Community calls, reading groups, interviews, and more.

Get invited to future Fission events

Events

Fission

Causal Islands Conference

ODD SDK

GitHub

Discord

Discourse

Fission Links

Decentralized Authentication

Webnative File System

IPVM

Webnative App Template Speedrun

RhizomeDB - February 2023 Demo

Presentations on YouTube

​The UCAN Community Call is a monthly recurring time for library implementers, spec maintainers, and users to coordinate, share learnings, and ask questions.

https://github.com/ucan-wg/spec/discussions

https://github.com/orgs/ucan-wg/discussions/172

WeCAN — UCAN Community Call

This call is open to all, but is focused on implementers, following the IETF's rough "consensus and running code" ethos.

The IPVM is an effort to add content-addressed computation to IPFS. This requires specifying calling conventions, distributed scheduling, session receipts, mobile computing, and auto-upgradable IPFS internals.

IPVM Community Call

EP05: Subconscious - Building a Second Brain with Gordon Brander and Chris Joel 

Subconscious is a social note-taking app powered by the Noosphere protocol. This protocol is a worldwide thought-graph, decentralized over IPFS. Due to its decentralized infrastructure, Subconscious uniquely provides its users with a credible exit. It's local-first, and users always own their own data. Want to learn more? Check out their episode live in the Causal Islands Discord! 

Welcome to the Causal Islands podcast! Each month, we’ll dive deep into distributed systems, local-first software, AI, tools for thought, and their profound sociotechnical implications. Join our hosts as they engage in thought-provoking interviews with leading experts, exploring the intricate connections between technology and society, uncovering the transformative power of these emerging paradigms, and discussing their potential to shape our future in profound ways. Get ready for captivating conversations that will bridge gaps and expand our understanding of what’s possible.

Episode 2: A Conversation with the Strange Loop and Papers We Love Organizers

Episode 3: Alternatives to Modern Programming Languages

End-Programmer Programming with Steve Krouse of Val Town

Causal Islands Podcast

We are delighted to welcome special guest J Chris Anderson, who will give us an overview of Fireproof. 

Fireproof uses immutable data and distributed protocols to offer a new kind of database that:

J Chris Anderson will share how CIDs let Fireproof run anywhere and how UCAN makes data ownership models super flexible.

Fission Tech Talks: Fireproof Overview

The Secure / Design community aims to establish:

1. A set of principles to guide secure design practices

2. Heuristics to evaluate whether those principles are being upheld

3. UX patterns and best practices to make upholding the principles a bit easier for the protocols, platforms and products that folks rely upon every day.

We're targeting design and product folks but all with a UX bent are welcome.

: improving authorization and signing flows.

roc-grotesk

Secure / Design Community Call

Join the IPFS Community for a full day of workshops, lightning talks, and demos showcasing technology, tools, and amazing projects in the IPFS ecosystem. 

Prep for the ETHGlobal Hackathon by learning about all the tools and SDKs in the IPFS + Filecoin universe that builders can use to add decentralized files and data to their dApps.

Join us Thursday, Nov 16th in Istanbul, just a short 15min walk away from the main Devconnect venue.

If you would like to attend a workshop, please submit 

All the information you need for the event is at 

​This is the first of the IPFS Connect regional events, and 

 is taking the lead in organizing it, supported by 

IPFS Connect Istanbul

Welcome to another Fission Tech Talk, featuring technical presentations and Q&A about people building interesting technical systems and protocols.

Sam Gwilym and Aljoscha Meyer present an overview of the Willow Protocol.

They’re also exploring UCAN interop. Read more about the 

Meyer's paper on Range-Based Set Reconciliation

 is likely also of interest to our Tech Talk audience.

Willow is still a work in progress. In the meantime, join the 

Earthstar Discord and the #willow development channel

Fission Tech Talk: Overview of Willow

In the tradition of Fission Tech Talks, we're hosting John, CTO of Source Labs, with an overview of 

John will talk about the different components of the Source Network, including 

, a p2p database, how Source uses IPFS, and some ideas and plans about interop with UCAN.

This will be an overview presentation with time for questions and discussion with attendees.

Fission Tech Talk: Source Network Overview

A celebration of local first software, dweb, software builders, and trains!

