Master in Research in Computer Science. He is currently developing his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, funded by an institutional scholarship, and working for the awesome P2P Models project. His research aims to provide decentralized governance tools for Commons-Based Peer Production communities. In the past, he was a core part of the technical team of the P2Pvalue European research project. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Surrey, the University of Westminster and Kozminski University. His experience developing decentralized web tools includes Teem, SwellRT and Decentralized.science, using technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS. Recent related work also include the proposal a framework for decentralized applications using IPFS and Blockchain and the design and development of decentralized.science, a project that aims to disintermediate and open scientific publication.
Scuttlebutt aims to harmonize four perspectives of life:
Environment reflecting Technology reflecting Community reflecting Society.
We acknowledge the natural, the virtual, and the social environments. Our responsibility is to recognize which resources are abundant, which are sufficient, and adapt accordingly through efficiency.
Technology is simply the means by which we communicate. We use local-first publishing so that each person owns their words and actions. Our solutions are piecemeal upgradeable, replaceable and incrementally improvable. Tending and pruning are not a stranger's duty, it is through near moderation and free listening that we improve our surroundings. Infrastructure is a voluntary act, multimodal welcoming is how we on-board people via diverse connectivity modes (technological acts of
inclusion) as well as with greetings (words of inclusion). No one "signs up" but everyone is invited.
Our community is a web of friendships: relationships defined not by a follow button, but by the flexibility of subjectivity. We cherish the freedom to be independent, but it is this same freedom which encourages – not coerces – us to be interdependent. We know we can at any time fork, but when individually recognizing the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, we tend to develop the collective. We value disagreement when it's supportive, and see it as generative and bond forming.
Society is not made of homogeneous people, so we must allow pluralism of cultures to flourish. The edges of the social graph must extend to include all people and their diverse values, interactions, and customs. No one of us can build a welcoming place for all groups, because the very concept of welcoming is subjective. We must instead design platforms that are easy to re-design, removing us as arbiters of other communities.
Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm and who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand. It is here, from the need for offline connection with the outside word, Scuttlebutt emerged.
Charles builds and maintains applications on Secure Scuttlebutt, with a focus on integrating external systems and protocols into the platform; current projects include git-ssb, ssb-npm-registry, and patchfoo.
Mikey is working to solve group coordination problems. He's currently building peachcloud.org, a hosted Scuttlebutt pub-as-a-service platform. Every week in Wellington, New Zealand, he organizes arthack.nz, a local gathering to open space for creative energy.
Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm and who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand. It is here, from the need for offline connection with the outside word, Scuttlebutt emerged.
Charles builds and maintains applications on Secure Scuttlebutt, with a focus on integrating external systems and protocols into the platform; current projects include git-ssb, ssb-npm-registry, and patchfoo.
Mikey is working to solve group coordination problems. He's currently building peachcloud.org, a hosted Scuttlebutt pub-as-a-service platform. Every week in Wellington, New Zealand, he organizes arthack.nz, a local gathering to open space for creative energy.
Seedpod is a semantic desktop built around a decentralized database filesystem, designed to empower knowledge workers with composable applications.
Background + Goals
Previous personal information managers (WinFS, BFS, Haystack. . . ) laid out what could be achieved if a knowledge worker stores her personal information in a database filesystem, a filesystem where files can be accompanied by typed, queryable metadata that’s stored in a system-wide, shared database. “Tagging” your documents with (typed!) metadata makes it possible to build reusable data processing pipelines out of composable applications, applications whose inputs and outputs are well-defined in terms of mutually-understood types.
While these tools haven’t quite caught on, recent developments in decentralized tech present great opportunities for new experimentation. A decentralized semantic desktop provides the same storage/query interfaces, while also giving users the features they expect from modern, empowering storage system:
1. Version control: All edits should be retained in timelines, which can be
rewound, branched, and forked. 2. P2P syncing: Any version of a filesystem can be shared and synced with a
single link. 3. Easy backups: An archiver is just another peer that eagerly synchronizes
every change. 4. Multi-user collaboration: A filesystem need not live on a single machine –
multiple users must be able to work together.
