Washington, DC, USA

A Decentralization Club in Washington, DC

I'm interested in starting a group on DC'd tech in DC, with an emphasis on events being useful and exciting.

About technology — but not just web technology, and not just for technologists.

The idea is more of a "club" than a "meetup". It'd be nice to have a budget (but without requiring dues), and to focus on practical outcomes. In the spirit of decentralization, ideally the group would make (most) decisions through consensus.

I'd like to see this group strengthen the community and its projects by encouraging clarity of purpose and usability of design.

What we could do

• Workshops on using decentralized tech for privacy/ownership, such as:
  • setting up self-hosted alternatives to cloud services (e.g. Piwik for analytics, Tarsnap for backups, Etherpad Lite for collaboration)
  • developing with WebRTC
  • getting involved in mesh networking software/hardware/communities
  • encrypting email now and then (or all the time)
  • registering domains and setting up a simple website for yourself
• Having people speak about their projects
• Usability testing, both informal and formal
• Raising money for scholarships to send the right people to conferences and speaking opportunities
• Being a base of support for people trying to support themselves working full-time on decentralized tech (for example, ArkOS or Mailpile)
• Acting as a Gittip funnel for people who want to support other people working on this kind of technology, but don't know who they are.

People

Eric Mill - [email protected]

If you're interested in helping, get in touch.