Take a train from Seattle to St. Louis to celebrate the last Strange Loop. Jam on software projects, share what you're working on, meet new people, and see the sights of the Empire Builder line.

More discussion and further details on the Fission wiki 

https://talk.fission.codes/t/strangeloop-trainjam/4789

TrainJam

This month's call will focus on review & feedback of permissions & authorization UX prototypes.

Secure / Design Community Call #4

More background on us can be found here: 

https://github.com/ChainAgnostic/secure-design/discussions

https://depatchedmode.mirror.xyz/4t_7BUzz5q3XlPtH7EgtGL61nh9U8plsfH23i7x5_lU

Our second ever Secure / Design Working Group community call!

Secure / Design WG aims to establish a set of design principles, heuristics to evaluate whether those principles are upheld, and a set of UX patterns and best practices to make upholding the principles a bit easier for the protocols, platforms and products that folks rely upon every day.

This is for designers and design minded folks who want to improve the UX of secure systems.

In a data driven world, individuals should be empowered to make their own decisions with data. To make the right decisions. This means ensuring their data is secure by design — and designed thoughtfully enough to make those right decisions clear.

"A security system whose user interface is written by cryptographers is no more likely to succeed than a security system whose encryption machinery is written by user interface designers." – 

We have yet to choose a specific time and place. Please register to stay in the loop!

Secure / Design - EthDenver F2F

The IPVM Workshop is a 3-day in-person workshop for people working on IPVM and closely related projects. As the initial IPVM implementation continues, there's been a desire to pick each other's brains, explore each other's use cases, share what we've learned, and roadmap out the highest value parts of the project.

Remote participation is possible, but being in the room with a whiteboard is valuable and strongly recommended.

This is not a conference. Presentations may happen as needed, but the intention is to have three very focused work sessions on topics including (but not limited to) ABI-as-IPLD 

Wasm components, raw performance, discovery mechanism, desired transactional semantics,

naming / packages, optional incentivization layer, FVM interop, and so on.

We created a discord channel dedicated to the workshop, join the server here: 

https://discord.com/channels/478735028319158273/1077414705938845716

IPVM In-Person Workshop Q1'23

A DWeb social I’m Toronto! Come out and meet others interested in decentralized web, open source, tech policy and more.

Hosted by Fission who has some extra team mates in town this week. 

Toronto DWeb Social

Did you know that the Internet Archive now has a Canadian edition? And that they have an amazing space in downtown Vancouver that supports everything from servers to socials?

Join the Fission team & Internet Archive Canada at The Permanent for an evening of presentations, lightning talks, and the first of hopefully many sociotechnical conversations connecting the Decentralized Web in Vancouver and beyond.

If you’re interested in tech, open source, decentralization, policy, or any similar sociotechnical topics, come join us!

Doors open. Presentations will start promptly, followed by Q&A.

An overview of Check My Ads, Claire Atkin

Claire is the cofounder of Check My Ads, the adtech watchdog. Check My Ads is dismantling the disinformation economy via the 400 billion dollar digital advertising industry. They have taken millions of advertising dollars from Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, and other insurrectionists. This summer they launched a campaign to defund Fox News’s website for brand safety violations regarding election disinformation.

The Big World of the Fediverse, Blaine Cook

Blaine was a founding engineer at Twitter, and at one time had code running that made it interoperable with other networks. Fast forward 15 years, and we’re witnessing an explosion of of interoperable, standards based social networks and messaging platforms. Blaine Cook will give a tour of the wide world of the Fediverse as it is now, as well as some of the work he’s doing at Fission.

We’ll wrap up with community announcements and then adjourn for refreshments and conversation. 

Vancouver DWeb Social

Our friends at BlueYard Capital are hosting a live coding session with Fissioneers Jess and Brian.

We will speedrun building a contacts app using Webnative & UCAN and explore why passwords are a thing of the past.

The Technology Behind Web3: Live Coding with Fission

Mastodon and the ActivityPub protocol that make up the Fediverse are undergoing a huge surge of interest.

Come and learn about some of the basics of Mastodon, a tour of the interface, who and what to use it for, and interactive Q&A and group exploration.