(These features are achieved by building on the Dat stack, described below)
What is it?
Seedpod currently runs as a cross-platform Electron application. It’s primary UI allows users to create workspaces, isolated information stores oriented around a common task or context, into which they install applications. App developers are provided with familiar File (mirrors NodeJS’s fs module) and Database (similar to MongoDB) APIs. Each application must declare its data model (described in an interface file) to the Seedpod package manager at installation time – this provides a pathway for dynamic composition through schema sharing.
Once an application has been authorized to write to a workspace, it can use the Database API to store documents that match the schemas defined in its interface file. Seedpod will automatically expand these documents into sets of RDF triples, stored in the workspace’s shared graph database, which can then be explored using a SPARQL-like graph query language.
Seedpod’s core data structures are built on top of the Dat stack (specifically hyperdb and hypercore), which provides workspaces with many of the powerful
Andrew is a freelance software developer based in Seattle. He’s primarily focused on building tools for empowering knowledge workers, using decentralized storage systems. Previously, he worked on the Fuchsia operating system team at Google, and was the lead developer of the Binder project, a cloud service for creating reproducible environments for hosting Jupyter notebooks (now a part of the Jupyter ecosystem). Andrew also actively contributes to multiple open-source projects, including Idyll and Dat.
Andrew is a freelance software developer based in Seattle. He’s primarily focused on building tools for empowering knowledge workers, using decentralized storage systems. Previously, he worked on the Fuchsia operating system team at Google, and was the lead developer of the Binder project, a cloud service for creating reproducible environments for hosting Jupyter notebooks (now a part of the Jupyter ecosystem). Andrew also actively contributes to multiple open-source projects, including Idyll and Dat.
Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.
Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible, and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.
At a glance, here is what Solid offers...
True data ownership
Users should have the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it. By decoupling content from the application, itself, users are now able to do so.
Modular design
Because applications are decoupled from the data they produce, users will be able to avoid vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers, without losing any data or social connections.
Reusing existing data
Developers will be able to easily innovate by creating new apps or improving current apps, all while reusing existing data that was created by other apps.
The Solid team has encapsulated several years of research and prototyping by a talented group of contributors, led by Tim, into a Node.js based implementation of the Solid server specification, and a basic data browser to allow users to play with the system.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the technical standards development of the Web. Sir Tim is the founder and a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity. He is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL). His research group, the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), works to re-decentralize the Web. He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford, UK. He is President of and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London. In 2017 Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize, called the "Nobel Prize of Computing” and considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science. Tim is a long time defender of Net Neutrality and the openness of the Web.
Ruben Verborgh is a professor of Semantic Web technology at Ghent University – imec and a research affiliate at the Decentralized Information Group at MIT.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the technical standards development of the Web. Sir Tim is the founder and a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity. He is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL). His research group, the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), works to re-decentralize the Web. He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford, UK. He is President of and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London. In 2017 Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize, called the "Nobel Prize of Computing” and considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science. Tim is a long time defender of Net Neutrality and the openness of the Web.
Ruben Verborgh is a professor of Semantic Web technology at Ghent University – imec and a research affiliate at the Decentralized Information Group at MIT.
Subsect installs as a standard app and does not require root access. Subsect could be best described as a personal web server (PWS). It is based on the concept that every human being on the planet should have logical and physical control of their data and generated content in a convenient manner. This objective is currently best achieved by hosting on a mobile device.
Subsect is a functioning product although it is still alpha grade software. It is an open source project.
Subsect is not an alternative architecture. It is consistent with the current web model of a server answering requests from a browser. It does allow for extensions to the current arrangement which does not expect each user to also have their own server. Designing web software with this assumption opens many new avenues with regard to interfaces and storage. Due to limitations on accessing port 80 on mobile devices, Subsect uses WebRTC for transport. This is a minor limitation and doesn’t impede exploring what can be done in a PWS environment. This may be a transitionary product on the path to the day when all people have at least one fixed IPv6 address as a birthright and a device to make use of it.
