Tomorrow is coming

The World Wide Web has always contained revolutionary potential,  to identify and address the most pressing challenges of our time. It has enabled us to connect our communities, tackle local issues, and organize across borders to address global crises. 

But its powerful potential continues to be stifled. 

Just this year, one of the largest social networks in the world – relied on by billions of people around the world to share critical information, culture, and news – has become a plaything of one of the richest humans on the planet.

What happens if we continue down this path -- an internet fractured by geopolitics, dominated by surveillance capitalism, and controlled by a powerful few?  Without serious intervention, will there even be a way out? 

So at this year’s DWeb Camp, we’re going to try something different. 

We are taking stock of all the hardware, applications,  protocols, and processes that we have already designed and built. We want to see if they’re ready to be truly tested, and to know what works and what doesn’t. We are going to spend the week sharing, scheming, and dreaming together, until we live this new reality, just for a day. 

Join us at DWeb Camp. 

Join us Tomorrow.

On Saturday at DWeb Camp 2023, we invite you to experience TOMORROW – a day when the Internet we rely on is suddenly gone and the decentralized web is a necessity. A day when we throw away the schedule and allow you to propose the sessions most important to you. Overnight, the networked systems we’ve been using (Wi-Fi, SCHED, push notifications) will disappear and we will run DWeb Camp on the technologies we are building:

• Our local mesh network. 

• Peer-to-peer (p2p) tools accessible and powered by our own devices. 

• Governance tools for community deliberation and decision making.

• Shortwave radio for hyperlocal programming and learning what’s going on and when throughout the Campgrounds 

We think this experiment will help us answer some important questions:

• How good are our decentralized web tools in this brave new reality? 

• What are the urgent conversations we need to hold now? 

• How do we govern ourselves in this decentralized culture? 

• How do we design and build local network technologies that address immediate needs?

• How do we retain the fun and sense of play when everything around us is shifting? 

From Wednesday to Friday night, we’ll encourage you to find others who are interested in the topics you find most interesting. We’ll help you adapt your tools to operate on our Mesh network. We’ll be using a new P2P app where you can jointly submit your emergent sessions and share the resulting artifacts.

When you wake up on Saturday, you’ll be in TOMORROW. So it’s time to start imagining: in this new world without the Internet, what gifts do you have to share? Can you find a good direction and bring others into the flow?

Like everything about DWeb Camp, this is an experiment to test our technology, governance, values, and social constructs. What will we learn?