We'll also look at using Hometown, a specialized fork of Mastodon, and how it could be used for a decentralized network like the Protocol Labs Network. PLN members are welcome to sign up and try out the system at 

Mastodon Show & Tell, PLN Ideas

We'll be doing a drop in working session around Filecoin accounts, FEVM, and flows for users and developers in the Filecoin and EVM ecosystems.

We'll be working out of the Hacker Base space @ Garagem Lisboa during open co-working time, anyone is welcome to drop in.

FIL Accounts Working Group @ Hacker Base Lisbon

At Fission, we really like reading papers, and, sometimes, implementing them (check out 

!). Though we already run the ongoing, monthly 

, we end up running into papers that just need to be read and discussed "in the now," which may involve other topics like programming languages, cryptography, networking, or a concoction of many subjects. This is that kind of series. 

For this rendition, we'll be reading and talking about the paper 

Katara: Synthesizing CRDTs with Verified Lifting

by Laddad, et. al, which was accepted to 

. We'll also have authors Shadaj Laddad & Mae Milano introduce it and participate in the discussion! 

Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) are a promising tool for designing scalable, coordination-free distributed systems. However, constructing correct CRDTs is difficult, posing a challenge for even seasoned developers. As a result, CRDT development is still largely the domain of academics, with new designs often awaiting peer review and a manual proof of correctness. In this paper, we present Katara, a program synthesis-based system that takes sequential data type implementations and automatically synthesizes verified CRDT designs from them. Key to this process is a new formal definition of CRDT correctness that combines a reference sequential type with a lightweight ordering constraint that resolves conflicts between non-commutative operations. Our process follows the tradition of work in verified lifting, including an encoding of correctness into SMT logic using synthesized inductive invariants and hand-crafted grammars for the CRDT state and runtime. Katara is able to automatically synthesize CRDTs for a wide variety of scenarios, from reproducing classic CRDTs to synthesizing novel designs based on specifications in existing literature. Crucially, our synthesized CRDTs are fully, automatically verified, eliminating entire classes of common errors and reducing the process of producing a new CRDT from a painstaking paper proof of correctness to a lightweight specification.

You can also find an open source implementation of the work on 

: Video and chat log from the session are now available: 

https://talk.fission.codes/t/papers-with-friends-katara-synthesizing-crdts-with-verified-lifting/3493/2

Papers with Friends: Katara - Synthesizing CRDTs with Verified Lifting

A little mid-retreat get-together for snacks and drinks on The Rooftop at The Art Inn in Lisbon.

Rooftop Drinks at The Art Inn

We last hosted an event at The Poutine Kitchen back in October 2019.

We’re back combining Canadians, Web3, gravy, and maple syrup on September 16th in Berlin. If you’re interesting in open source, p2p, IPFS, Filecoin, privacy & encryption, or just want to meet some friendly Fissioneers, come join!

We'll be around from 6pm until 8 or 9pm, and have some stickers and other gifts to share.

Fission & Friends Poutine in Berlin

Thank you to Jordan Ellis from PolyWrap for giving us an overview of the their system 

The IPFS community is exploring various usages of WASM for which PolyWrap has many tools.  

Video will be recorded, please do use the IPFS Discourse forum for additional comments and questions 

https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/polywrap-overview/14861

PolyWrap Overview

Jess & Boris are coming to NYC and are organizing the first in person Tools for Thought Rocks Meetup.

 5-minute talks on a variety of subjects. Let us know as part of registering if you have something to share! 

An interactive session on "mediums" and "workflows." More details coming soon!

After the talks, we're going to grab some dinner as a group. Details to follow.

Tools For Thought Rocks NYC

Dialog is a work-in-progress strongly eventually consistent data store that combines 

, the rich distributed query semantics of 

. It builds off of existing ideas from the WebNative SDK to empower developers to build new types of local-first applications.

Join us for our monthly community call to hear what our database research team has been thinking about recently, along with an open discussion on how you're able to get involved!

Fission Reactor Community Call

The Fission team will be in Amsterdam for Devconnect 

We'll be attending and participating in a number of events, as well as hosting technical talks and social events. Register to get notified as we finalize events, and make suggestions in the forum 

https://talk.fission.codes/t/devconnect-amsterdam/2515

Devconnect Amsterdam 2022

We're gathering together a small group of folks in Seattle to talk Web3 of all kinds and get to know people in the PNW.