Individuals are powerless if they do not control their own data. Legal rights to access need to be clear with 2nd parties who could be forced into entering into EULA type agreements. Handing data over for only usage rights and then expecting to influence later behaviour is hopeless. Physical possession of data with the retention of copyright is the strongest position for balancing the asymmetries that exist in the current web model.
Mark Kudlac graduated with degrees in engineering and computer science from the University of Toronto in 1985. He founded Conxsys with a partner in 1990. Conxsys developed a turnkey Linux based ERP system, Drive 2.0, for car dealerships. After a successful exit in 2000 Mark developed a voice controlled email system for mobile phones, VerbalFusion, which was crushed by the rise of BlackBerry and later smart phones.
After a period of retirement travelling and spending time with family a number of other products were developed which focused on using mobile devices as data servers. This track has culminated in Subsect which is a light weight general purpose platform for serving web content from Android and iOS devices.
Mark Kudlac graduated with degrees in engineering and computer science from the University of Toronto in 1985. He founded Conxsys with a partner in 1990. Conxsys developed a turnkey Linux based ERP system, Drive 2.0, for car dealerships. After a successful exit in 2000 Mark developed a voice controlled email system for mobile phones, VerbalFusion, which was crushed by the rise of BlackBerry and later smart phones.
After a period of retirement travelling and spending time with family a number of other products were developed which focused on using mobile devices as data servers. This track has culminated in Subsect which is a light weight general purpose platform for serving web content from Android and iOS devices.
The InfoCentral Project is..
A Long-Range Architectural Approach to Decentralization
InfoCentral proposes an information-centered architecture for decentralized systems and dynamic user environments. It is primarily concerned with data portability, semantics, and interoperability – while making all information social and collaborative by default. Rather than starting with APIs or protocols, information is the platform -- a neutral foundation that software and networks can evolve around.
A Unifier of Decentralized Internet Technologies
Many projects have produced valuable ideas and inspiration. Unfortunately, their contributions are often difficult to combine. Consensus on shared foundations is needed to integrate the best ideas into a unified technology ecosystem. InfoCentral's minimalist, graph-oriented data model provides a foundation to promote collaboration and cross-pollination among decentralized internet technology projects.
A New Hypermedia for the Information-Centric Internet
The InfoCentral Persistent Data Model is an extensible, cryptography-minded, legacy-free standard for containing, linking, and layering all types of data, with no dependence on particular infrastructure. It is not a blockchain, but it can support these and other higher-order data models. We propose the Persistent Data Model as the "thin neck" of the future decentralized, content-addressed internet. By mandating independence from centralized components and hierarchical structures, InfoCentral's hypermedia design ensures that all information is fluid and recomposable by users and software agents.
A Post-Application Software Architecture
The software architecture native to decentralized graph information brings a whole new paradigm for user environments. The future is app-free computing – fully integrated, composable, and adaptive software functionality that comes alongside neutral information rather than creating artificial boundaries or limiting users to certain interactions and modalities. Post-application software architecture makes heavy use of declarative programming paradigms. This promotes runtime composition and customization, giving users total control and flexibility. It is also is a great fit for future AI software agents that are currently limited by clumsy human-centric UIs and APIs.
A Fresh Vision for Social Computing
Collaboration, contextualization, and community-building need to become default, baked into the architecture of information rather than relying on particular services or networks. The modern world needs an internet that is robust against misinformation and extremism – where the best quality and most useful information rises to the top. Societies need portable digital trust and other tools that make it easier to build community. Consumers need empowered to act rationally through reliable, unbiased information. These sorts of issues are largely dependent on the ability to reliably reference and neutrally layer information with third party annotations, a primary design concern of our Persistent Data Model.
Learn more: https://infocentral.org
Chris Gebhardt is a software researcher with diverse tech background and specialization in distributed systems and databases. In the last couple years, he's been working on formalizing a comprehensive architecture for decentralized information systems and dynamic software environments to make best use of them. He is especially passionate about how decentralized technologies can make the internet more civil, collaborative, and community-oriented.
