THE EXPERIMENT: Over the course of three days and nights, in a house in the Presidio of San Francisco, can you take 10 core peer-to-peer (P2P) developers, 2 research directors, 1 editor, and 3 stewards, datasets mix them up, expose them to provocative prompts, and see if some breakthroughs in understanding and technical consensus are possible?
THE PRECEDENT: The inspiration and format of the DWeb Seminar comes directly from Professor Christian Tschudin’s P2P Basel, the annual workshop he runs at the University of Basel for offline-first, P2P researchers and protocol builders in Europe. Over the course of five P2P Basel annual gatherings, Christian and his associate research director, Erick Lavoie, have honed the recipe: 10 participants (not more), cooking and doing dishes together (a key lubricant), in a smallish space (no escape!), for three days (it’s exhausting!).
At DWeb Camp 2024, I heard from DWeb Fellow Andreas Dzialocha (P2Panda) that this three-day workshop in Basel had been a turbo-charging event for his work. To be in a place where everyone understands intimately what a CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) is, has a basic grasp of cryptography — that allows the participants to move fast and deep very quickly. I wondered: could we replicate what the folks in Europe were doing in the Americas?