gistfile1.md

#Talks

##Jeremy Keith

• The idea of the internet is to make everyone a publisher
• In contrast to Apps there is no gatekeeper
• Grunt an SASS and so on are great but raise the entry bar for content creation
• Geocities: Founded 1994. 3rd most visited on the web. Never the prettiest, but also a playground for everyone, for normal people.
• 1999 Yahoo acquired Geocities, in 2009 it was shut down and 15 years of content were just wiped out
• The content might be mostly ugly, but it is also a fragment of history
• Jason Scott from Archive.org: "Yahoo will be known for absorbing huge parts of the internet and for destroying it"
• We don't value old sites, into which somebody poured a lot of creativity into
• The phrase "The internet never forgets" is not true at all
• Average lifespan of the website is 90 days
• startups are a small elite working for an even smaller elite, their financiers
• startups mostly never have a long term strategy for the data they are given
• If a startup doesn't work out, it shuts down and takes all the data with it
• If a startup is successfull and gets acquired by a big company, it also shuts down and also takes all the data with it
• When Vox shut down, 6 million URLs disappeared from the web
• Our incredible journey: "excited", "eluded", etc.
• At the beginning we were the early adopters of new services
• Now more and more people are "rejecters" of new services
• Terms of service are one way. They don't talk about what they promise to do for you
• http://contentsmagazine.com/data offers good guidance
• Some people grew up after the time where people published on their on websites. They only know about publishing on third party services.
• On your own site you can turn everything upside down as you like
• There are no protests in favor of selfhosting or freeing data
• That's OK. Everything starts with just a few people
• Federated camp(?) only talked about decentralization problems like signup, authentication, etc. - they started with just talking about it, no coding.
• http://indiewebcamp.com tries to tackle the technical problems of re-decentralizing (they code)
• Once a lot of services are deleting data, there arises a big opportunity to offer people help and teach people on how to host themselves
• IndieAuth is an interesting idea
• http://indiewebcamp.com/Principles
• Indiewebcamp is for solving your own problems right now (not solvinf other's problems)
• POSSE-Principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere: Own your own data and then allow other services to syndicate that content, too.
• Gina Trapani: If I invest time into creating content, even if it is just a tweet, it is automatically meaningful to me
• Mandy Brown: I want to own my own domain, so I never wake up and my data is lost

##Ali Jelveh (Chief Revolutionary Officer at Protonet GmbH)

• Minority Report from 2002 shows a world that resembles today's
• Argus sensor: 1,8 billion pixels via an array of cameras: covers 15 squaremiles when used from 17.000 feet high, works as life movie, tracks cars and individuals
• Tracking hundreds of faces and people's mood has become very easy and cheap. The required software is free to get.
• Science is adapting to technology as it is advancing. They allow for usage scenarios that were just not imaginable until today. E.g. mapping 3D space and shapes through measuring the trajectory of light photons
• The technology described is controlled by just a few entities today
• Do we chose the decentralize road and distribute the power/the knowledge for building that to everyone?
• As makers we can put all of that technology into a product that we create and distribute that to less tech savy people, to democratize the use of it.
• That way you distribute that knowledge
• You create powerful individuals, even if a lot of the users never look into their possibilities
• We need products that incorporate this knowledge and are worthy of use
• Protonet as Freifunk are working on the idea of a mesh of personal clouds
• NanoSatisfi set out satellites into space and let you rent time on them
• The satellites are set out by Copenhagen Suborbitals, not NASA. They are just some dudes that decided to build a rocket.
• Protonet-Philosophy: Tech must be easy to use and nicely designed

###Q&A Best of:

• Ali would like to see a future where 70% of traffic is of short distance typ and goes through local networks and just the rest over long distances through the internet
• A Protonet box currently is EUR 3,000+ (Ali also takes Bitcoins)
• Ali would be somehow very happy if thousands of people would take Protonet's software and copy it over to their own hardware. Protonet wouldn't come after you. They did not yet have made their minds about a license model.
• Protonet also accepts patches
• 250 companies and 4.000 - 5.000 users using Protonet

##Alex Feyerke (Hoodie)