Chris Gebhardt is a software researcher with diverse tech background and specialization in distributed systems and databases. In the last couple years, he's been working on formalizing a comprehensive architecture for decentralized information systems and dynamic software environments to make best use of them. He is especially passionate about how decentralized technologies can make the internet more civil, collaborative, and community-oriented.
Participants contribute tokenized art to an open collection for the purposes of public exposure and record. Open access to submissions and equal exposure to all works are central, however the focus is to push Creative Commons into tokenization by utilizing send memos and other protocol level methodology of declaring licence for reproduction upon delivery. While any user may submit any work of art, only sends from the origin account will be authorized to declare usage rights.
The intention is not to only use CounterParty, Ethereum, and Namecoin, but any blockchain (or similar) fitting to the industry as the utilities become available. Visual art is currently only accepted if it has been approved in another collection. Original content in the form of text based content is invited to be registered in the poem/ namespace in Namecoin to be included in a truly decentralized digital ‘zine.
Attendees at rare.af (Rare Arts Festival) in January 2018 were invited to contribute to an exquisite corpse of great length. This collective illustration was the first physical submission to the collection. It
is scheduled to return to the second blockchain art conference in NYC of the same name later this year, but first it will be made available at the DecentralizedWeb Science Fair 2018. Illustrators will be encouraged to “tokenize” their addition on their own or in cooperation of the attending volunteer. Content creators who are better with words than pictures will be invited or assisted in registering their own entries on the spot as well. Participants at the science fair will retain all of their issuance in the process if funded individually otherwise it will be delivered within 24 hours.
Those who follow through until the end of the process will have a unique memento of their contribution to this work of art which can be shared, traded or sold on the open market using CounterParty. Tapping into such a resource as the universal applicability of these tokens will secure the ability to use these novelty tokens well into the future.
Duncan is an artist from Kalamazoo, Michigan who has recently traveled to NYC and Tokyo to meet with other cryptoartists in real life. After selling a tokenized print of an illustrated parody on stage at the actual first auction of visual art made for the blockchain, he became inspired to found artMuseum.io to be the world's first decentralized open-submission museum of cryptoart for any blockchain.
As a direct result of being empowered by publishing in someone else’s system, this independent artist felt compelled to forge a collection of his own which is not as exclusive in theme but aims to reflect best practices in greater indologies of decentralization and consensus. Growing from the understanding for the root word of token being “to teach,” this telegram user assists artists all over the globe to participate in other the various community based cryptoart “games” which have launched in 2018.
Having accrued enough reputation and body of knowledge from all the odd jobs which made this outlier specialized he was selected by EverdreamSoft to curate the Memorychain and OasisMining collections in Book of Orbs. He began with updating the two Japanese whitepapers into one solid plan, drawing an action plan together with other compatible projects.
As a curator this visionary has launched a word of mouth only cryptoarto collection whose mechanisms push the boundaries of experience by inverting most of the rules. As a student in Marketing at Western Governors University this entrepreneur learned that a successful endeavor is based on giving the market the service it needs. Contrary to all the tokenized games to be announced since mid-2017, his “Proof of Parody” offers a novel upgrade to the joystick battle genre.
Duncan is an artist from Kalamazoo, Michigan who has recently traveled to NYC and Tokyo to meet with other cryptoartists in real life. After selling a tokenized print of an illustrated parody on stage at the actual first auction of visual art made for the blockchain, he became inspired to found artMuseum.io to be the world's first decentralized open-submission museum of cryptoart for any blockchain.
As a direct result of being empowered by publishing in someone else’s system, this independent artist felt compelled to forge a collection of his own which is not as exclusive in theme but aims to reflect best practices in greater indologies of decentralization and consensus. Growing from the understanding for the root word of token being “to teach,” this telegram user assists artists all over the globe to participate in other the various community based cryptoart “games” which have launched in 2018.
Having accrued enough reputation and body of knowledge from all the odd jobs which made this outlier specialized he was selected by EverdreamSoft to curate the Memorychain and OasisMining collections in Book of Orbs. He began with updating the two Japanese whitepapers into one solid plan, drawing an action plan together with other compatible projects.
