 Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm very excited for everybody here to join us today to talk a little bit about how Constable Society participates in the decentralized future of the web. So my name is Shruti Ramaswamy. I'm with the team at TechSoup. For any of you that might not be as familiar with us, TechSoup is a global nonprofit with a mission to support other nonprofits around the world with access and support to the technology solutions and resources that they need to fulfill their missions. This event is part of the Public Good App House series. This is a series of events that focus on purpose-built digital solutions designed to help civil society achieve its objectives. Today, we're going to be focusing on solutions built on the technologies that are a part of the decentralized web, also known as Web 3. This is the first of many events that are part of a project supported by an award from the file Cohen Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Before I introduce our speakers, I want to tell you a little bit about why we're excited about this work and why TechSoup is actually engaging and participating here. We believe civil society deserves digital solutions that are built to meet their needs. That means organizations across the sector should take advantage of emerging technologies as much as they should take advantage of existing technologies. And we want to support groups like the ones that are going to be speaking today that focus on the specific uses for civil society in leveraging those emerging solutions. So we're going to learn a little bit more about it today, but what our decentralized web technologies goes by a lot of names. I said Web 3. We settled on D-Web. Blockchain is an essential technology in understanding some of the decentralized web. Blockchain is a record of transactions that's maintained by a distributed network of users rather than essential organizations. So transactions happen peer to peer as opposed to with intermediaries. So it makes it almost impossible for any individual or group to alter a record once it's been made. And the fabric of the way blockchain works is really how we're thinking a little bit more about the decentralized web technologies as well. You can find out a lot more about this work in a blog post that my fantastic colleague who's not here with us today, Marnie Webb, has written. We'll put that link in chat so you can and we'll share it as part of our follow-up so you can engage more. But the goal here today is to learn more about that with our fantastic speakers. You'll have a better understanding coming out of today about these technologies and specifically how these technologies can be put to work to achieve the goals that we have as a civil society. Today we are excited to have two speakers. The first speaker is Hunter Trusseter. He is the head of global social impact programs with the Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. In this role, he leads a team that's passionately focused on improving the internet by increasing the use of open decentralized systems and technology. After we hear from Hunter, we'll also hear from Nathan Freitas, director of the Guardian Project. The Guardian Project is a global open source, mobile security collaborative with millions of users and beneficiaries worldwide. With that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Hunter, to introduce yourself and your work and really excited to hear more about it. Thank you, Shruti. I appreciate you and TechSoup bringing us all together today. It's always so nice to meet with a group of people who are focused on improving the lives of others. Frankly, for me, it's refreshing and heartening to be surrounded by people who recognize the potential for technology to improve lives and who are dedicated to doing the necessary hard work. For those who are just meeting me today, as Shruti mentioned, my name is Hunter Trusseter. I'm the head of global social impact programs Filecoin Foundation and Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. Prior to joining what we call FF-slash-FFTW in 2021, I spent 15 years as career diplomat in the U.S. foreign service and much of that time was focused on human rights and online hards, which is how I ended up at FF-NFTW. Now, in the U.S. foreign service, we often measure time in presidential administrations. And there is this period towards the end of President Obama's first term when those of us who were working on digital and cyber matters noticed this thing to change in the attitude of many governments, including our own force technology. And that shifting attitude could be encapsulated like this. Policymakers had gone from focusing on the potential of technology to shark focusing on its downsides. Suddenly, colleagues who left government for tech jobs looked from being celebrated to those successors, seeing whispered out as having taken a payback to represent the dark side. Given this, it's natural that people lost their nationality while I left government. To be frank with this audience here, I had lost my confidence that any U.S. administration was ever going to do a good job of promoting technology's potential while also managing its risks. Being in government in that period felt like all we ever did was implicitly focus on the potential negatives of technology. I left because I wanted to go back to a time and a place where technology had potential again. A time where it felt like the heavy days of the early 2010s when people would talk about empowerment connected. And that funny little thing you know about not being feels these days like many people in the tech industry spend their time focused on maximizing shareholder about or freezing market share. And don't get me wrong, I know that any business needs to make money. But I'd rather see the idea of technology to focus on helping people and not on squeezing users for every last hour they could get. So why have I spent so much time on my personal show box selling your wrap, where's the ones? Because that's many of us here have similar orgy stories. We've watched the energy balls of a place of promise to its current state where asset deals that many interactions are predatory their core. The HBO series Silicon Valley did an excellent job of summarizing the situation. During an episode