Web3 Seattle Social

Boris has hosted discussions and given presentations on this general topic for several years now. 

1) There are a number of emerging code licenses that are not the same as classic open source licenses that are 30+ years old

2) Changing licenses may lead to greater success for code maintainers 

Review of some emerging licenses and approaches — Cross Licensing Collaboratives, Parity / Prosperity, "Fair" Licenses vs Open source

Code and the digital bits aren't a scarce resources — they can be infinitely copied. But support, maintenance, dealing with security and issues ARE a scarce resource.

Some previous presentations and resources:

Join us for an overview of some emerging licenses, bring your questions and topics of discussions, and share what has and hasn’t worked for you. 

Please share additional comments and resources in the forum 

https://talk.fission.codes/t/emerging-code-licensing/2530

Emerging Code Licensing

We had a great call with Jessy Kate Schingler from the 

Read the notes and resources from our call »

We're inviting Jessy on for a live discussion to share with everyone the mission of Open Lunar, about taking open standards and data into space, instead of leaving it only in the hands of corporations and governments.

For IPFS and other open commons networks, how do we go InterPlanetary? 

We'll talk about decentralization, collaboration, and pooling fund for public goods.

An intro to Open Lunar with Jessy Kate Schingler

A reading group for folks interested in learning more about distributed systems: we pick a paper to read each month (classic or contemporary), a volunteer presents a summary, and then a general discussion afterward. (Attendees are expected to come having read the material).

Please suggest papers for the 2023 Sessions 

Call Recordings + Transcripts can be found on 

Distributed Systems Reading Group

Can we use Ethereum / WalletConnect and similar blockchain IDs to login, and then link that to encryption keys for encrypted chat messages and other content?

How can we smoothly enable QR code based logins while being non-custodial & decentralized?

Is just linking identifiers good enough? eg Sign in with Ethereum -> a Matrix native account?

Talk through Murat @ Spiel’s desired use case.

What tools does Wayne @ SpruceID have for us?

Other flows & interop. eg Matrix powered Beacon on Tezos

Further discussion and links on the Fission forum 

https://talk.fission.codes/t/linking-web3-login-with-encrypted-chat/2304

Linking Web3 login with encrypted chat

Calling all buidl'ers and hodl'ers! We're gathering together a small group of startup founders and company funders to meet and get to know each other locally in Vancouver.

Many of us are connected to the global web3/crypto/blockchain space and mostly work through Zoom and remote tools. This is a chance to get together and meet in person, and hopefully things get better for in-person meetings and travel in 2022.

 We'll have some beer & wine & non-alcoholic drinks, and some light refreshments.

Web3 Founders & Funders Drinks

We're going to be in Seattle for a couple of days, and would love to meet some people in person!

If you're interested in decentralized web, open source and general developer topics, drop by. We're always happy to talk about IPFS and Filecoin, and our work around decentralized identity with UCANs and the WNFS encrypted file system we've implemented on top of IPFS.

We'll have a table at Optimism Brewing set aside, drop by whenever you like starting at 6pm. Note: vaccination + mask wearing required by the venue.

Fission Seattle DWeb Meetup

Edge Apps and Elixir — how do we build them, where do we start?

This will be an open discussion that will cover some Elixir commentary, but also talk generally about edge apps and the Fission stack.

Brooklyn Zelenka, CTO & Cofounder of Fission, recently gave two relevant talks that make for useful background:

Edge Apps and Elixir

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/7392

The discussion on manifests is also related: 

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/6214

We'd like to discuss who is interesting in collaborating on this and enabling this on their infrastructure, with the goal that SPAs and other front end web app frameworks would "just work" on any IPFS http gateway, without having to use nginx or another proxy layer.

IPFSOPS Native redirects for web apps on IPFS gateway

Join us in Vancouver for the hybrid event 

https://fission.codes/blog/cascadia-js-2021/

Cascadia JS 2021 - Virtual + Hybrid in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland

https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/8499

 use go-ipfs or some forked version. go-ipfs is in a challenging position of being a single binary supporting desktop application and web-service needs via configuration. go-ipfs maintainers are concerned that we're either not serving either party very well and/or more slowly than we ought.