Bridging Decentralized Web & Web3 with DWeb Camp and Internet Archive | Wendy Hanamura (Febr 2026)

Thank you. Hi everyone. My name is Wendy Honamura and I have come here from the internet archive. So I'm wondering how many of you have ever used archive.org?

That's pretty good. How many of you used the Wayback Machine? How many of you have played like a vintage game in our gaming in emulation? How many of you ever read a book on archive.org?

Oh, so most people think of us as the home of the wayback machine, which we are, but we do many other things, including quite a bit of work in the decentralized web. And uh I was having dinner with a guy named Trent McConna uh from Ocean Protocol and he was saying that he is a OG of the crypto space. But in our minds, Trent is not an OG. He's kind of a MG. He's like middle little middle G.

But I am from Oakland, California. And uh I think I am an OG. Now, do you know what OG stands for? Who knows what OG stands for? Oh, okay.

You in the orange. What is it?

Original gangster.

That is right. I am an original gangster from Oakland.

Oh. Oh. In fact,

this is my proudest moment. I got to meet at Devcon Osaka the Dogecoin dog. That's how old I am. I am older than the Dogecoin dog who actually just died last year very sadly. His name is Kabotaa.

And uh I love Kabotaa. And this was thank you Vitalik for allowing me to meet my hero. But I want to tell you a little bit about how the internet archive came to be in the decentralized space and I want to hear from you why you are in the decentralized space because I think that's really important. So okay go back to 2015. I think this was yeah 2015 and um the five largest funders the five largest philanthropies foundations in America said okay we're going to pull all of our money and we're going to create a moonshot for the internet and uh they invited different people to come and present their ideas including my founder Brewster Kale and um I always work with Brewster on what he talks about and I'm pretty sure they thought he was going to talk about the uh Library of Alexandria for the digital age.

And I said, "Brewster, that is not a moonshot. Give me a real moonshot." And he said, "Okay, well, clearly the web that we're using is failing us. It's not private. It's not secure.

It monetizes you." And he said, "I think that we can build something better." And I said, 'Well, that is a bold statement because in the front row when you give the speech, it will be Tim Berners Lee who made that worldwide web. And he set out this kind of vision of a decentralized web. At first, we were calling it the distributed web, but we settled on decentralized web back in 2015.

And he said, "This web should be it should be private. It should be secure. It should be locked open for good, but it should still be fun." And as I was watching your presentation, I realized Ethereum has achieved much of that. It is private, it's secure, it's always going, it's pretty fun oftentimes.

And this is this is how much of an OG we are. In 2014, I attended an SF Bitcoin meetup in the lobby of the internet archive. And the speaker that night was a very young kind of skinny guy named Vitalik Bdderan. and Vitalik announced that he was creating something called Ethereum and we said well what is this thing he said oh it's kind of smart contracts you know and he's eating pizza and we had known Vitalic for quite a while because we the internet archive has always been about experimentation so we in the early days could have been paid in Bitcoin oh woe is me that I did not take that uh and we convinced the restaurant next door the Japanese restaurant to be paid in Bitcoin. So every day Brewster would go and he'd order his chicken teriyak bento and he would pay in Bitcoin.

And that restaurant owner is now of course a Bitcoin millionaire investor in Hong Kong. So we've been around for a long time, but for us Oh, and that first year that we took Bitcoin donations, we got 12,000 bitcoins in donations. Oh, we should have really kept it in Bitcoin, but our our board said, "Oh, no. That's way too dangerous. We you you must you must sell it."

And you know how much we sold it for? $12,000. $1 per Bitcoin back then. We could have been running the internet archive forever if we had just held on to that Bitcoin. But the point was never to make a lot of money.

I don't know if it's to make a lot of money for you. The point was to try something new, to try and make something better. And so in 2016, Brewster said, "Wendy, I think you should put together something called the decentralized web summit." And he said, "Yeah, you know, we'll just get all of the people who are working on this stuff together for the first time, and can you do that for me?" And I said, "Well, I don't know anything about this field, but if you give me someone smart, we can do this."

And so a young guy who was working in a small industry and I with great hubris, great ego, we decided we would pick the 80 most important people at that time working in this field. And you know, we got some right, we got some wrong. There was uh a young Vlad Samir. Uh there was Gavin Wood and his team came. Uh Stefan Thomas of Coyle.