in the show's final season, Richard Hengricks, the main character in Sound Grid, a decentralized technology company, was estabired by the Web Monopolies in front of Congress. He notes that the Web Monopolies are modern royalty-reconciliation that are larger than any empire in human history. They are so entrenched that there is no story on earth that can force them to change their rights. So given that, what is the solution? Richard's proposed solution was that similar to how the founders of the United States led Europe to get away from law pleas that could not overthrow, the solution here is to move away from a centralized internet to place where the incentives are fundamentally different. In Oakland, decentralized internet where predatory behavior is difficult is how it's possible, where the users have control over their online lives and the internet buys the people of the people for the people. Now is a good time to segue to telling you about the Filecoin Foundation, which I know is not the most accessible of segues to promoting our organization. Now, we actually have two organizations. Filecoin Foundation, or what we refer to as SS, is the steward of the Filecoin Union. Filecoin itself is a decentralized data storage network that provides an alternative to the trend, and puts people in control of their own data. Filecoin Foundation, the decentralized web, or what we refer to as FFTW, is a non-tropical hybrid operating technology that seeks to advance human calories by furthering the future of the web through education, research, and development. As I mentioned before, I run the social impact programs at Filecoin Foundation. Almost all of my team's work is conducted through FFTW, and I'll click inside of our two foundations. I'm joined today by a few of my outstanding colleagues in the interest of time or what I introduced to myself, but they'll be here to help answer any questions you may have. Caitlin Donovan is the program manager overseeing our work on cultural preservation, education, and policy. Caitlin Donovan is the program manager leading our efforts on human rights, journalism, and science. Ian Davis is the partner engineer who helps our project partners identify and utilize the best decentralized technology tools for their agents. Just to give you a quick overview of how our team approaches its work, I want to describe our mission as following the ABCs. A is Accelerant. That's Accelerant, the adoption of open decentralized technologies. The B is Built. That's Built to communities, abusers, and champions of open decentralized technologies. And the C is Community. And that's Community that values and benefits open decentralized technologies to wider audiences. So if I'm talking to a dedicated user technology to the public good, it'd be fair to step that many of you are wondering why SFDW invests so much money in its social projects. The simple answer from a team perspective is that all of us who are here today by presenting ourselves in SFDW have built their careers around trying to make the world better. We're all personally inclined to pursue opportunities that center around helping people just like us to step all of you. The more complicated answer is that the incentive structure of the Heret is, in many of our opinions, broken. It prioritizes profit over helping people. If we think that WED through can improve in this area, it only makes sense that, as a foundation, it would support organizations and projects that are focused on helping humanity over making a profit. Now, what kind of social good challenges can decentralized technologies address? File copy being a decentralized storage protocol is often used to address the challenge of making data more accessible. Let me give you some quick examples. Through a collaboration with the University of Maryland's Department of Geographical Sciences, we're making geospatial datasets more accessible. One of the aspects of geospatial data that I personally find incredibly frustrating is that while much of the state is collected by governments using half-spare funds, it is a near inaccessible unless you're willing to pay for more profit corporations to corral the data behind T-walls. After a collaboration with UND, it resulted in a project that hosts massive geospatial datasets on file in an open, sensible, and redundant restored platform. Similarly, government data itself is often difficult to search citizens to access. This can be for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that governments don't budget nearly as much money as you might say for making their information accessible. This is especially true when the data is natively analog. Through a collaboration of internet accounts, we're building Democracy's Library, a free, open-to-end era of government research and publications. Now, sometimes, on the other hand, information can be difficult to obtain not because governments don't have the stunning or the resources, but because they're deadly working to assist. Such was the case with our project partner, Mottrock, who had his entire document club formed locked by the deaf and the raw shirt after an Australian media outlet posted great government documents on the document club platform. I would directly store on the document club database of Mottrock. Mottrock is able to make its files significantly more resistant to censorship. As you can see, many of our projects revolve around the important information, open, and accessible. Thank you for all your time this morning. Now, I'm going to turn the stage over to another of our project partners, Guardian Project. Nathan, the founder and director of Guardian Project, is going to talk you through some of the exciting ways that his organization is leveraging decentralized technologies for social benefit. My name is Nathan Freitas, and my pronouns are he, him, and I'm here to present our work on proof mode, which is a decentralized technology in kind of the old school sense of applications running on devices, but also one that takes advantage of the decentralized web technology and blockchain and other solutions. I've been working on mobile technology for, wow, 25 years at least. I've been a fan of kind of small portable computers from the Apple Newton to the Palm Pilot, BlackBerry to early smartphones, and the potential for these