By Will Howes

DWeb camp 2019 is less than a week away and with new events being added to the schedule every day (available here) there’s no shortage of things to be excited about.

There is something for everybody. In no particular order of importance, here are just a handful of the events I’m most excited about:

Yisi Liu – Lightning Talk: Enhanced Privacy with Decentralized Identity

This talk is rather straight-forward: Yisi Liu looks to discuss today’s online privacy and identity issues, and to propose his solution for a privacy-focused internet. A former natural language processing researcher, Liu has seen first hand the double-edged user data can be in the wrong hands. I’m hoping to hear more about how his exciting work on the Maskbook project comes into play, but regardless Liu will no doubt brings an interesting perspective to the privacy debate.

Mark Nadal – Lightning Talk: Scaling Decentralization: 2M+ Monthly Users on GUN protocol

The GUN protocol is a decentralized data storage protocol with a specialization in real time data synchronization. Perhaps most importantly, the GUN documentation declares that it “just works” and you know what, I can get behind that. In his talk, Mark Nadal will be giving a rundown of the different technology behind GUN that allows for scalability in a decentralized environment. I hope to come away from the presentation with a better understanding of GUN’s place in the dweb space and where it would make sense to put it to use in a project of my own.

Paul Frazee – Lightning Talk: Web Crawlers in the Browser

I haven’t thought much about what a search engine might look like in a decentralized internet, but Paul Frazee certainly has. One of the beaker browser’s co-founders, Paul will be talking about the power a browser-embedded web crawler can have for personal search engines and beyond. Having read many of Paul’s beaker-related blog posts, I’m excited to learn whatever he has to share with the rest of camp.

Feross Aboukhadijeh – Lightning Talk: What I Learned from WebTorrent

BitTorrent was my first introduction peer-to-peer technology, as I’m sure was the case for many others. So when I heard about WebTorrent, a streaming torrent client written entirely in Javascript, I was smitten. In this talk, WebTorrent-developer Feross Aboukhadijeh will walk the audience through his experience of developing WebTorrent and explain what his project got right (and what it got wrong). With his priority being to help as many people as possible, a deeper look into Feross’ development process will be uniquely insightful and uplifting.

Margaret Warren – Build a Linked Data ImageGraph

This project will provide a demonstration of the power of using RDF Graph to map offline spaces. Margaret Warren will be showing participants how they can contribute to a web of images being constructed throughout the event, something she calls an “image graph.” By adhering to the FAIR principles and through the use of RDF graphs, the end result will be a metadata-driven image collection that will share the stories of DWeb camp 2019 long after its completion. Get ready for metadata madness, through and through.

Sergey Ivliev – Lightning Talk: Formalizing Unique Identity on the Internet

During his talk on digital identity, Sergey Ivliev will not be pulling any punches. He’s going to give the audience an overview of what solutions have been conceptualized, why he considers them to be inadequate and thirdly his own proposal as to how we should identify ourselves in a digital space. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with his perspective, I think Sergey will contribute a lot of important talking points to the discussion as a whole.

Dawn Walker – Lightning Talk: Resourcing Values in Design

Concerned with the morality of technology used by Facebook and Google? If you’re attending DWeb 2019, that’s probably a safe assumption. In her talk, Dawn Walker will offer a brief overview of the strategies one can use when personal values are the driving-force behind technological design, as well as what keeping those values in mind during the design process actually looks like. Being unfamiliar with this approach to design, I’m excited to learn more.

Noffle – Fire by Friction Workshop

Whether you’re a DWeb attendee looking to relax or recently-thawed caveman searching for that next big evolutionary step, the answer is always fire. With their trusty bow drill and a 6000+ year old technique, Noffle is prepared to participants how to turn that cold pile of brush into a roaring flame. Even if I can’t get an ember churning on the first go, I’m looking forward to walking away with an understanding of the physics behind the technique and a respect for the ancient origins of the skill.

Studio Ghibli Movie Nights

Any film lovers in attendance might like to know that, among other activities, a movie will be shown each night in the following order: Thursday is My Neighbor Totoro, Friday is Wall-E and Saturday is Spirited Away. Having (embarrassingly) never seen a Studio Ghibli movie before, I’m excited to finally get the chance.

SEE YOU AT DWeb Camp!