As a curator this visionary has launched a word of mouth only cryptoarto collection whose mechanisms push the boundaries of experience by inverting most of the rules. As a student in Marketing at Western Governors University this entrepreneur learned that a successful endeavor is based on giving the market the service it needs. Contrary to all the tokenized games to be announced since mid-2017, his “Proof of Parody” offers a novel upgrade to the joystick battle genre.
Web3 is a new kind of web, and today is a decentralised movement, envisioned and further developed by Dr. Gavin Wood in 2014. It is “a reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties.” (http://gavwood.com/web3lt.html). We call this the “more truth, less trust” model.
The Web3 Foundation was founded by Dr. Gavin Wood, Co-Founder of Ethereum and Founder of Parity Technologies, as a non-profit organization that focuses on the development, deployment and maintenance of “Web3”, promoting the development of innovative technologies and applications in the field of cryptographically-enabled decentralised software protocols.
The Web3 Foundation developed a framework to visually display the Web3 technology stack and to lay out the different protocols comprising Web3. This forms the base upon which the decentralised applications of the future will be built. The Web3 tech stack is used as a roadmap for teams to coordinate efforts and push development forward collaboratively (Web3 tech stack: https://twitter.com/web3foundation/status/1006218412069150720).
The Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards cutting-edge technologies and applications at all levels of the Web3 tech stack. Our focus is on the research, development, deployment, funding, and maintenance of Web3 technologies, plus advocacy and education, developer-adoption, support of middleware, and base-layer/demonstration applications. Because of our experience building major components of the Web3 tech stack and their respective communities, we are uniquely positioned to assemble and align the diverse set of teams building the protocols that make up the Web3 tech stack.
Peter is the Executive Director of the Web3 Foundation which aims to bring about a more secure, efficient and trust-free web. He obtained his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Oxford, reading Engineering Science where he focused on Bayesian Machine Learning.
He has worked across defense, finance and data analytics industries, working on mesh networks, distributed knowledge bases, quantitative pricing models, machine learning and business development. As a principal engineer at Parity Technologies, he contributed to the Parity Ethereum Client development, in particular implementing consensus algorithms, as well as driving enterprise solutions built on the Parity technology stack.
He has given multiple talks at conferences (TOA, BPASE, DevCon, EdCon) and meetups.
Jack works from Berlin, Germany where he is helping to launch the Polkadot protocol and coordinate all protocols within the Web3 Tech stack. Jack leads various community and communications efforts in the domain of decentralized technologies at the Foundation.
Jack served an Associate and Head of Crypto of Ulysses Holdings. As an Associate Jack provided support to the CFO, Head of People, and other Ulysses Partners in the form of investment research, financial modeling, and operational functions. As Head of Crypto Jack led the firm’s cryptocurrency and blockchain related investments and partnerships.
Previously, Jack was an Analyst at Bain Capital in Boston, MA and the Founder and President of Cypher League Media in Brooklyn, NY.
Dina is a member of the Web3 Foundation which aims to bring about a more secure, efficient and trust-free web. She is helping to launch the Polkadot protocol and other technologies that build the base for decentralized applications. Previously, she served on the management board of Parity Technologies where she helped to build the organization and operations.
She obtained her Masters of Engineering and Business degree from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and she worked for 5 years with McKinsey & Company where she advised a variety of global companies in strategy, organizational development and operations.
Peter is the Executive Director of the Web3 Foundation which aims to bring about a more secure, efficient and trust-free web. He obtained his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Oxford, reading Engineering Science where he focused on Bayesian Machine Learning.
He has worked across defense, finance and data analytics industries, working on mesh networks, distributed knowledge bases, quantitative pricing models, machine learning and business development. As a principal engineer at Parity Technologies, he contributed to the Parity Ethereum Client development, in particular implementing consensus algorithms, as well as driving enterprise solutions built on the Parity technology stack.
He has given multiple talks at conferences (TOA, BPASE, DevCon, EdCon) and meetups.
Jack works from Berlin, Germany where he is helping to launch the Polkadot protocol and coordinate all protocols within the Web3 Tech stack. Jack leads various community and communications efforts in the domain of decentralized technologies at the Foundation.