little super computers in our pocket, especially when they have all of these wireless radios, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G is just amazing if used in the right way, if applied in the right way. So our work at Guardian Project has, for 15 years, has focused on that. How do we build technologies that empower the end user through their device, as opposed to draw them in more to distraction and consumption? And one of the earliest things we did, and I saw the question already about authoritarian states, the Great Firewall, and things like that, one of our original projects was getting the Tor network running on smartphones, and we built Orbot for Android and iOS and helped Tor bring their technologies to mobile phones. And we're acutely aware of the censorship and network filtering that is a reality for so many people and increasing reality around the world. So this is something that we can get back to, but definitely part of what I want to talk about. And Nathan, do you mind just explaining to Tor technologies really quickly? Tor is one of the original ways to get around network firewalls and censorship. So it's a volunteer, decentralized peer-to-peer network that allows your computer to be part of a network that helps other people hop through your computer and a few other computers to get where they want to go. And Tor has been an open source technology in a decentralized way for over 20 years and a lot of ideas around things like the peer-to-peer networks build on Tor, especially if they're thinking about privacy. Okay, so proof mode is something that we've worked on for quite a while, but really have been able to increase our attention and efforts on, thanks to the support of the Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. A few years ago, they were prescient enough and I was prepared enough to come together and realize this was a moment that while we want to increase speech and freedom and access the ideas of misinformation and disinformation and these on the ideas, the realities that these are a huge problem. The more you enable the free flow of information, the more you have people trying to poison that flow in a way. So we need more technologies to combat that and so to start off with something fun, this is our disinformation fighting scavenger hunt and we actually ran this in New York with the Filecoin Foundation folks and also at the decentralized web camp, which was last June in California. And this is a way you can think of proof mode. It's a way to do a scavenger hunt where you know people won't cheat and we sent people out in New York City to take pictures of things around and they had 24 hours to do it and whoever won and we also did it at the D web camp with things from nature and the idea is you get our proof mode app, you use your smartphone camera, you capture proof that you did see these things, you return to a fact checker, they verify your proof and then you get an award, right? So we're creating this kind of game to teach people this behavior of capturing verified photos and videos and behind the scenes what the proof mode technology does is gather extra signals from your phone, from the network, anything we can pull in maybe because there's so much information about where you are and what your device is doing and we add that data with cryptographic signatures. So like a PGP signing and we notarize through some third party notarization service on the internet we'll talk about and that data is then instead of just a picture you have a proof bundle and then that can be shared say over something like signal or Dropbox or Bluetooth however you decide or even through the interplanetary file system which is the underlying protocol that Filecoin is built on and we'll talk about that more in a second. So you take a photo and you share the proof bundle of that photo with someone they receive a bunch of data which they can then use to verify. So we ran this game in New York City in real time I was getting entries in over signal that were from different players we were pulling these together verifying them and deciding who our winner was and so we had two winners and these are some of the photos that they took as part of the game and they got some nice airpods courtesy of Filecoin Foundation. So it was a fun way to engage people in play in a kind of training train the trainers and to start asking these questions about oh how could this work how could we use this as opposed to waiting for a crisis moment right or waiting for the actual thing and these are new behaviors we need to understand and think about with how we use these cameras these smart cameras around us in a positive way for civil society. You'll see though back here I mentioned a lot of things that are already decentralized web technology we're using the app and the captures all happening on my phone I can share via different messenger apps I can share via airdrop bluetooth nearby I can upload to a local file server I can use the interplanetary file system IPFS and so all of these things are really about you are in charge of how and where you're sharing your data and through what conduits it's not we don't have proofmode.org the centralized proof cloud service that will solve all your problems we are not a gatekeeper or a silo in that way. So what is it that we're working on here and this was a great piece of research done with the Shorenstein Center Claire Wardle and Hussain Derek Sean about seven types of myths and disinformation and first of all yeah anyone who says every technology can address every problem of course you probably shouldn't listen to them what we've tried to do is figure out what aspects of this problem of myths and disinformation are we actually able to support and so one is imposter content about who is the actual source can you identify the source and trust that it came from that source and so we use signing of photos an easy integrated way to have a cryptographic identity this can be through something like pgp pretty good privacy which is a very old way of doing verified identity and signing of data or can be through x509 certificates which is part of the adobe content authenticity initiative for establishing identity and it's an industry wide initiative with microsoft and others and you also see things like wallets and in