October 19-21, 2018
Berlin, Germany

Benedict Lau

Website | Twitter

Benedict is an engineer working on mobile software and mesh networks. He is a contributor and organizer at Toronto Mesh, currently focused on meshing with single-board computers and building deployment tools and literacy around peer-to-peer applications. He has designed and facilitated tech workshops to diverse audiences at conferences, makerspaces, hackerspaces, libraries, and is author to some marginally popular open-source projects.


Workshop

Building the Peer-to-Peer Internet

This workshop will start with a social activity to investigate the power structures around a common centralized web application, reflecting on questions like whose interest is prioritized by a social networking platform like Facebook, and whether there are mechanisms through which monetary or knowledge gained may be distributed to the local community of users. This is followed by together building a local ad-hoc mesh network of Raspberry Pis that run IPFS and Secure Scuttlebutt. In this hands-on session, participants will experiment with sending files to one another over IPFS, interacting through the peer-to-peer social network, Patchwork, built on top of SSB, and learn how messages are passed around in an encrypted physical mesh network. After the hands-on session, participants should have a good understanding of a mesh network where nodes are serving distributed content and web services.

Each participant should bring a laptop with an SSH client installed (usually available through the shell / command line)

Additional information:
https://tomesh.net/peer-to-peer-internet/
https://decentralizedweb.net/building-the-peer-to-peer-internet/