DWeb: Co-creating resilient communities | Raul & Beth (Berlin Ethereum Day, June 2026)

All right. So before we start, how many of you know about the webcam? Okay. So a few people. That's good.

So we're going to talk today about co-creating resilient communities under the centralized web. And I think the question that really frames this discussion is how building resilient communities and resilient protocols are ultimately the same project. Right? Hopefully they should they should be pair and pair.

H more specifically, we're going to talk about a bit of the crops vision following Ethereum Foundation latest mandate and even more specifically we're going to talk about the D web camp and what it is. Uh my name is Raul by the way I work at the Ethereum Foundation but I'm also part of the DoD. Um at Ethereum Foundation I work on a project called Odin. So if you want to talk about digital public goods and sustainability, you can always catch me here today and doing Berlin Blockchain Week. Beth, you want to introduce yourself?

Um,

hi, I'm Beth McCarthy. I have a studio called Abstract Machine Studios where I help clients with ecosystem development, strategic partnerships, experience design, program curation, and stuff like that. I'm super happy to be doing strategic partnerships for DEBamp and bringing DW Webb Camp to Europe. And also I um was program director for the conference here yesterday with another client web free privacy. So if you also were here, thank you so much for coming uh twice and uh yeah, seeing some familiar faces and our cool t-shirt.

So yeah, very excited to talk about the intersection of all that stuff.

Good. Um I'd like to start with a part of the Ethereum mandate particularly chapter 4 which is the principles for action and it's a social pillar of the mandate which I think resonates with our work a lot particularly the first part is very is very telling as you know as you might know by now because other talks have been talking about it and because you're part of the Ethereum community the Ethereum Foundation recently released a mandate that is focused primarily on the crops vision this is censorship resistance opensource force privacy and security. And at one part of the mandate, it says that the world computer naturally connects to builders who uphold these freedoms. This is the crop vision. Open source projects, privacy and cryptography researchers, civil liberty defenders, which is very much related to not only neocy summit but also the dweb movement, educators and public interest technologies.

Um I was doing a bit of research on past readings. um for this discussion and I want to focus this conversation on four elements that I think are important when it comes to building decentralized communities and online communities. These are four elements from Peter Hinches which is quite a controversial was quite a controversial character in the online world. But these four points can help us trigger a bit of a discussion. Particularly he said that there are four distinctive necessary elements on the centralized and online communities.

Diversity of opinion, independence of members from one another, decentralization and effective ways to aggregate opinions which is I think one of the most difficult but most important parts for a community. Changing the mission of the community and the organization if there is an organization there. um as the community changes encourage members to create their own project and spaces within the movement uh very much related to diversity of opinion I think and independence and a diverse community in general not always will talk about past experience collect more relevant problems solves them more accurately and do this faster than small expert groups so in order to start I would like Beth to tell us a bit more about what the web movement is and what the camp is in 2026, why it's happening here in Germany in Brandenburgg an hour from Berlin and what is this all about.

All right. Yes. So for those who are not aware, um 10 years ago, Internet Archive and specifically Bruce Derk, the founder of Internet Archive, uh started to realize how important it is to build a community of active and engaged people who are really thinking about these topics around decentralization, censorship resistance, um data sovereignty, and you know, as uh Ro mentioned, how um the kind of technologies that you're building and the decentralized stack also um is about a network of humans from open source builders and maintainers to project managers that make sure stuff continues happening etc. And they had this vision of having gathering specifically about that. So 2016 there was the first um kind of intimate meetup around that and that expanded in 2019 to having uh a camp that was taking place at various locations in California and uh you know continuing to scale thinking about these same topics and drawing in an increasingly international and interdisciplinary group of campers and uh since uh the past year there's really been a focus on bringing internet archive to Europe Europe in a uh in the physical context.

So even though there's been a strong presence for the past 25 years or so, last year there was the new um headquarters opening in Amsterdam just a few weeks ago in Switzerland and and this turn toward um you know looking outside of the US and taking in more perspectives in a really tangible way you know as you were mentioning with you know legal advoc advocacy uh the different types of regulatory structures and also just um having more ways to connect with the strong community of contributors and maintainers and awesome devs and humans in Europe. So, uh this past year, um the webcam reached out to me and was like, "We're super interested in coming to Europe. We want to engage more deeply with this community and we have such a strong um you know, presence of people here uh that they were like, what would it look like to have uh the gathering happen in Germany?" And so, you know, to back up, there's um over 10 nodes around the world, um from Shanghai to um somewhere in Brazil, I think Sa Paulo, um to Canada, like there's many um different groups of people that have these gatherings. So, you know, kind of meetups and uh community building around these topics, but the one that's been the most active for the past years is in Berlin.

