A Campout for the Decentralized Web 🛜🏕️
What's DWeb Camp?
DWeb stands for Decentralized Web, and Dweb Camp is a 5-day camp out in the redwoods of Northern California. It is sponsored and hosted by the Internet Archive (among many others) and it is a Schelling point for projects built with open source, distributed, and cooperative principles. Dweb Camp, as the organizer Wendy Hanamura puts it, is like 'Burning Man Meets Hacker Camp'.
WHO SHOULD COME: Are you a coder, policymaker, artist, activist, armchair philosopher or all of the above, working to build a better digital world? Ready to get your hands dirty and build something new from the ground up? Love to camp, code, create art and connect with the great outdoors? Then DWeb Camp may be for you.
Dweb Camp has been around for about 5 years, see an awesome video here about the camp. This year, there are about 550 participants. The activities are composed of intellectual workshops and panels, as well as activities that fit in the category of 'mind-body-nature', such as tai chi, acro yoga, and meditation. There is also one 'Emergence Day' where all the activities are put together by participants.
The Principles of Dweb:
Technology and Human Agency — using technology built with collaborative principles to enable flourishing humanity
Distributed Benefits — letting proportional benefits flow into the whole community instead of creating uneven wealth distribution
Mutual Respect — open and transparent principles for each other practiced with mindfulness
Humanity — the goal of decentralized technology is to protect human rights and enable agency
Ecological Awareness — projects should have minimal ecological harm and technologies should not worsen the environment
Ethos
As the Dweb organizer Wendy puts it, there needs to be 'a third way'. Currently, well-adopted projects grow from two common sources, 1 is from VC funding and 2 is from acclaimed academia. Both of these sources have accumulated certain levels of gatekeeping against peculiar types of talents and projects. 'There needs to be a third way, where builders can find allies, partners, funds, and necessary resources to grow and make impacts.'
It is a technology focused conference that is designed to have humanity and nature at the center of the topic. The projects and people here in general deeply believe in using frontier tech to build towards a more egalitarian, Protopian future.
It is so easy to stumble upon in mission-driven, purpose-aligning conversations at DWeb Camp. It’s a place where activism doesn't feel like a hopeless cry or a mere form of rebellion but is taken to a hardcore practice where some of the most brilliant minds at the frontier of innovation are inviting collective actions to make our world better than yesterday.
Many projects and movements deeply moved me at Dweb Camp, and was also extremely inspired to continue the journey to pursue and explore my missions.
Topics
The discussion topics include open-source best practices and solutions, censorship resilience, governance designs, food security, AI ethics and safety, environmental justice, global coordination challenges, the role of art and culture in shifting collective mindsets, and so many more.
What are the Projects?
As JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out) is a core principle of Dweb Camp, it is impossible to capture all the amazing projects. Maybe there should be an archive somewhere? Here are some fascinating projects that inspired me:
Bluesky, Nostr, and the Fediverse
The Fediverse is a network of social network services hosted on decentralized servers built with shared protocols. Users can host their data on separate servers, and websites yet still be able to connect with each other because of the shared protocol.
Rabbel, the founder of Nos.Social gave a brilliant speech about the early history of Twitter, other social networks, and open-source software. The essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘ was recommended to understand the technical landscape of open-source software.
Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky shared insightful visions on creating impactful social media. She emphasized the importance of having a ‘lever’ to make an impact, in today’s society that lever is either technology or capital. Bluesky is started and funded by the leaders of Twitter, it is built upon an open-source protocol AT Protocol that any developers can use to create interoperable social networks.
Social networking apps are such a heated topic because the oligopoly of a few massive tech companies has caused so much mental and political distress with unethical use of their platforms. I believe it will be inevitable for us to shift to a better solution, although it would probably be more of an incremental step towards a more fair and open network rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.
One concept Jay mentioned for Bluesky is the importance of understanding choices and trade-offs. If we want more control of our software we need to spend more time configuring and understanding it (like Linux). Of course, not everyone has that time, and maybe not everyone cares to either, so there should be simpler boilerplate solutions (like Mac), and Bluesky is designed to serve both.
Partial Common Ownership
Partial Common Ownership (PCO) is “a new evolving system that allows artists, communities, and holders of art to create structures of shared ownership and distribution of value that better reflects those living relationships”, enabled by a modular design of capital distribution via smart contracts. This project is created by RadicalXChange and the Future Art Ecosystems.