There was Juan Benet. There was Trent McConna uh of Ocean but back then Big Chain Data. There were the nonprofit folks like the creator of DAT Max Ogden. There was a young Feras whose name is very hard to pronounce but he did web Torrance and they were the young Turks but then there were the OGs there and then there were the super OGs. So the super OOGs were Tim Berners Lee and Vince surf creator and father of the internet and Brewster and Van Jacobson HTTP protocol and the OGs there were Bram Cohen and uh Zuka Wilcox, Brian Warner, Taho Laughs and you guys are are like the enies.

You're like the nude gangsters honestly. So why do I tell you all this history? Because since 2016, the Internet Archive has seen as part of its mission to gather the best decentralized technologists in the world together. And we have no horse in the game. We don't care if you're working on Athereum or if you're working on coil or, you know, if you're working for DAPCON and and Nosis or if you are doing much more fundamental peer-to-peer stack stuff.

We work with people who decentralize storage, decentralized transport, decentralized apps, decentralized identity. They all come because we believe that someday we are going to build that completely decentralized stack and that it will be really important for you to know the people who work in decentralized storage or who work in decentralized identity because if we're ever going to achieve this huge vision, you're going to have to know each other. And it's really important. Do you know why? Because not only is the web that we know betraying us, the internet that we know is splintering.

The Internet Archive has one of the largest libraries of data in the world, second honestly only to Google in the digitized form. But there are now huge swaths of the world that we cannot reach. China, many parts of India, parts of Turkey, they got really mad at us when we kept up their, you know, Turkish journalists who had been banned. Hell, you know, much of America will soonly be cut off from us. I'm sure parts of us are disappearing from the web.

We're splintering. The internet that we know is splintering. And one of the only solutions to this is to have peer-to-peer delivery on every single level of the stack. That's why we invest in it. No one will see us if we can't perfect some of these technologies.

But how do you know you want to work with the internet archives? So this is my colleague since 2019, my Ishikawa Sutton. And we said, okay, how do you know you really want to be part of this this gang of ours? Well, you you have to believe in our principles. And I'm going to turn it over to Mai because she was one of the architects of the D web principles.

Hello everybody. Uh so in 2019 after our first DW web camp we realized that we needed some sort of vision document for the D web movement. We knew that we were against this splintering of the internet against big tech taking over swast of the infrastructure of the web that we know and love. So I worked with a colleague um John Connor Ryan who used to work closely with Georgia Telecom, used to work at Google X. Um and so as a uh or digital rights organizer that used to work at EFF, we kind of came from very different backgrounds.

Um but we found that we were able to talk to the whole DW community and come up with this document called the DW principles. um the five overarching categories. Technology for human agency. We stand for technology that enables the primacy of people as beneficiaries of the technology by upholding their security, privacy, and self-determination. We urge coexistence and interoperability and discourage world gardens.

So that's just a sample of this first one. We have

Oh, okay. Can I hold it together? And then so we have uh distributed benefits um mutual respect humanity and ecological awareness. And in developing these uh principles we were able to signal what we were about. And this has been a really important document essentially to show who is part of this d web who aligns with us um who doesn't align with us.

And uh in developing this, we actually worked with a lot of um as Wendy said, OG's and maybe middle G's of the internet. Uh so for instance, uh Jay Greyber, the CEO of Blue Sky, who's a friend of mine, um gave us a ton of comments actually on this uh document. So she has her fingerprints all over it. Um

Ayami Guuchi was also very instrumental in helping us shape this document. Um, of course all of us uh Ray McKelie who used to work on dad who worked on Ditto and so uh we came up with this document and it's actually and now this uh endorsement list is just growing more and more and uh and so this is really if you want to learn more about what we are about at our core um please read our dweb principles at getdeweb.net/principles.

So you're probably wondering what are we doing here in Berlin? Well, we are here to issue an invitation to you. If you could go to um our website, there's two invitations. Do

you want me to show a video or or maybe

Sure. Sure. Hang on one second though. So, oh my gosh, I don't know. Maybe 2018, Rooster said to me, you know, Andy, I think what we need to do is create a third path.

You've got your get-richqu guys. You've got your academics, but what if you want to use technology to make the world a better place? You don't have to do that your whole career, but maybe you have unique skills and you want to find other people who can help you create code that will really make the world better. Where do you find those people? Where do you find support?