ethereum and cryptographic wallets are just another way to identify yourself so these are things we're integrating into proofmode fabricated content is another thing we're trying to combat it's not real it's been edited it's meant to deceive it's not the whole clip it's someone else's clip that's been photoshopped these are all important things that happen all the time and these need to be combated and proofmode ensures that shows that this was an original clip attached on a device this is the entire thing unedited false context is when someone takes something from one incident and shares it somewhere else you see this all the time oh look there's there's flooding in new york and look there's sharks in the east river and or maybe it's a photo of a of a shark on another day in another river but they're taking things from one place and often this is even done by mistake i often see this with the work i do in the tibet movement look there'll be a photo of tibetans protesting in napal or india and someone will say tibetans protesting in tibet just like please don't say that it's like confuses everybody and hurts the cause in all ways and manipulated content which is a little bit like fabricated about things being manipulated versus oh sorry a hundred percent false so something fabricated like using a generative AI right making up new imagery versus something that is manipulated or edited yeah so this is these are the four areas we are focused on addressing with proof mode in different ways happy to talk more about so we came up with an idea with proof mode about a three layer verification i think i was inspired by the three body problem something about threes and trinities and stools and being stable integrity is the first step in our process which is all about notarization signing is something have integrity in itself and can more than one person vouch for that integrity consistency is you have a photo or a bunch of photos is all the data kind of matching up internally are these all does this make sense in and of itself with the phone the signals does everything kind of line up are there any flags that say this one looks weird this one stands out this doesn't make sense for the phone that it's supposed to come from so we do that check and then synchrony is does this data match the time and place and environment that it supposedly came from and there's some external signals and this is really a concept this isn't an app or code we've put it into code and we'll talk about that but this is an idea to think about three ways of evaluating any information so this was here's a bunch of photos from a beach earth day beach cleanup i did with my family out in beautiful cape cod we have a sort of humorous blog post about we all go and clean up trash and you're just picking stuff up and a little gross it's fun you're walking around i don't know you do it you feel good you take a picture yake so we took a lot of pictures and we use proof mode to do it all along the way my family often has to put up with me testing technology with them we found some amazing skeleton bones and alcohol and plastics and there were some interesting trends a lot of those plastic like dental teeth things wash up in the ocean please don't use those anyway so here's a bunch of pictures that's nice right then behind the pictures you'll see some of the dots on the map that you can see that yeah roughly this did happen there's a timestamp when i said i really did it in the place went but in fact there's tons of little points for every piece of trash picked up and these points are combination of gps and cellular tower and really precise data and altitude and anything we can suck in beyond just latin lawn there's quite a bit more and you could do this every year maybe and see is there a trend are things changing our different kinds of trash happening in different places is a current changing that was causing something to deposit more trash there in certain seasons right so you start to take pictures and really make it into data this beach is a real place with sea turtles right so this is an important thing and we could have more data related to sea turtles as well and this is a setup proof and i'll talk about our tool to verify we showed how many photos were taken through what time how far i traveled did it verify not every check has to be checked it's a an additive thing it's not a binary it's here's a bunch of signals and you can trust this so on proof mode dot org you can see the whole blog post so this was a way to make a trash pickup more fun interactive meaningful and turn this action into verifiable data and i'll talk more about that a little bit so as another example this is a occupy protest i think on brooklyn the brooklyn bridge years ago and you can just have the photos or you can have the photo with lots of other data added on top of it and multiple pieces of data sink together cellular towers wi-fi notarize and turn it into evidence to combat police violence to show that someone was not violent when they're being accused of it there's so much ways that this can become data that is submitable in court and we work with starling labs another partner of falcon foundation and ours to actually submit a cryptographic docket to the international criminal court with regards to evidence of war crimes in ukraine so this is happening now and it takes a lot of really smart legal people and technologists at starling pulled this all together into yeah this amazing effort but we were happy and we've been thinking about this for over a decade of how that could happen and now of course we've got some generative ai this is a picture i generated i went to stable diffusion running on my computer another decentralized technology these ai models are decentralized in fact and i said no please arrest police priest conference press conference and it made this wacky photo with lots of blurry faces and someone might have thought it was real if i spent more time i probably could have come up with something and so just this idea of like just dropping a random jpeg of a photo online and expecting everyone to believe it are over and should be over and we need ways to to also publish verification data with it and so that's something that is part of our work we have another blog post about this on our site of course with