Traditionally, we recognize the artist for their work, but it is hard to capture the value of the immediate community, cultural, and societal context that enables the artwork to happen. PCO creates a system that distributes recognition to the greater contribution factors of artworks beyond just one single artist.
PCO is currently active on the OP Sepolia testnet. Read through the documentation to learn more!
Merging Mixed Reality
This was a deep investigation of the future of spatial computing from Amber Hu. He expanded on how spatial computing is the direct way of merging physical reality with our dreamed reality.
A dream we dream together becomes the reality
Amber’s work at Reality Design Lab has put amazing endeavors towards building more openly accessible mixed reality experiences, including an open-source mixed reality headset.
Another interesting project shared is Agents by Keiichi Matsuda, where different parts of our future lives are offloaded to AI agents that we communicate within mixed reality.
One broad question proposed at this workshop is the open standard of mixed reality. How can we create a shared protocol for ownership in 3d, mixed reality spaces? NFTs are a primitive attempt at doing so, but there is so much more layers above that is yet to be configured. It would be interesting to think of a standard protocol for the ‘metaverse’, and it can be both daunting or liberating depending on its design.
Archives Against Censorship
The team at arhicvebox.io gave a workshop on their journey and reasoning for building Archivebox. Archivebox was built in a country where censorship is constantly taking down articles and banning the flow of information. Archivebox is an open source community-operated tool that allows individuals to take snapshots of online content, to make them censorship resistant. Different from the Internet Archive which hosts publically available content, archivebox can be used as a private tool for personal knowledge keeping and is self-hosted, and stored on decentralized machines.
AI to Decode Animal Communications
The natural world is communicating all around us, but as human beings we've forgotten how to listen. What if technology could help us understand what animals are saying? How might this help us see that we are a part of nature, not separate from it?
Aza Raskin from National Geographic introduced the Earth Species Project, where researchers are using AI to communicate with animals.
This is one of my most exciting use cases of AIs, as creatures are pattern makers, the potential of using AI models to analyze patterns and discover meaning is beyond exciting. This makes me think of the works of Austin Wade Smith on creating protocols for ecological actors, essentially giving legal representations and “a wallet” to nature.
Both are fascinating approaches to improving our relationships and understanding of the natural world.
Digital Spaces and Their Data Structures
Jiang from Social Layer presented a great talk about designing different data ownership structure for different kinds of digital spaces.
Digital spaces can be categorized into:
Personal: dairy, task management, etc
Friends: private chatrooms
Community: meetup groups, Facebook groups, etc
Team: slack, etc
Topic: subreddits, forums
Public: X, Instagram, etc
Different digital spaces should have different ownership models designed into them. For example, maybe in a community space, the community can decide on where the data is stored, who has moderation rights, how is data stored and can things be permanently deleted. For personal spaces, each person should have the absolute sovereign right to manipulate these data. For larger public spaces, this can get exponentially complex, but a question worth pondering.
Read the original article in Chinese here.
Mapeo - Local Map for Communal Land Rights
Mapeo is a powerful mapping tool for local communities to fight against outsiders such as illegal miners who are motivated by capital interest and most often have the power to eradicate local communities.
Mapeo has helped communities track local natural resources like water, plants, and historical sites. It also enabled communities to document actual damage to these sites from outside forces. With this comprehensive tracking and documentation tool, communities are able to prove their cases effectively in court and many cases, win legal rights to protect their spaces.
Read about a case study in Kofan, Ecuador here.
These are just a fraction of what was available at Dweb Camp, there were so many more projects, talks, and interesting discussions that are impossible for one person to attend.
Please find a list of many projects from Dweb Camp here.
Many Other Hacker Communities & Conferences
The idea of ‘Burning Man meets Hacker Collective’ really got stuck in my mind. I’m grateful that technological innovation doesn’t need to be limited to modernist stone-cold offices. What are some hacker collectives out there? Here are some recommendations from the Agartha:
Mars.College, Bombay Beach, California
Noise Bridge, San Francisco, California
Anthillhacks, Bangalore, India
Chaos Computer Club, Europe
Defcon, United States
Noah Cheng Lee has also been proposing a more long-term Dweb camp at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, I look forward to the progress into this idea!
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