Where do you find allies? He said, that's the third path we should create. and I think we should make it kind of like chaos commuter computer camp meets uh burning man. And he said, "Could you do that?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I think I could do that."

And so this is what we've created and it is called D Web Camp. So take a look. D Web Camp brings together all the dreamers. I think it's one of the best places I've ever been for finding people who not only have the political ideas and the political imagination to look at what a next world would be, but also people have really done the reading. They're coming having worked on the technology and having read the books and having thought about the different philosophies behind it.

It's really a special place. The DM camp is a convening of people who are interested in all kinds of decentralized technologies to help create the next generation of the internet which will be much more decentralized than the current one. And so fundamentally I think the idea here is to actually be using the decentralized web to protect civil liberties and to protect human rights. You know I think that has the the extra advantage of really making it clear why this technology is so important at a moment in time where it really is critical for the future of this technology that that message gets out to policy makers. My impression is these are people who care.

They want to contribute to a future worth living in, a future that's in harmony with nature, which is wonderful. While we're meeting out here, 2 So we are leaving Northern California and coming to Alle.

Yeah. Alahole about 1 hour, one and a half hours perhaps from right here from Berlin. And we come to learn because nobody does outside events and tech camps like the Germans quite frankly. And we've come here to make partners and some of our partners are in the room. Liy, will you stand up?

Every does everyone know Liy? Uh Cabbase, Ethereum, Department of Decentralization. Uh we've come to to learn how you do it and to learn new ways and to try and bridge the best coders, the best policy people of North America, South America with the folks who are here. And we think that we can do this uh on this ground and look at the root systems. I love that Martin's incredible uh document about uh funding, but the root systems that underlly all of us.

Let's go back to our roots. Let's think about how we sustain those roots. Let's spread those roots. And we're going to start by cocreating this camp because we want to do it differently in this place. And we're going to do that this Saturday at Seabbase thanks to our friends at Seabbase.

Um so during the day there will be an unconference, there will be breakout groups. What are the topics that you care about? What would bring you to this? What are the activities? How can you contribute?

What ideas would you have? I mean Lei alone has 25 ideas honestly you know uh roots music right the roots in like you can feel it in nature and uh tea tense but also of course deep technological and and social discussion so my do you want to talk about maybe some of the areas of discussion that we will have at camp

sure so uh some of the conversations we've been having were actually in Amsterdam last week uh meeting with various organizations kind of trying to understand the European context the uh both the technological context the reality of many organizations coming to grips with AI to um to again the the political and regulatory context of developing new technologies in uh in the EU. And so, uh, we have a couple tracks that are bubbling up to the surface and we're looking for curators and stewards to, uh, host these conversations at the webcam. Uh, one is public AI. So how do we make use of publicly available cultural and civic data to make the use of the best use of those uh data sets and also make tools that are actually for the public interest and inviting various organizations that are thinking about this. Uh one of our team members Tommy is really passionate about the Fedverse and uh open social web.

So, how do we think about bridging the the AT protocol with the Fediverse and all the other open social networks and how do they learn from each other? How do we bridge them, make them interoperable? And another one is one that I'm personally passionate about and I think is also related to what Martin was talking about with sustaining the digital infrastructure builders and maintainers is how do we think about sustaining the funding for developers the the critical people who build oh I'm sorry uh who build and again maintain the code that we rely on and I believe that there's much to learn from the social solidarity economy cooperatives collective organizations to think about how do we make funding flow between each other and and pay attention to the stewards of the technologies that we rely on. Uh another one is privacy and the anti- athoritarian stack. How do we listen to uh people who are on the ground um fighting the good fight and also thinking about how we resist uh you know big tech complicity with uh big powerful players um wherever you are in the world.

Uh, am I missing I'm missing more?

Well, we'll we'll definitely have some of the most interesting P2P open source local first builders in the world there. Um there's in Berlin uh the founder of Willow perhaps you know him he's doing a uh not appendon kind of base layer that would allow you in to to delete not only an item but the the metadata for that item. You can imagine why that's so important. You know, maybe you and I are working in America as sanctuary providers to undocumented immigrants and we hear that ICE is coming and ICE is going to definitely take your server and my server. Well, we want to get rid of that and we want to get rid of all traces of that.