we saw this recently new york with former elected official i guess elected president who you know had this happen to him and it could happen to anyone that fake photos are created of you generated to get on the hype train so on the decentralized verification process we have a tool called proof check which is really has the decentralized web in its core we didn't want to build a website for you to upload proof to because then we would have this problem of we have your data and we're now somehow liable and we can block it or censor it or be legally held accountable plus it's really inefficient if you have 100 megabyte or a gigabyte video with proof to upload it to us it costs us a lot of money so proof check is a dap a decentralized web app served up over ipfs but you just go to it like a web page proof check dot gpfs dot link i can share that later it'll be on it's on our website again proofmo.org it can retrieve proof via ipfs but it's also it runs all local on your computer once you open it it looks like a web page but it's actually an app on your computer and when you load your proof data it's running locally in the app so it's it'll be instant the way it loads the video it does pgp verification it verifies third party notary signatures it does the consistency check the synchrony check and it's very soon going to then allow you to then put a stamp that you have reviewed this and then upload that to file coin web 3. storage so that you can then have your sort of verified i am a person with an identity and i have looked at this and i say this is good and then permanently store that on web 3. storage for however long yeah so we're really excited this combines rust and python and web technology and a bunch of wild things this is just a quick diagram showing this flow this is a bonding of witness.org an amazing partner of ours for so many years and another part of the alcoine foundation community working on preserving the most sort of essential data and documentation on the decentralized web so this is a real person who's does this kind of work of verifying media and is using proof mode and starting to use proof check soon in their work and workflow and a variety of other services that you can use to archive and preserve data one of the features we're working on and i'm going to speed up a little something going along is uploading directly into ipfs from a mobile device this is still really hard and we're working on it and there's various efforts of how do i make my phone directly part of the decentralized web that's not there yet to be honest it puts too much pressure on the phone battery network we can get it to work in limited cases but it's not good enough for kind of the whole world we want to support yet but i know people are working on this and we have it working but we're being careful about this because we care about battery life and storage and network usage because as you'll see proof mode is already being used in really some of the most vulnerable kind of least wealth least finance parts of the activist world and you don't want to say yeah you're on the decentralized web and then have the phone heat up and all their data get used in one tap but we are working on it and we're believers that we can make this work because it really then starts opening up possibilities for actually nearby sharing if other people are on your same network so i can talk about that more as well i'm going to skip this one it's in the slides we want to make many copies of data i'm going to the cool thing is once you have a little ipfs link so say i publish here's my earth day trash data set which i did you can take that code and use the ipfs tools to pin or copy it and you can ask everyone in your network to do that so that's a really interesting activism tool as well to say this is important data everyone please make a copy of this data just run this command and so we're looking at ways to allow community participation in data preservation we're really excited about that approach i'm going to skip we've got a lot of real code and interesting technology projects behind this there's a lot of engineering happening for people interested in this and again with support of falcon foundationally been able to dig into this and do that we have apps we have cloud services we have our proof check proof check verifier and we can integrate proof mode into other apps save we are playing with integrating into signal we have our own apps we're really excited to be more of an ecosystem around this and we're also working with the industry content authenticity initiative so now big idea i'm going to skip forward here so beyond just our work or journalists or activism we feel like we need to have like almost like an open source google earth google street map for the world that we call baseline and that this could all be preserved on the decentralized web our idea is that you can use proof mode to document all sorts of things or a similar tool but that we can start creating this a wikipedia but a multimedia visual wikipedia that is stored decentralized with many versions and iterating and that this is an important part of work on climate on history on anything you can think of that development and positive movements we want to support having this kind of verifiable data is important to us and to know what is really real so we have efforts to support that to support contribution to our baseline work and we call that also proof core and so you can join learn more about how to join proof core and there's a kind of guide to welcome it's what you'll be doing as part of proof core on our website and we do have some financial support for groups that are already in process of documenting the world for their own purposes and supporting their extra effort they would put into using our technology right now to do that and i'll close with an example of an amazing group and indigenous caravan in the southern part of mexico near chiapas and the yucatan peninsula and documenting over two weeks all of these endangered sites that are indigenous history sites because of development that is happening this is happening right now they are using proof mode to document their rallies their travel their interactions authorities they are sending us media in real time we're verifying it and doing what we can support