/ Community

May Community Call Recap!

We hosted our second community call on May 31st with a whopping 7 speakers from our sponsored projects Dat, Stencila, and ScienceFair - as well as speakers from the broader community.

It's archived on AirMozilla (thanks AirMoz!) so you want watch it here and follow along with the notes on our Etherpad.

There were over 20 lines of community announcements! Including:

We had an incredible line up of speakers:

  • Mathias Buus Madsen / Dat & Beaker joined us from Berlin and spoke about Dat and hyperdb, a distributed, scalable database. This is the next big step for the Dat protocol. Hyperdb sets the stage for enabling multiwriter databases. In other words, allowing multiple people to write to a Dat. This is the culmination of many years of work and will enable all kinds of new use cases, including Jim Pick's collaborative shopping list, art, chat, and more!

  • Yoshua Wuyts talked about working on a Rust implementation of Dat, funded by the German Prototype Fund. The issue he is addressing is that Dat is written in javascript - so it doesn't run everywhere. Yosh's approach is to port bits and pieces to low-level language. He's 3/4 done implementing hypercore and hasn't hit roadblock - so the experiment is going quite well! The goal is to build a mobile-friendly Dat.

  • Hugh Isaacs II joined us from New York. He's made a Dat Chrome extension and he spoke at the last p2p web event in NYC (we'll post the link to his talk when it's available). Hugh is interested in offline friendly tech. Zombie apocalypse example - limited power, limited networking - how do we connect in those types of situations? Even in NYC, disasters like Hurricane Sandy show the importance of being ready with offline friendly tools. Hugh is focused on trying to get the word out there and highlight the ability for protocols like Dat to work offline.

  • Naomi Penfold, PhD just ran a productive and inclusive hackathon - The eLife Innovation Sprint - in Cambridge, UK. Joe and I both went, and we invited Naomi to the call to talk about her experience planning and running the event. She flipped the Q and A by asking our audience questions in the Etherpad (line 243), including "How can we reach more under-represented people in the tech space?" Review her extensive notes on planning and executing the event, and reach out to her with your comments!

  • Georgia Bullen and Chris Ritzo joined us from Measurement Lab to tell us about the Open Internet Measurement Platform -- and yes, folks, it's all open source, open data. Measurement Lab's mission is to measure the internet, save data, make it easy for people understand. To do this, they partner with Open Tech Institute, Planet Lab (Princeton), and Google. Since 2009, they've been working to provide OS platform to host measurement tests. This means you can ask "how fast is my connection?" and get a real answer for your actual house. They collect data from millions and millions of measurements per day. Right now they're working on a project to with colleagues at Simmons College & Internet2 to make better system for libraries - learn more at Chris' slide deck. Reach out to Measurement Lab and join their mailing list!

  • Nokome Bentley / Stencila joined us from New Zealand to talk about what's new with Stencila. The team has released Stencila Desktop 0.28.0 a few weeks ago for beta testing - check it out! They've also started a beta testing program, learn more here and reach out to get involved. Daniel Nüst and Min Ragan-Kelley created nbstencilaproxy for running Stencila inside Binder during the eLife sprint, which was a lot of fun for everyone. Nokome has been simplifying the approach to writing and registering custom functions in Stencila. He hopes to make this part of the next release.

  • Rik Smith-Unna / ScienceFair joined us from the UK to tell us about "The futuristic, fabulous and free desktop app for working with scientific literature 🦄". Right now ScienceFair is a desktop app for discovering, collecting, organizing, reading and analyzing scientific papers. Long-term vision for it is a complete rethink of how scientific literature is produced, distributed, discovered and used. Works p2p, built on dat (migrating to hyperdb). Stay tuned for bug-fix releases and more in the coming months! Join the ScienceFair community on Gitter.

Thank you to all our speakers, AirMoz, Aurelia Moser, and to everyone who tuned in and asked questions. See you again in August. In the meantime, please reach out if you'd like to speak on a future call @codeforsociety on Twitter or by email at hi@codeforscience.

The last call was super fun too, check it out!