This new Willow protocol would allow you to do that because it's not a pendonly log. You can get rid of things pretty much forever and traces of it. But you know up the stack people from Berlin and Pepa Panda and other groups and some of the very finest uh local first developers are coming from Brazil and from Buenes Ares and from California and Vancouver. So a chance to really bring the best minds together. Uh so much more and so much fun because as Brewster said it has to be fun or people will not come.

People will not stay. People will not volunteer and give their heart. So, two invitations. Come to Seabbase. I think there's eight tickets left, but if you do something special, uh, if you email us at dwebarchive.

org, um, we will get you on the list, um, we're expecting even though we are sold out, uh, always 10 to 20% don't show up. So, and there is a train strike this weekend. So, hopefully that doesn't impact us too much. Uh, so in the morning, uh, we are going to be doing some intros um, and breakout groups. So, a little bit more of the offering.

So, thinking about the children's and family program, the music program, infrastructure, transportation. We want your ideas to make camp a beautiful fun experience. The afternoon will be an unconference where we will elevate the ideas, your ideas and uh break out into groups to discuss the kinds of things that we want to surface at DEB camp this year. How do we um how do we encourage you to use DEB camp as a meeting place for your teams and your ideas to get feedback, find partners, find collaborators and so really this is kind of a starting point for that to happen in July. And then in the evening, uh, Wendy will be in a fireside chat with Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kale.

Uh, we'll talk about the vision of DEB camp, the D web movement, and uh, Internet Archive Europe uh, which has reopened its office uh, in Amsterdam uh, last year and uh, talk about some of the goals and missions of Internet Archive Europe. I guess I just want to end by doing two things. I want to introduce you to our team, our magnificent team who have come from all over the world. Beth McCarthy, Danny Shave, Kevin Nuin, and and actually Lishi is very much a part of this team. My and myself, if you have any questions, you want to volunteer, you have an idea, no idea is too wild, please come and share your idea.

So come this Saturday to Seabase and then in July 8th through 12th come to Alle. It's only an hour and a half away and it's it's going to be quite a beautiful uh thing in nature and you can make it more beautiful. You can make it more interesting. Uh I think the homepage of the uh dwebcamp.org site has better uh shots.

Oh Tim Berners Lee always comes. Uh he's he's lots of fun. In any case, if you have any questions, come up to us. And I do have one last closing question for any of you. Why are you doing this work?

You could probably be doing any kind of work, but why?

You could just talk loud.

Yeah,

sure. Um I'm not too quiet but uh well I mean the way I entered was different but at this point and and soon after I entered the ecosystem it was this realization that the internet and well I mean it was first finance but the internet as public infrastructure because it's definitely not right now

others what is this a Thursday night? Why are you here on a Thursday night? I know this is a nice space and they give good free food but

you go next to your colleague but um I I work for safe which is used to be part of Nosis and yeah here used to contribute to Google now contribute to this and partly uh the reason is there is a lot of censorship and contributing to anything that leads to less censorship especially in censoring capital money. Um, seems like a better thing to do than contribute to the centralized web.

Oh, I think

I don't anyone else.

Did you want to say something, Dick? No.

No.

So, yeah. For me it always was about the exciting tech. So open source is of course amazing. It opens up a lot of possibilities. And for me as a youngster I started out using Nixus which is also somewhat decentralized open source and through Nixus I also ended up in crypto and working on exciting technologies in this space for example a lot of informal verification which is used so much more in crypto because of the emphasis on it security and everything and so it is just the perfect place to cultivate amazing research and open source for everyone.

Okay.

After uh so for me like uh the main point why I started doing uh like development in blockchain is uh you cannot do a lot of things with like uh traditional financial instruments. For example, there is no way to like uh create like uh uh financial gambling application for example with traditional finance easily. you have to get like so many licenses and stuff with blockchain like uh you just need to write like a smart contract and then connect application and done. So it like kind of is gatekeep uh gatekept in uh traditional instruments while blockchain is not. So that's it.

Yeah. So I see the potential in Ethereum to be something good and also it could be something bad and if I don't work that it becomes something good then it's a problem. I think it's um very very critical that um that there's always ways to directly interact without using any algorithms. And more and more I think on the internet we we see how much algorithms dominate our experience whether that's with other humans whether that's with information whatever we're doing online. And so making sure that there's always going to be ways to interact without any algorithm is is very important.

