Program

The ongoing discussion about decentralisation has been dominated by the talk of blockchains lately. While they do work in certain fields, in social networks the bottleneck and restrictions imposed by the distributed consensus render it challenging to build a social network on a blockchain that does not suffer from speed issues. This talk explores a different way of building networks that does not depend on distributed consensus. By making a small number of tradeoffs, it... read more

Althea is a protocol that allows people to easily buy and sell bandwidth from each other. The session will cover the design choices and philosophy of Alteha's mesh networking technology. As well as setup a basic mesh network on stage to show off. read more

The Internet as it exists today is not an ideal tool for liberation or the exploration of something new. The infrastructure is largely corporation and state owned and controlled. In this demonstration, we look at working with communities to build local networks: small pockets of exploration that have the potential to become whatever we can dream up together. We will be demonstrating the MAZI zone toolkit (meaning 'together' in Greek), and the results of a... read more

Although we access internet from many locations acoss our communications, our expectations for connectivity and availability of content are somewhat more static. In these moments our experience of the networked connectivity is embedded in not only files and bandwidth, but also mixes the activities of passerby and environmental features. Our ways of accessing information (i.e. files, content, etc) could be significantly diversified in networks without ubiquitous (centrally provided) broadband, where access might be linked to... read more

We are living in a fluid existence between the virtual and physical worlds. The urban development models of the past are beginning to fall short in creating cities that support the reality of our current existence. Networks aren’t just nodes and links designated by code—they are accessed and used by real people over physical infrastructure that exists in physical space. How does the network interface with the city, and with the public? What are the... read more

The digital divide in Mexico is not just a matter of connectivity. The deployment of physical infrastructure must be coupled with a cultural, linguistic and community perspective, able to provide internet access as a way to exercise a wide range of rights. Article 19 Mexico and Central America office is doing field work in the state of Chiapas to analyze, from a broad perspective, the impact of connectivity policies and the lack to internet access... read more

The interdisciplinary creative practices of fandom — whether it be fanfiction, fanart, or cosplay — challenge our previously held notions of authorship, but also uphold the open internet’s emancipatory values. Networked-based online creations thrive within particular fandoms, and its community-based model has enabled authors to create works that bring in feminist as well as queer and critical race studies approaches, especially through genres like slash. So how are these fan methodologies reshaping the practices of... read more

A talk exploring the question is it possible to build/manage communal mesh infrastructure in a decentralized fashion and pay contributors fairly, all while staying true to an ethos of providing free/low-cost Internet to those who want it? and a possible answer. read more

What does a 'stable' deployment of a community mesh network look like? During this session, we will look at successful community wireless projects around the world, see how they are structured, both organizationally and technologically. In particular, participants will learn what a stable implementation of a People's Open Network might look like directly from the people building one in Oakland, CA. Finally, we will facilitate an open discussion about defining network stability and organizational values... read more

What does a 'stable' deployment of a community mesh network look like? During this session, we will look at successful community wireless projects around the world, see how they are structured, both organizationally and technologically. In particular, participants will learn what a stable implementation of a People's Open Network might look like directly from the people building one in Oakland, CA. Finally, we will facilitate an open discussion about defining network stability and organizational values... read more

The philosophers have only interpreted the internet, the point is to change it. IP, BGP, DNS, HTTP, and many more protocols set the boundaries of what we do on the internet. Their specifications and implementations have enabled many great advances, but some of these advances have revealed structures and mechanisms that are objectively counter to their users' needs and wants. Our communities are radical in many ways, and some of our shared principles are accessibility,... read more

'Electronic art is electronic education is inter net and television for and about people. My television video electronic educational inter net art is for people, minds and bodies. Electronic art educational inter net television. Not so hard to imagine.' -Peer Bode (Experimental Television Center) This talk begins from a seemingly simple cultural historical premise: that the Net Art/Anti-Globalism movement theories of data-bodies, new forms of civil disobedience, and the performative matrix of artist networks between... read more

'Electronic art is electronic education is inter net and television for and about people. My television video electronic educational inter net art is for people, minds and bodies. Electronic art educational inter net television. Not so hard to imagine.' -Peer Bode (Experimental Television Center) This talk begins from a seemingly simple cultural historical premise: that the Net Art/Anti-Globalism movement theories of data-bodies, new forms of civil disobedience, and the performative matrix of artist networks between... read more

Currently, most websites and apps depend on centralized servers despite the limitations of this structure. Migration towards P2P architectures may be encouraged by solutions which support the current centralized paradigm while taking advantage of P2P architectures, making apps more resilient to interference and letting users' devices empower the underlying P2P network. For that reason we created Ouinet, a technology where an entire cooperative network helps serve HTTP requests using P2P routing and distributed cached responses,... read more

'What even is a proof-of-work based globally distributed ledger?' Blockchain is everywhere these days - from finance and law, to kitten-collecting, dating-apps, and ice tea companies. This workshop will explore what this technology offers, how it works, and what it can and cannot do in a friendly, playful setting. We will introduce the basics of how blockchains work in a short presentation, and then expand on them with a facilitated session of Scrabits, a modified... read more

qri.io ('query') is an open source peer-2-peer data collaboration tool. In the spirit of 'do it with others' this workshop will engage participants to each develop their own dataset of citations they'd like to share such as books, online articles, and blog posts. Participants will then publish these datasets on the distributed web using qri, and from there we'll work together to combine the sum of these datasets into a collection of citations. We'll then... read more

In the world we live in, there is a near-universal social norm that says greater connectivity, a more global web, and more pervasive digital networks are an inherent good. We see this sentiment reflected everywhere, from the obvious manifestations in IoT devices, cellphones, and Facebook, to more implicit forms, such as in the fights for greater digital security, more censorship-resistant communication, or more distributed control of these networks. As communities involved in shaping the future... read more

Wireless Toronto is a community wireless network run by volunteers, dedicated to the growth of no-cost wireless Internet access in Toronto's public and publicly accessible spaces. Since the group's founding in May 2005, volunteers set up almost 40 hotspots across the GTA, including some of the city's largest: St. Lawrence Market, Yonge-Dundas Square, and the York Quay Centre at Harbourfront. At its peak, the network served over 1000 connections per day. For a variety of... read more

Formed in the wake of grassroots archiving efforts undertaken in 2017, Data Together seeks to contribute to a civic layer of the internet where communities use decentralized technologies to steward data they care about. Since July 2017, founding partners EDGI, qri.io, and Protocol Labs, have been prototyping open source and decentralized archiving of web pages and data sets using IPFS. Initiatives also include public engagement through in-person events and topical roundtable conversations through online webinars.... read more

In this session, I will present how IPFS and HLS came together to allow us to build a distributed live stream for this conference. read more

In this session, I will present Mesh Orange, a Debian-based router that runs on various single-board computers (SBCs), which together form an autonomous encrypted mesh network. The operating system supports various WiFi hardware and features a configuration system that allows local mesh communities to specify custom hardware settings. After walking through the steps to form a physical mesh network with Mesh Orange, we will run peer-to-peer applications on these SBCs to show a possible internet... read more

As the internet evolves and changes, what material of the internet's past will continue to be available? What is being actively preserved for the future, and who is doing this work? In this session I'll discuss my doctoral research project that explores these questions through two cases studies of web archiving by national libraries and academic research libraries which are part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. These cases are representative of the many web... read more