The first week of April was DWeb Camp kick-off week for organizers, starting off with a visit to The Farm from March 31 - April 1, followed by a week of meetings at the Internet Archive from April 3 - 5.
On Sunday, eight of us arrived to The Farm on a beautiful day, most of us visiting for the first time, and got a tour around the site where DWeb Camp 2019 will be held.
The coastal camp site is really beautiful and there are lots of interesting projects going on, from agriculture to energy projects, which may end up powering much of DWeb Camp.
We spent half an hour walking around, discovering many areas connected by walking paths. Immediately we started imagining the possibilities for this huge patch of lawn surrounded by giant structures and a junkyard full of different materials.
There were also facilities such as the Tea Lounge and a couple other large indoor and outdoor spaces.
Three of us decided to stay in one of the tents, which will be available for rent at DWeb Camp. They can comfortably fit 4 people with plenty of extra space. The campgrounds are scattered throughout the site, which presents a challenge to distribute news across the entire event space, but also makes for an exciting opportunity for groups to connect themselves to the local meshnet using wireless radios.
We discussed processes for information distribution, favouring low-tech processes in case our digital tools break down. For example, teams of volunteers going around to write schedule updates on large blackboards! Or other offline processes like USB dead drops loaded with pre-built binaries of peer-to-peer tools, a peer-to-peer human process commonly used in places with limited Internet access.
Our group, along with Farm staff, spent many hours discussing our learnings from previous event organizings from Burning Man to ScuttleCamp, logistical things like space use and power distribution, and most importantly we absorbed some of the culture of the Farm and the principles we might build upon. Below is a list of agreements we found posted in their dining area, with much we too could embrace.
After spending lots of time with the friendly staff at The Farm, sharing stories around the bonfire after delicious meals prepared by our hospitable hosts, we were inspired to imagine a DWeb Camp that not only connects people and protocols, but also to nature and our shared roots. Having the privilege to hold DWeb Camp on such beautiful natural land, it's an excellent opportunity to start from our shared roots, with the basics we need to survive, make inclusive spaces to connect with one another to explore the role of technology and the purpose of decentralization. How, for whom, and on what soil, do we build our Decentralized Web?
After taking a day off to reflect on our site visit, the core organizers gathered at the Internet Archive on Wednesday to start 3 days of meetings, where we'd share our personal visions for DWeb Camp 2019, draft first principles, our inclusion & diversity plans, ticket sales & support policies, project proposal processes, meanwhile arranging consultation and partnership calls to get more diverse feedback on our plans.
The first session began with Wendy leading a collaborative value alignment exercise, where we surfaced personal feelings about how we want DWeb Camp 2019 to be.
And what we do NOT want DWeb Camp to be.
After grouping related feelings and sharing thoughts, we wrote potential candidates for first principles, grouped and voted for them, then co-drafted our long-form of our Five Pillars.
As you can see from the snapshots, there were high overlaps among organizers throughout this process. Here I will share some of the discussion points that came up, some of which are related to parallel research and external consultations that individual organizers are involved in.
Many of us felt that the Summit in 2018 was packed with great sessions, with in-between times filled with often enlightening hallway conversations. Awesome as that was, we also felt it was tiring and stressful at times. It was too much go time, participants were always on, and there was not enough physical space to take a break or time for personal reflections. Some discussions with organizers and participants of ScuttleCamp also echoed these feelings of FOMO–Fear of Missing Out. We do not want Camp 2019 to be stressful and tiring, and someone suggested to indulge in the JOMO–Joy of Missing Out!
Emphasizing nourishment & self-care as a core part of our exploration into the Decentralized Web and planning explicit relaxation times for participants reminded us of holistic approaches from Holistic Security and the 6-2-1 Rule at Congress.
Before dinner at The Farm, around 20 of us gathered in a circle for a round of introductions, telling each other where we are from. Some people introduced themselves as from here and now. There is no rush to be anywhere else.