I feel like it's an interesting ven diagram of like technology nerds and then people who really care about being human and other humans and also just novelty and trying to rethink our systems, how society works and all these things kind of combined in in people. Um that's just really fun people to be around who are like curious and like to think about the future in positive some ways. Um, those are things I perceive in these kind of communities.

Anyone in the front? I think I saw Liy with his hand up.

Did you want to see? Yeah, I think we need some tools uh to stand up against the big corporations because otherwise you might up in a big dystopia and it's kind of also like a spiritual calling somehow like uh this David was Goliath and I think Ethium could also be part like of the steel beat that gets shown but it could also fall in the hands of Goliath. So what do was saying basically the right people have to use the tools also. Yeah, I would just add that like the people generally like the people who are gravitated towards these technologies and open source and decentralization I think are just the coolest people I've ever met and ever worked with. So I think the vibes, the energy of building this um this more brighter future and not just following what corporations and the system is telling us to do.

And I think a lot of people tend to work on these open source projects in their free time. That shows that you know it's something more meaningful uh for them to do versus their daytime job that is you know often a like a boring corporate job.

Thank you. Thank you all so much. Oh, do you want to say why you do this work, Mark?

Uh why do I do this work? Um well, I used to work at EFF. Uh, I would say I'm also one of the first generations of digital natives. I grew up with the internet in my home. Um, and I think realizing that it could be captured and it could go the wrong way really inspired me to join EFF, uh, fight copyright and fight for users, fight for free and open source code for the creative commons and, uh, realizing that we actually can't just fight all of these policy battles because it just felt like putting out fires uh, locally in the United States and California, but also in this international policy agreements, the big tech companies were always winning.

And so, um, I kind of came into DEB actually when I was working at the community network project in Oakland. And, um, and when Wendy, uh, was working on DB camp in 2019, the very first camp, I said, "That's so cool. I love that power is being discussed at all layers of the network stack, and we're thinking about this holistically. We can't do this without thinking about how open- source developers um are relying on corporate captured ISPs. We can't uh deal with uh you know social networks being captured by big tech.

And so the fact that we kind of operate and bring together people who are thinking about this in different layers but then o have such an open mind and thinking about how we do things differently really has kept me working on this for now this last seven years. And and also with Mikola too, the people um just the fact that I get to work with all these lovely people, but the people who come to DEB camp, I just have the best conversations at D Web Camp and I always look forward to it because I just don't get to have these, you know, crazy philosophical conversations at the same time just, you know, talking about what we'd like to cook at home to all kinds of things. So, you know, I've been to lots of tech conferences. It kind of is a tech conference outside, but it just feels really special and different. And um I just feel really lucky to be able to be one of the core organizers of this and and also just um meet new people and see all these new ideas and uh figure out how we can support all of these interesting, creative, groundbreaking ideas yeartoear.

Thanks, Mike.

How about you?

How about me? So, each one of you has a superpower. Maybe you know what it is. Maybe you're still trying to define it. My superpower is that I am a storyteller for change.

And I was telling my stories for American media, very progressive media. And I thought, you know what, I could have more impact because San Francisco is not the media capital of the world. It is the tech capital of the world. But I could not work for the man. And so, uh, that left about four nonprofit tech companies I could work for.

And I went to the internet archive and they saw that I could have value. And seriously, in my first three months there, I could not follow what they were talking about. I'm constantly googling or whatever, searching under my desk, what is a Hadoop cluster? Um, but we can have value and we can choose where to put that value. And two years ago, I I guess I should share, my husband had cancer, terminal cancer.

And so I left my job at the internet archive and I retired. And when I came out of that period, I said, "Okay, I have to have a new mantra determining what I do." And this is my mantra. I will only work with people I love on projects I care about. I'm very privileged to be able to make that choice.

And these are people I love. And this is a project I care about and I do it 100% as a volunteer because I still have that urge to make the world a better place with the skills that I have. And I challenge each of you to do that a little bit. You can make money. You can you can uh do whatever you want.

Launch a company but use your skills, your superpower to make this place better. We all need to. So come join us. Come talk to us. Uh, thank you so much for listening.

It's been a pleasure to see you and I look forward to meeting you.