them but they're also you know frontline quality assurance testing and that they're being paid for there they know what they're doing and they wanted to be a part of pushing the limits here and documenting this important stuff and we're really excited to have them and other partners as part of our work thank you so much Nathan and thank you hunter as well this was fascinating i have thousands of questions in my head but we do have some questions coming up from the attendees today as well and they're in the q&a as well some in chap and i'm trying to pick on a few of them i want to do one quick question i think that will be a little bit fast to answer from kerr which was is ipfs consistent with the terms of service of conventional web hosts such as stream hosts go daddy and websites you mentioned that a little bit nathan in your conversation so i wonder if you could just tackle that yeah i think it yeah it's totally different it's a protocol that anyone could participate in without a centralized host so you it is it's not anarchy there aren't it's not a wild west there's rules and there's behaviors but you're not allowing so one corporate entity to define the terms of service and then change those at any time it's almost like asking is there terms of service for smtp or http now there's the web three dot storage service which is an instance that is operated by filecoin and they are acting as a primary cash right so that's a step away from decentralization and they do have terms but at the core ipfs is a in some ways better htp and that is technology and a protocol that is open to all to use and summarizes a lot of some of the sentiment that we're trying to understand as well and so there isn't a tech soup is involved it's from raga which was what do you think needs to happen for the public to achieve the tipping point in making web 3.0 more adopted and normalized any tech upgrades more funding or government regulation milestones that need to be achieved first something else i admire the on-the-round initiatives the guardian project took to make web 3.0 more accessible but it seems like the public is still very far from normalizing this tech and skeptical of it skeptical of it all so i'd love to open this to all of our panelists and attendees today to try to answer because i think this is definitely something that we're all tackling and honestly one of the reasons the tech soup is involved and why we have the public good app house series of events to start normalizing some of this conversation as well if you don't mind i'll play golf on this one because this is a bit of a pet issue for me i'll try to keep the high level because i can fall down a radical on this question look and the high level answer is from my perspective it is usable i think the thing that is keeping some of the people's really adopting a lot of these decentralized technology projects or initiatives yes it is useful nation is one of the most important partners we have that have been in and of the trenches on the front lines of supporting civil society actors around the world for decades of technology one of the common themes here is that it is not in common let's go 10 15 years not like they're not common in 10 15 years ago for one of our project partners to supply a human rights organization that can test the environment in latin america with the technology that could make privacy more secure could mix in members of the activist communities safer from for tenants or for demands and those people wouldn't pick up that technology because it wasn't as easy as trying to think back to 10 15 let's just take off it was not as easy as just putting everything on google jarred and at the end of the day people will default to the thing that is are bringing the simplest to use to right now web 3 or these are our technology tools are off but still by deep believers who are building for other deep believers and are not necessarily focused on making entirely use of companies or people who fall outside of that table and that's something we're focused on as a foundation i should add and that's a public foundation that just say we're not just worried about the problem we're also investing in trying to solve it Nathan or anybody else anything else to add to that just tapping in here i also can back up what hunter is saying also add on that i believe education early exposure and active engagement with the global community is critical for onboarding the public to dweb tech makers of decentralized tech must share with the public why decentralization matters as well as expose the public to these options and how to apply these tools in practice additionally just again echoing hunter makers and builders also need to facilitate open channels for regular feedback to make the technology and tools usable thanks kealan and put this on the chat i just want to plug as well that's some of the goals of tech soup has here to bring together the conveners of people who are tackling and looking to learn more expose more and bring these back to their organization so we're going to be hosting series of events we're going to have office hours tomorrow with some of the guardian team as well so if you want to keep engaging in this conversation make sure you sign up for these events and then we can make sure we continue this and that's also that is what i just appreciate tech soup for dealer so thank you please keep it coming if you look forward to answering that yeah thank you i'll also just mention i put it in the question response there are initiatives like offline first which are really about user experience and design approaches to having worlds that are more decentralized and not assuming everyone's connected all the time so our opinion is if again you can build a great experience for someone that wow saves them data because when they went to transfer the file that the person right next to them it realized they're on the same wi-fi network and it just sent them the file as opposed to having you upload to the cloud and downloading again using both your battery and data there's actually very practical everyday values to the decentralized web and the offline first model of design means we have to get app designers and product people everyone just thinking in this way more like i said with our proof check tool we started with