So, we're like, that's a good start to see what it looks like for DEB camp to happen in Europe. So, um, what we ended up doing is working with, uh, the folks at Alaholo, which is a really awesome space out in Brandenburgg, uh, formed by a group of friends that were organizing together for the CCC and Fusion, um, who were really interested in having a permanent space for gathering around these topics. So they have a lot of you know builder weekends, anarchist bike workshop, like many um different ways of engaging communities of nerds and activists and people that are um engaged in yeah topics that are resonating with us. So we are going to be coming there um on July 8th through 12th and would be yeah super excited obviously for any of you guys to come. I think a lot of uh people who are walking around the building today are going to be there.

So we're really excited about that. Obviously the department of decentralization is participating. What about other collectives other organizations who is coming uh from the United States and from Europe or anywhere in the world?

Yes. So we'll definitely have um people from internet archive of course we'll have uh folks from Metagv and the public AI network um free software foundation Europe um mastadon and matrix and um my mind my mind is blanking on uh everyone who is coming from uh f like from Asia but I know we have a huge uh community of people coming from uh yeah from over there and then we also are working with um some of of our allies to make villages within Dweb Camp such as uh Ftopia which is an intentional community in France uh foresight and uh artisan which had the really cool event yesterday to bring creators. So yeah they will be um up blue sky that's the that's the one that was on the tip of my mind. So yeah it's going to be really interdisciplinary and fun.

Nice. Let's move a bit to the principles on where we align. I would say I don't know if we align but we can check it out. Um I was rereading the Ethereum Foundation Monday. I took as for this discussion I took it as a reference um to understand a bit more about the D web movement and also your past experience with building resilient communities.

you've been in this community for a very long time and so you understand how communities work and you've done a lot of work and I want to talk about the first one which is decentralization particularly social decentralization as a foundational principle. Yeah. So the EF mandate says that Ethereum exists precisely to enable coordination without violating anyone's self sovereignity. And when I was reading the D web camp manifesto and the principles of the D web movement, you guys say that the centralized systems derive strength from dense network of roots. I think root system is the topic for the camp this year.

sharing resources without hierarchy and coordination that persists even when individuals notes disappear. So I'm wondering how the Dweb movement and you personally with your experience in past events and organizations think about the centralization in a social way and what are the challenges of this?

Definitely. So I would mention my favorite quote uh from Adrien Murray Brown about this topic in the book emergent strategy that's uh protocols or principles put in practice. I think this is the really critical thing for both building resilient communities and connecting those in with uh technical infrastructures. So, um being really clear about um you know, what is the purpose that we're building together? What is the goal of engaging with this community, you know, versus all of the interdependent other ones that people are um familiar with?

And also how do we think about um you know honoring contributors who do all of the you know non sexy work behind the screen that I mean be behind the screen behind the scenes and behind the screen that makes it possible for these sort of things to happen. And you know in that uh quote they're mentioning protocols in terms of you know how do we have protocols of care around um you know things like code of conduct also how do we have protocols for saying you know this is how we manage governance this is the rules of things that are really important to us like working with department of decentralization to help um d webcamp um kind of walk the walk in terms of using open source software even when that created many logistical challenges like all of those things are, you know, saying we have these principles that are super important and part of being a community together is helping each other put that stuff into practice.

And when you think about uh the camp territory itself, right, when you think about the blueprint of the camp, um do you have let's say autonomous territories, autonomous islands, collectives that come and set up their tents and provide particular projects uh or workshops or sessions? How does that work in the camp?

Yeah, so the camp is uh going to be this um mix of structured and unstructured uh yeah time and space to engage together that I think is going to be really exciting. So we have nine stages that has um uh I guess yeah specifically curated programming that's already underway such as anti- athoritarian stack stage local first and peer-to-peer um public AI um the sustainable infrastructure solidarity tech many different ways of going deeper in a you know a formalized way about uh these topics but then there's also a lot of room for emergent spaces like one of the ones I'm super excited about with uh what I mentioned at this intentional community of Ftopia is um you know there's going to be space there for people to specifically come and do musical jam sessions, nerd out about um some projects happening there that blend AI and um mesh networking like there's many ways to uh to be um see yeah trying to think of the right word yeah to to have just emergent collaborations um and there's also going to be the unconference time for uh structured unstructured collaboration Another very important principle and topic throughout Ethereum community and the Ethereum foundation mandate as well in my opinion is censorship resistance. I think many people would agree here. Uh censorship resistance is the C on the crops vision. So it has quite um non-negotiable position h in this particular vision and the EF definition or the Ethereum foundation mandate definition is that no actor can selectively exclude valid use or break functionality right and all work must be architected to be maximally unstoppable that we should be able to co-create and to discuss ideas and to deploy code without anyone stop us right um what is your ideas with regards to censorship resistance in communities like this and what's your past experience and how does this reflect on the D webcam movement as well based on your experience

