Dweb camp - California, USA
Here is one of the first travel fellowship reports coming from the dweb camp 2019 by two CN peers: hiure from coolab/association portal sem porteiras and dinesh from servelots/janastu…
Hiure describes the event as follows:
“This will be a special gathering of pioneers building decentralized technologies and principles for an open, private, secure Web. DWeb Camp brings together artists, communicators, designers, educators, funders, infrastructure engineers, lawyers, network operators, organizers, software coders… into a team to explore a use case, share knowledge and build tools for collaborative decentralized communication. It will be a good opportunity to meet with the devs that code P2P apps and share the needs of the CNs. This is in line with the interests of our key objective, which is contribute to innovative technology use and approaches that enable scaling and sustainability of community networks. “
Dinesh’s impressions and purpose at the camp:
“Dwebcamp.org was a timely meeting that brought together many of these players where the Internet Archive was the coordinator of the event. My wish was to attend this meeting and to meet many of the related people and organisations during this trip, including the Internet Archive and others in Europe who we have been in communication with.”
Hiure’s thoughts on the lessons that he learned from the camp:
“The feeling that remains for me after the trip, is that the exchanges I made with people from different parts of the world to decentralization and web paradigm change, make the long range actions stronger, but just make sense if fed by the local work, with community and people near us.”
Dinesh also shares some of his story at dweb camp, a visit to internet archives and to Oakland to see People’s Open Network in the Omni Commons.
I got to meet many of the fellow APC team members at the dwebcamp! I was happy to learn that along with the APC grant that made the trip possible, I had anonymous donors who supported my stay at the camp.
source: dinesh’s photos
The camp was a treat to the eyes, body and mind in addition to the essential revamping of old networks and making new friends. I had the opportunity to meet a number of networking experts and groups working on decentralised messaging and file sharing systems - the APC libre mesh, Peoples open, Toronto mesh, Secure Scuttle butt, Solid and the Internet Archive groups are some of the ones I recall and hope that our teams will be connected to in the future.
Being there I realised it was the reassurance I seemed to have been seeking as the camp brought a number of indigenous people and their representatives, many of whom seem to echo the culturally decentralized existence of peoples who in turn are disenfranchised for lack of meaningful connectivity online and accessible / relatable content. The camp also was outspoken when it came to gender sensitivity and in ensuring everyone could be heard. The program included walks by the beach, sessions, firepits, hay bales, lunch and dinner with drinks like only California can offer. These resulted in many happy moments for discovering and connecting to people of interest. A tree, called the tree of life, became our hot spot. Behind the tree, facing the beach, we set up an “anthillhacks” corner where we asked people to explore the Mushroom farm and the surroundings to discover the location where the camp happened. We further requested to use some of the material to make/enhance badges and gift it to friends - we have taken laser engraved badges of APC, dWeb, Janastu, SSB and the Internet Archive made of natural palm leaf and grass from our location in India. A comingling of location specific natural material from diametrically opposite sides of the earth. (see j.mp/myhill for the anthill or “iruway” metaphor).
source: screenshot of dinesh’s online photobook
While groups of people gathered and spent time making something from the natural material, we also invited the Mushroom farm folks to make and promote making from material from the farm. We exchanged baskets from our Crafterspace in India for mushroom spores from the farm. The mesh radio was setup and made available on the local network as a service. As people recorded their stories and narratives, they could be seen on the default portal of all available services on the mesh at the dwebcamp. As people arrived at the tree of life, we requested them to talk about the tree. Our aim to make these narratives from people both local and from far away places to become a set of interpretations that capture the intelligence at the tree. Location intelligence interpretation is an approach we are considering for creating, managing and discovering content in low-literate contexts. Later at the Internet Archive, we set up a collection for these audio files and related images on archive.org. We plan to work on an interface and make it available for all.
source: screenshot of dinesh’s online photobook
Internet Archive is a colossal space! The time I spent with the people involved during the dwebcamp, visiting the Internet Archive after the camp and talking to people who are involved with projects in the area gave me a good feeling about their progressive intentions in rethinking a new Web architecture. What appears like a simple project to store files, can ask questions about privacy, intent, security, representation, availability, inclusion, contextual curation, version control and coherence. I also got to sit through a presentation of how they are building the dweb services. An overall good feeling about how we can take our archival and networking spaces forward in the near future. We also planned to work remotely and install Internet in a box on our Raspberry Pi nodes when I got back. Next, I was introduced to the amazing space called Omni Commons in Oakland where Peoples Open meets every Tuesday. Omni Commons has a large hacker room called Sudo Room and a Counter Culture Lab where citizens learn and experiment with different bio cultures. It was deja vu - our space in Bangalore is a micro version of this! Also at the camp and later again in Richmond I got to meet and talk Whoseknowledge group - again a synchronicity.
Hiure’s video using story hopper on his journey to dweb camp:
source: screenshot of hiure’s video
Dinesh shares several resources:
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a google photos picture book - use freely except when people are in it, in which case we can ask their permission where needed.
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Dinesh’s blog “Coyotes in the Fortress”, he posted his call of sorts that reflects on the why he and his team are working on connecting the low-literate billions in a meaningful way to the Web:
- Some future ideas to put together cowplans
j.mp/cowplansaux and j.mp/cowplans
- His Lightning talk on archive.org - Camp Day Three July 20 Lightning Talks Anthillhacks A Location Inclusive Fair by Dinesh : Adjy Leak : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Enjoy the read and videos!