i was like we need to use somehow decentralized web in this tool and then our team were like in fact if we do all the media processing locally it's blazing fast and cost nobody any data and i was like there you go there's the win thanks we had a few questions related to this theme so i'm going to marriage a couple of questions together and started off with john who asked how do you maintain integrity in a web world where people might have different standard of integrity than others there's also a question i think about the onus is on the users and the participants to take on the role of verification and validation and how do we ensure trust in a model like that so if you guys could speak a little bit about that would be great and it's funny you used the word integrity john because i used it in our proof mode three layer verification model and to there we were thinking of it from a bit of a cryptographic perspective but also does this set of bits and the person claiming the set of bits is legitimate stand up to scrutiny and i'm not one for kind of real name policies and the answer is government ids and real faces i don't believe in that and doesn't really solve problems often but i am for strong identities that you carry over time i've had the same kind of primary pgp key for over a decade and that's like the main identity that many people know and you use and is trusted and is signed by other people so having these having persistent identities that could be pseudonyms or anonymous but are built through reputation relationships i think is important we're missing that kind of integrity online and i do think that again from a usability perspective there we have a long way to go but there are things happening related to identity decentralized identity even are starting through universities where people again realize that as a researcher a student you need some sort of identity that can travel with you and others can build up that reputation so i think yeah i think we need that work but the larger issue of integrity i think can only be solved by real community and there's not one value system that's shared around the world and so again decentralized technology really helps empower that kind of human organizing for me one of the things that they can just sort of show isn't it just that idea that there's not one truth that is true around the world and i'd say that as an exchange in the government you got a singular body that is trying to enforce its vision on different communities and inevitably slowly alienate those communities so that that really sheds a chord with me and i think that's such a core and our decentralized technologies trying to empower those communities this is going to turn almost a hell of a trend maybe live their truth rather than explore their truth should be also like i've seen out it's like the trenches of their entire disinformation time misinformation efforts in government and i'm one of those people who doesn't believe that there are any if any objective truths in the world and actually to me another question that we got from and Joseph and Haiti and there was a little bit of back around that he provided in his question so i'd encourage y'all to read that but it builds off of that conversation that you just illuminated hunter which was can we really talk about in his context Haitian civil society or just civil society our vision is not part of a totalizing approach that wants to conceive of a ladder as a monolithic and homogeneous block and i think interestingly what you're stating is how the decentralized web could really combat some of those kind of narratives but i wonder if you wanted to speak to that a bit there was that for need or to me either need than or hunter other years i love my years from this one which is that i understand the question here and actually it might be good to get a little bit of clarity here sir is the concern that the question focused around a concern that you should be focusing on homogenous blocks of people i actually don't quite look at things that my understanding is that the way that standard brain processes associations around it is that it tends to complicate the lives and i think that also evidence is itself is how look at people many people self-identify as being part of the community um so i wouldn't want to say that and i actually i'd really feel like i'm not understanding the question here but i'll speak to what i think about the understanding and then just please correct me if i'm kind of missing a mark here i do think that community is important that people self-identify as being part of communities humans tend to categorize things around in each of these like part of our psychology and i do think it's important you want to be able to dial out and be able to talk about your picture things you want to be able to dial in to have that flexibility um and you need to not be forcing people into communities in your head that they don't mean to belong to you that's part of the dialogue that you're just standing above when we'll deal with them it's almost just judging but i don't know think that i really think i have a solution to question because at least i interpreted the way that you're going with it now i don't know nithin if you have anything to add here but to me some of the parts of the question that he's saying is that's how does the technology support that of building communities not having a monolithic view of being able to have different kind of viewpoints in that and not have this one homogeneous way that you're approaching community and how does the technology support the various ways that people are going to be thinking about themselves can i then add a little but just that's my answer just a little detail to him before termination that i think an easy example that would be mastodon so we've got this decentralized alternative to twitter whereas you join twitter you join a modelistic entity you join mastodon you're able to select sport communities you want to be a member of and that is empowering people are able to self-select rather than having a monolithic entity that's applying a algorithm that at its core is really just about sort of looking for ad dollars push you into a community so that it won't cheat yeah i think that's a great answer hunter and and a lot of people are understanding