definitely so I think it's interesting uh again to draw on this idea of like where the um the technical infrastructure and both on a protocol level on a hardware level and also on the community level ties into this. So if we think of censorship resistance as the um resistance to being uh shut down and also a resistance to surveillance, then being able to have gatherings like this to where um the community is able to have a strong um like you know understanding of how each individual node in a you know a physical and geopolitical location is working is one really important way to do that. we have, you know, if we build this trust by connecting in person, then that makes this difficult to shut down on a human level. We're also really excited about um exploring uh you know things like self-hosted and um self- sovereign compute and also doing experimentations around what I mentioned with uh what many folks are excited about with uh mesh networking like maybe you can share about the Laura thing that I don't fully understand but it sounds really cool. I think we have Yar.

I don't know.

So,

he was working on that.

Oh, yeah. So, yeah, maybe I'll reverse a question and ask a question to the audience to help us explain about that. But yeah, there will be a lot of um ability to experience that. And also it will be super uh interesting to take this very raw um you know environment in the forest and transform it to somewhere that people are doing a huge amount of tech experimentation to see what does it look like in this kind of um contained structure of these five days to have internet to have um you know hardware that we're in installing as um you know a I guess political act even that saying like we you know with our group of 500 people. This is what it can look like to have a um a self-hosting environment.

So

um I don't think we have a lot of time left because I saw Martin giving me the five minutes the three minute signal and we still have like six principles to go through. So what I would like to go through is the idea of uh no here privacy as a structural right not a feature. Um, I think the EVF mandate is also pretty clear, not only about how the foundation sees privacy, but also in my personal opinion, the idea that privacy is not a feature, but should be structural to the technology of for the future internet protocols. And this is quite a powerful idea. And they even go further into say that once the wilders of p of power gain the ability to restrict our privacy then they will never surrender the advantage they obtain right which is quite a powerful message as well.

So by the ef privacy must be permissionless unconditional and available to all not a premium or a feature. I'm wondering in your code of conduct in the D web movement code of conduct in the principles of DB and also if you can talk about a bit your past work and yesterday's work as well at the neo cyber summit

h how do you see this how does this interact with communities that are decentralized and open

um and what are the challenges there

yeah so I think one uh thing that's really special about having opportunities to you know go deeply on discussions is to be able to have the educational aspect. That's kind of an essential underpinning of um even you know thinking about living with cippher punk principles or um you know having an examination of like what are ways that um you know surveillance and um like yeah uh infringement on your rights you know is taking place within your computer within the phone you know in your pocket within your face as it's getting um you know photographed and of many places you don't even realize. So it's like I would say one of the most important aspects for resistance and fighting back and also you know working with regulators to make sure that some of these rights are protected etc is to have time to really break down a lot of these topics and uh speaking about yesterday it was super awesome and you and you guys workshop room from department of decentralization that there was a focus all day on what does it mean to you know live cipher punk values in practice. Um, so maybe I would put back to you to say maybe what are some of the workshops that you guys were having because this is the type of content we hope to have and also we'll have some really amazing people at camp um that I was about to name but then I realized maybe that that would be doxing people. So if you want to know who that is then um you should come to camp and find out but people who were pioneers of uh yeah working in the privacy space.

Just to give a bit of context, yesterday at the NEO Cyberpunk Summit, the DoD curated one of the workshop rooms and we focused on privacy, cyberpunk values and gave workshops from 1 hour to one and a half hours with different projects uh about what type of um tools and instruments, applications you can use to take into account this idea of privacy and owning your own data. And if you want to share that data agreeing with who you share it and how to exercise a walk away test that allows you to relinquish that uh permission that you gave before the team from Fileverse was here. Graphine OS was here. Um the guys from who else was here? Martin uh sorry Mario H from B from Bordeell was here.

So that was really really cool and we spent the whole day talking about privacy instance or shift resistance applications. So that was really good. Um another thing I want to say related to privacy and very much align with this idea of co-creating um daily instruments or daily applications that allow us to understand what privacy means is outside in the foyer too. Uh there is a very interesting art piece called Moyes cryptography by Yonis Bardacos and Luis Parker. They work with privacy protocols um biometric data and have created a spectacular piece outside that discuss this and make us think about the idea of privacy and how communities think about privacy as well.

So very much um looking forward to go again through that uh right after this. I think that's all the time we have.

Oh no.

But with that, yeah, sorry. With that, uh, if you want to talk more about the principles of the EF mandate, how I understand the principles in the EF mandate, how the DWEB movement uh, works around this principle and how they integrate them. H, please come to us after this talk. We can discuss a bit more. And we extend the invitation to the G web camp from 8 to 12th of July at Alola in Brandenburg, 1 hour from Berlin by train.

So if you can make it, that would be great. And thank you everyone for coming.

Thank you.