There was widespread agreement that we do not want DWeb Camp 2019 to be or feel exclusive. The DWeb Camp team is striving to achieve and support diversity in gender, subject expertise, and geography. At the Decentralized Web Summit 2018, we sent representatives to RightsCon to do outreach, recruited from sister organizations, offered travel stipends and scholarships to Global Representatives, and built a track of Solidarity programming to highlight ways decentralization could work throughout marginalized or censored communities. This year we also looked to ScuttleCamp and received input from its organizers, and spoke with groups that work with communities that are traditionally under-represented in our digital ecosystems.
All the groups we spoke with shared how working toward diversity & inclusion takes explicit effort and their strategies toward this crucial goal. For example, in speaking with Internet Society and Nico Pace from Association for Progressive Communications and AlterMundi, we recognized that inviting community representatives from the Global South requires deep resources and a long timeline. Travel stipends can be significant (USD 5,000+ for people from remote regions), and the many months it takes to apply for travel visas and how often times visitors are mistreated in the process. This reminded us of the thoughts shared by kopek and Will Scott during their 34c3 talk (around the 39-minute mark).
Nonetheless, to paraphrase Emily Jacobi of Digital Democracy, tools always reflect the values of the toolmakers, and we’ll build better tools when we create them alongside those who will be using them. We understand the importance of working with people who understand viscerally the real world constraints: small communities 1000 km away from the nearest internet connection point; unreliable power; no network operators in the region; connectivity that is exorbitantly priced; censored web content.
Given the limited scholarship budget and timeline, DWeb Camp creators agreed that our best strategy is to partner with specific organizations working with communities worldwide who could benefit from decentralized tech. We will ask these groups to nominate the 10+ Global Fellows we can support, focusing on tech-savvy intermediaries who work on-the-ground.
Global Fellows can become the bridges between the decentralized protocol builders and the global users. We also spoke a lot about building meaningful engagement for the Global Fellows who attend, and how to move to a culture that values diverse skill sets and perspectives beyond the knowledge of technology.
Building upon the process employed at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018, we went through a list of 300+ invitees compiled by various contributors last year; next our 2019 organizers added to that list, with the goal to invite individuals who can help foster the inclusive space that we want. We are engaging in an ongoing process to come up with a list of individuals to whom we will reach out to participate at Camp 2019.
This post captures only part of the discussions that led to the drafting and outcomes of our Camp Pillars; you can look at our current draft for details and add comments.
We went through a similar collaborative session to surface our thoughts on the project proposal process.
We saw DWeb Camp as a space to build cross-discipline connections and lasting trust among participants with diverse backgrounds. Rather than segregating people of different disciplines by track, we want to projects to become a space that bring people together, where talents are respected equally and become opportunities for bidirectionally learning. With open mindsets for personal growth in a safe environment, we hope the gathering over a short four days can be personally transformative, and trusting connections can be made to catalyze long-term collaborations informed by diverse participants that will ultimately create a Decentralized Web for social benefits.
Using analogies of "weaving" projects that involve participants who traditionally would participate in different "tracks" at a conference, how can we "build bridges" through more holistic projects that explores certain topics, with different types of sessions that could span different spaces over many days?
We wrapped up this session with a couple standing questions to be addressed the coming week, but with a common vision of how we want projects to be.
In 2016, DWeb Summit involved mostly builders of technologies. In 2018, participants represented multiple disciplines and efforts were made to broaden gender, ethnic and geographic diversity. In organizing the third event, our first Camp, we hope to more deeply explore who is represented and create more meaningful representations by thoughtful curation, supportive structures like support circles, and encouraging multi-disciplinary projects that span many groups. With increased emphasis on decentralized physical infrastructures, we bring whole new discussion threads about infrastructural governance and "below-IP" projects and protocols that have established communities in the Global South. We are transitioning to open planning processes and exploring use of open source tools, drawing inspiration from events large and small from ScuttleCamp and Our Networks to Chaos Communication Camp and Burning Man. We are also very excited for this gathering to take place at a venue with very aligned aspirations, and will allow us to connect with decentralized processes of nature and defocus our primarily digital experiences.
We hope to document a large part of the planning process on our GitHub, in hopes to transition into a volunteer-run event and become replicable in other places around the world, collectively under the DWeb brand if they choose. In this archival process, we are emphasizing accessible and modular information, and favour pull-based access that are not pushy. Building local capacities while trying to make resources accessible globally as a way to grow the Decentralized Web.