As we start heading into the new year, it’s time to start thinking about what we’re going to do for Blockstack Summit next year. After the success of the first Blockstack Summit at NYU this past September, we have discussed hosting a similar event on the U.S. west coast in the spring - so we’d have one on the east coast in the fall, one on the west coast in the spring. If we still like this idea, then we should start planning now-ish
So to toss one idea out there - in early November I gave a talk about “The History of Blockchain IDs” during the Aaron Swartz Day event at the Internet Archive, and afterwards I got a chance to chat with IA founder Brewster Kahle. Turns out he’s been thinking about doing a “distributed Web” event, and when I told him about Blockstack Summit he was excited to hear that there were a lot of people already interesting and working on these kinds of things. Shortly before Thanksgiving I had a follow-up meeting with Brewster and Wendy Hanamura, head of partnerships at the Archive, to discuss the possibility of collaborating on an event in the future. Here are some of my notes from that meeting:
identify design goals of the distributed Web
bring legitimacy to project goals
build and modularize the distributed Web (naming, authentication, storage, front-end stuff e.g. JS)
top-down goal is building a community that can proactively get ahead of arguments against a free, open, distributed Web (winning the PR battle early on - stopping it before it starts)
people are building their own things, challenge is getting them together to build the “grand vision”
could we get the money and influence together to organize an event somewhere other than the Internet Archive? more people, more space, more impact?
format: hackathon? unconference? keynotes? all of the above?
Brewster and Wendy like what we accomplished with Blockstack Summit. Brewster wants to support a similar kind of event at the Archive, but focused on the distributed Web applications of all the technology that Blockstack (and other projects) are working on. They are open to hosting the event at the Archive, but depending on a few different factors, the event may have to be hosted somewhere else and IA would support us other ways (factors being space, depending on the format of the event, and whether they can commit institutional resources to helping to organize and plan logistics because they have a moratorium on new projects right now).
It’s yet to be decided whether this distributed Web-focused event would be an independent/new event organized/supported/hosted by the Internet Archive, or whether it would be “Blockstack Summit SF 2016” with a focus on distributed Web projects - the latter option would depend at least in part on whether or not our community wants to do such an event or whether we want to keep the theme of our Summit broader than that. I’m here to present the idea and get feedback from the community about this, so we can decide whether we want to explore this idea more or cross this option of the list and plan something else. In any case, I’m excited that Brewster is so excited about what we’re working on. It would be cool to collaborate with them in one way or another, since there is definitely crossover in our goals and vision.
TL;DR Would you be interested in attending a “p2p Web”-themed Blockstack Summit in SF next Spring?
Great to hear that Internet Archive is interested in this! Thanks for starting the conversations with them!
My quick thoughts are that a “Second Blockstack Summit” vs. event focused on just “distributed Web” makes more sense, especially given that now we have more developers interested in the platform and some of the software is more refined. There can be demos and hackathon in addition to “unconference” style discussions.
Also, a couple of well-written and important software projects have shown interest in migrating to the Blockstack umbrella (I’ll post about this in more detail separately).
I think a large part of the “Second Blockstack Summit” will be these concrete demos and apps that people have already built in additional to the higher level architecture discussions etc. The theme of “decentralized web” is great and certainly relevant and we can potentially include it as dedicated sessions (or even a day) or co-locate the event. Some questions:
Are they interested in calling the event something else, if we collaborate closely with them? This is an important thing to figure out. Having a theme for Blockstack Summit is great, but calling the event something else might get tricky.
If the name will remain Blockstack Summit then what percent of the event will focus on “p2p Web” vs. Blockstack. I understand that there is overlap here, but I’m trying to figure out what will be the core of the event. For example, we went to IIW and talked about blockchain-based stuff but the core of the event was still Internet Identity.
Would love to hear what other people in the community think about this.
BTW, since we’re on the subject NSDI 2016 will be co-located with Open Networking Summit in March. Location is Santa Clara and this can be a potentially great time/location for Blockstack Summit i.e., co-locate with these two events.
If we don’t want to do a p2p-web-themed Blockstack Summit then it would be a separate name. If we do a p2p-web themed Summit, then IA and/or Brewster would be interested in hosting or offering some other kind of support.
If we want the theme of the event to be “p2p Web” then we would be looking for presentations and discussions that are at the nexus of the p2p Web and Blockstack worlds. The Web is a specific kind of application of Blockstack tech, which would focus the discussions a bit. These discussions would also be cross-disciplinary, bringing in designers and front-end developers who could contribute ideas about how to translate best-practices for Web development to a p2p environment.
“Blockstack Summit Spring 2016 - Building the Distributed Web”
Co-locating the events is also an idea - have Blockstack Summit one day and the Distributed Web event the next day. The formats can be the same or very different. I like the idea of having the Distributed Web event be more hackathon than presentations. We have the tools, we can put them to work on a specific application and distributed/p2p Web seems like a great candidate. IA could host/ sponsor the hackathon and Blockstack can also sponsor and be one of the technology providers. 24 hours to build a p2p Wordpress clone with Blockstack components and Web technologies - GO!