• Things to tackle for Decentralization: Technological, Infrastructural, Economical, Cultural
• Re-d14n == Redecentralization
• Back in times there were just selfhosted websites
• Conference badges had the website's URL on them
• Setting up and maintaining websites was a lot of work and not all too easy
• Web 1.0 just wasn't for everyone
• When the first silos came along, they made hosting stuff a lot easier and quicker
• They empowered the people
• Selfhosting is noble but "Convenience trumps ownership"
• Silos did better then selfhosted sites (e.g. SPAM comments and continuous development)
• Web 1.0: RSS, Pinbacks etc.
• Silos won because they met a genuine need
• Therefore you cannot simply oppose to silos and expect people to follow
• Silos show us what people want
• Simply trying to replace them also doesn't work (see Diaspora): They are too tech-focused, more complicated and have a lower level of usability.
• The way to go is not to look at the technology but to ask: "What are the problem we want so solve?" (Suveillance, closed ecosystems, advertising, the "Californian and only way", as well as monopolies)
• Startups are expected to A) fail, B) be assimilated or C) replace an existing company. So that always leads to even bigger silos
• That's toxic
• Also that all startups concentrate at the same places
• Also: who will buy out startups? Companies based in California
• Startups do not need to grow in an explosive way, they don't need to be huge
• They just need to work, they should grow at a more healthy rate
• A lot of content is rubbish, but some pieces of content are real gems
• Content today is distributed through the silos, because there is higher visbility, and because it's convenient
• Silos can be more effective
• In media creation, silos empower producers and customers
• People that still go buy records in a shop are enthusiasts, like people that use PGP
• Silos don't exist because they force people into using them, they make life easier
• People expect content to be free
• That's why we have ads
• Flattr tried to establish other means of income, and is very well made. But people continue to expect content to be mostly free
• Sometimes some centralized service allows for more decentralization, eg. Kickstarter
• How to decentralize content?
• Foster culture of value & build tools that allow for a lot of small products
• Humans are connectivity addicted
• So you are not only up againstthe silos, but also against the human's strive for maximum connectivity
• Sascha Lobo asked a re:publica: Why are our parents able to fund a bird's protection organozation in Bavaria with thousands of Euro, and why are we at the same time not willing to spend money on good web companies and products?
• Traffic technology is a good case: They developed ABS, Airbags and ESP, and they all assist us in a transparent way. You don't need to change habit.
• So that is a good takeway: We need to bring improvement to the table in a mostly transparent, undetectable way, that need no efforts
• Back in time there were social sharing tools like AppleSeed that covered a few of the problems. But they were to technical
• People don't care for their privacy and security in a short term
• Therefore these tools just stayed "alternatives"
• The internet is for people to connect.
• That's why the POSSE principle is okay
• But silos offer something on top of the connectivity: They make the posted content better, e.g. Instragram
• Also: If you want to empoyer people to build their own stuff, what to do with all the people in the world that never had and never will have a device that is suited for development. See the third world and its mobile phone culture.
• Our alternatives must be enjoyable, they must be easy to selfhost
• Proposition: Stay tiny, and be focused, build infrastructure and protocols, stealth your way into the life of people dragging them away from the silos or their offerings
• Problem with distributed hosting: Phones are very bad it as thier connection characteristics (and their OS) doens't allow for good distributed networks
• Decentralization shouldn't become "a thing". It should remain invisible.
• With Hood.ie you are empoyered to build apps without having to think about any backend. That's makes it less complicated for the bunch of less tech savy people
• The principle: Offline First, local user data + one online database to replicate it
• You can take that and build some cool thing on top
• Interaction with Hoodie shall feel amazing
• All the complicated stuff is being cared of
• Takeaway: Aim for the infrastructure layer, don't try to build products
• There is less of a brutal competition
• Earn money by offering consultancy for your procuct
• http://hood.ie

##Maciej Ceglowski

• Both "The web never forget" and "The web loses so much content" so interconnect
• The fear of losing important data retains us from deleting data in general
• Maybe it's rather "The web never forgets the stuff you want it to forget" (and vis versa)
• People tried to organise content scraping around the down takings/moves of Geocities and Delicious
• There is no solution for preserving closed sites in a sort of cryo state where one can still open its URLs but nothing new happens.
• You especially need to preserve and display data when you don't know why it's there. There might exists some back story on it that you don't know.
• There are a few decentralized services, but really not a lot because it's hard from a technical standpoint
• Then there is the "Vintage Decentralization" sites, sites that are leftover from the nineties where there existed no silos.
• The question is: why isn't there room for other sites, that are not Facebook & Co. Why is it that there are continuously new services popping up and old ones dying?
• As you try to grow you layer feature after feature on top of your service and it gets very complex.
• That offers a new opportunity for a simpler startup in the niche that you left
• Then people move from A to B, A dies, and the game repeats
• That leads to data dying with A
• But how would you keep going with services, how can you avoid closing down?
• Maybe it has to do with work-life-balance? (see Instapaper)
• Has it to do with income?
• Has it to do with laws and regulations regarding getting employees to help on your project
• There is one further type of decentralization: The breaking of monopolies.
• Rule of thumbs: If one company is totally evil, it should not be the only one controlling stuff.
• One other thing missing: We have open source, but we don't have open services.
• If one doesn't want to provide a service any more, one can only pass the code over to the public, but not the "living" thing.
• Data silos are also vulnerable for attacks from the inside like an unhappy employee of a cloud company
• If we eant to decentralize we should revise assumptions and "given facts" around what setup is successful and which one not
• Security is a field we should work on as we will quickly get useful results
• Luckily the crypto/security-people open themselves up to other developers and teach and help in that area
• There is also a lot of room for regulation:
• Collection of data should be regulated, especially the passively collected type. It should be regulated at the store, not at the collection place.
• Limit collected lifetime, except for when the user opts into keeping it longer
• Data should not be transferrable (e.g. when company gets bought)
• Data should be exportable. "I gave you data that belongs to me. Now give it back to me"
• One should have the right to request his/her data to be deleted
• If comopanies offer these options they should not offer them to just a certain part of its customers (e.g. only to US or EU people)
• Make such propositions legally bindable so companies can show they guarantee them
• We can turn a lot of existing infrastructure into carriers for our improvements
• The internet of things offers a lot of opportunities for decentralization
• We should learn from real communities, e.g. a shitty interface can be good
• Some interfaces are so hard to navigate, one needs time to learn it. So it becomes sort of a qualification test.

#Session proposals

• Indiemark: Quiz on how "indie" your own website is
• Open Source Design: How we can open source projects work better togther with designers
• OwnCloud: How it works, how they are interoperatble and how they work with community
• BuddyCloud: State of the open network cloud and how to solve
• Web Accessibility: How to make your website more accessible to everybody
• Remote storage: Open protocol for users to bring data storage to their apps (sort of open Dropbox protocol)
• XMPP: Federated decentralized chat network, but also a lot more. Will build a little App based on that protocol (a Todo App)
• Protocol patterns: Common Patterns for decentralizing and cryptography
• arkOS: OS for personal services that runs on embedded devices, also everywhere else. Also talk about how personal services should work.
• Freedombox: What can one do with it, how can it help decenztralize common services
• Bittorrent: Howto about content-distribution via bittorrent protocol