that through mastodon for sure the i'll go back to the caravan of indigenous activists we're supporting in mexico right now they're they're deciding with proof mode and their use of decentralized technology how and what to document how to create this archive of media how to publish it and who to trust around the verification of it and the long-term preservation this is they're not structured by a specific website or format or terms of service and they can both retain the media and while it's on their phone it has all the properties of verification into integrity and consistency and synchrony but then they can when possible push it up through into the decentralized web for long-term preservation in a way they choose so i think that's a self-determination of this indigenous community who's long to choose how and when they use technology in a way that suits them and i'm excited to see and i know i have some relationship to the tragedy of the earthquake in Haiti my brother was in an organization that was there doing solar engineering off-grid power for hospital clinics and was there right in the aftermath trying to help and i tried to give him technology to help during a crisis like that and i know the crisis continued for a long time related to communications and information technology and i see just another question about construction and architecture and design so i think our goal with proof mode is there's this these tools need to work both in everyday life and in these in a crisis hurricane war political shutdown assuming people will be connected all the time with the high bandwidth connection is an arrogance and a great privilege of certain parts of the world and that's just not the reality so our goal is to create technologies that work for you as a business person as a community leader as a teacher as a student as an activist to make sure that what you document can be trusted and verified if it's a you're doing a construction on a house and you have a contract issue that's important you have a medical issue a car accident you need to document that someone's dumping trash in the wrong place or polluting environment you need to document that there's so many ways and things throughout our lives that we need to be able to be a verified eyewitness and speak that truth to the world yeah so we really want it to be a general purpose tool and again because we're not running a website where we have to pay for all the data coming through it and trying to sell it to a certain market we can do that that's again a really empowering aspect to the dweb we're already running low on time which is sad because we have so many great questions left i have one i think we have time for one more question and then we all can close out but one of the questions themes that we see a lot of questions about privacy concerns and how do you maintain anonymity how can we ensure the protection of privacy there's also a question about how the technologies support accessibility there's some groups here that are focused working with access and functional needs and so curious if you guys have resources or any answers that might help answer those questions right now listen to one of the good officers sure yeah we have a great accessibility lab partners we work with this is something that we've been working very hard on along with localization indigenous localization so accessibility of all kinds and yeah it's a it's something that we have resources for fortunately and we are aiming to get better the other really interesting thing with the proof mode tech at least and many of these dweb texts there's a lot of building blocks so things can be reconfigured in very specific ways for like different purposes i think that we're always interested in as well so happy to talk more and have testing and feedback and an area that we always have a lot more to learn on and bringing on more members of our team perhaps as well directly from impacted communities is something we're also working on yeah that's usually important things ensuring that you're very much hearing from these impacted communities but what their needs are rather than uterine what their needs are again so for everyone that's in government's hands there's this don't worry us how many it takes two blocks but i know that we're just getting tired right now one of the tort things that i would want to just touch on until rear naysay it says it's the fact there's no different building blocks i'll quote myself as biased towards autism but in with decentralized technologies based there are different building blocks which kind of apply to how you like and it is too bad if we're running long zones i think that some of my teammates would have some excellent inputs providing this answer but unfortunately we're at times if it connects well yeah absolutely it's just a topic rich with conversation and i'm really excited to have started that today with you guys today so thank you everybody for attending what we have up here right now is a way to continue the conversation and that is actually just tomorrow so you can get some of your questions answered directly by the guardian project team and felt techsoup shape our upcoming work in the decentralized web space like i mentioned before we will be following up with an email containing the links that we shared of today a recording of this event and there is a brief survey that there's a child link in your assume chat right now so we'd love to get your feedback on that but really a huge thank you to hunter nathan and the file foreign foundation for the decentralized web team and your partnership and support of this work obviously we just scratched the surface at some of the questions i think one of the big questions was how do we stay engaged so please continue to come to these events come to the office hours tomorrow the team graciously shared a lot of their own resources and email addresses so feel free to connect with them as well and if you have any questions you can always connect with the techsoup team as well we're really grateful for your time today and we hope that you can spend one minute just completely do a survey so we can make sure that we make these events as successful as possible for you so thank you again to our speakers and panelists and we really appreciate everybody's time today