Jack served an Associate and Head of Crypto of Ulysses Holdings. As an Associate Jack provided support to the CFO, Head of People, and other Ulysses Partners in the form of investment research, financial modeling, and operational functions. As Head of Crypto Jack led the firm’s cryptocurrency and blockchain related investments and partnerships.
Previously, Jack was an Analyst at Bain Capital in Boston, MA and the Founder and President of Cypher League Media in Brooklyn, NY.
Dina is a member of the Web3 Foundation which aims to bring about a more secure, efficient and trust-free web. She is helping to launch the Polkadot protocol and other technologies that build the base for decentralized applications. Previously, she served on the management board of Parity Technologies where she helped to build the organization and operations.
She obtained her Masters of Engineering and Business degree from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and she worked for 5 years with McKinsey & Company where she advised a variety of global companies in strategy, organizational development and operations.
What is WebTorrent?
WebTorrent is the first torrent client that works in the browser. YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. THE BROWSER.
It's written completely in JavaScript – the language of the web – and uses WebRTC for true peer-to-peer transport. No browser plugin, extension, or installation is required.
Using open web standards, WebTorrent connects website users together to form a distributed, decentralized browser-to-browser network for efficient file transfer.
Why is this cool?
Imagine a video site like YouTube, where visitors help to host the site's content. The more people that use a WebTorrent-powered website, the faster and more resilient it becomes.
Browser-to-browser communication cuts out the middle-man and lets people communicate on their own terms. No more client/server – just a network of peers, all equal. WebTorrent is the first step in the journey to redecentralize the Web.
Feross is building WebTorrent , the first torrent client that works on the web in the browser. He is bringing P2P to the masses with accessible, WebRTC-based P2P protocols.
Feross is building WebTorrent , the first torrent client that works on the web in the browser. He is bringing P2P to the masses with accessible, WebRTC-based P2P protocols.
The application was named as an homage to the ancient Library of Alexandria, a perfect but tragic example of the problem with centralization, because it is intended to be an open public space for all information. Web information architecture today is vulnerable because it relies on centralized hubs to store and distribute information. Applications like Alexandria that are built on Open Index Protocol offer transparency, resist censorship and protect information access because they are built on a decentralized and permissionless system.
We will share about how to publish content to a decentralized system anchored to a blockchain, and the ways blockchain content distribution will benefit creators & audiences.
See more at https://www.alexandria.io/
Amy James is the co-lead author of Open Index Protocol, a blockchain specification for an open and permissionless database, and co-founder of Alexandria.io where she serves as strategist, writer, speaker and advocate for artists. She has previously worked for nonprofit arts organizations, political campaigns and as an independent writer/director. How blockchain will benefit creators, audiences & the web is the most exciting story she’s ever told.
Kristoffer Newsom is a content creator at Alexandria.io and a multidisciplinary artist, focused on the intersection of scientific thought with creative expression and intuition. Kris has worked as a Photographer for Print and Web, in Film/TV as a Cinematographer, Colorist, Editor, Producer, and Director, and as a Designer, Machinist, and Product Developer in the Automotive and Consumer Products industries. He thinks the decentralized web will bring a new era of unparalleled creativity and economic development.
Amy James is the co-lead author of Open Index Protocol, a blockchain specification for an open and permissionless database, and co-founder of Alexandria.io where she serves as strategist, writer, speaker and advocate for artists. She has previously worked for nonprofit arts organizations, political campaigns and as an independent writer/director. How blockchain will benefit creators, audiences & the web is the most exciting story she’s ever told.
Kristoffer Newsom is a content creator at Alexandria.io and a multidisciplinary artist, focused on the intersection of scientific thought with creative expression and intuition. Kris has worked as a Photographer for Print and Web, in Film/TV as a Cinematographer, Colorist, Editor, Producer, and Director, and as a Designer, Machinist, and Product Developer in the Automotive and Consumer Products industries. He thinks the decentralized web will bring a new era of unparalleled creativity and economic development.