See Part 1
See Part 2
See Part 3
See Part 4
See Part 5
See Part 6
See Part 7
FWIW, these are my impressions.
There is a lot of data being moved or stored – or applications being produced to move and store data – in a secure and private manner. Somehow this impression makes me think of boys and fast cars. Not so much is being discussed about being able to find it again. Not much talk of metadata or finding aids. Of course, finding aids point to a location, which can compromise privacy.
Bitcoin is a big deal in this crowd, which is interesting since my experience comes from one CSI episode and some references I have read. I have no idea how to even buy bitcoin. I looked it up and found that you can’t even find the value without signing up with a bank that has bitcoin. So much for privacy.
There was a lot said about bringing some of these apps to the browser, because the browser was more universal. Having to install programs/software/applications is a barrier.
Women were present, and Primavera De Filippi even spoke, as did Mitchell Baker. Most of the audience and presenters were men with beards and t-shirts. As I said, only Vint Cerf wore a suit. The men weren’t, however, the stereotypical computer geek. Many of them had, or were working on PhDs and could talk intelligently in front of an audience.
There doesn’t seem to be any thought given to making any of these tools, applications, ideas available in anyway to the commercial world. If there was some common ground found or some small way that commercial entities could use some of these tools, they might get a wider audience.
There is a role for librarians if we make ourselves known to this segment of the Internet community and keep harping about access, findability and metadata.
Check back. I may add more impressions.
Listen/watch the video of the whole conference for more detail and more information.
Resources:
- Blockstack website
- Blockstack GitHub
- Alexandria
- Tendermint website
- Tendermint whitepaper
- GnuClear GitHub
- Cloudfleet
- MediaChain
- MediaChain on Facebook (page is in Polish or Russian)
- Center for Open Science (COS)
- Open Science Framework (part of COS)
- Cryptographic hash function, a derivation of data used to authenticate message integrity
- Fragment identifier, in computer hypertext, a string of characters that refers to a subordinate resource
- Hash function, a derivation of data, notably seen in cryptographic hash functions
- Hash table, a data structure
- hash (Unix), an operating system command
- slack.mediachain.com
- github.com/mediachain
- Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality.[1][2] It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. (Wikipedia)
- The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[15] Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.[11]:ch. 8 The block chain is a distributed database – to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount), each network node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[11]:ch. 5 (Wikipedia)
- InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. Nodes in the IPFS network form a distributed file system. IPFS is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with help from the open source community.[1] It was initially designed by Juan Benet.[2] (Wikipedia)
- Cory Doctorow’s presentation
Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit
Tweets about #DWebSummit video