Dear backers and Scuttlers, here is a snapshot of the last month’s developments on SSB. 

Community

Scuttlecamp 2

Glyph, Luandro, Mnin, Dinosaur, Mix, and Nico are actively preparing Scuttlecamp 2, aiming to hold it in Brazil around June 2020. The event will start with an optional building week, where participants will be invited to build composting toilets. The toilets will stay in the village of Moinho after the event, as a contribution from participants. The event will continue for four days of core activities. Participants will then be invited to stay for an optional exploration of the place and surroundings. 

Community Infrastructure Learning Group

Punkmunk started a Community Infrastructure Learning Group focused on learning p2p infrastructure management, and creating the accompanying documentation. The goal is to make deployments accessible to a broader range of users, with different levels of technical skills. Austin, Arj, and Glyph participated in the first meeting and decided to start by writing good documentation on setting up an SSB Pub.

Website

You can find a preview of the new website here. The design is more graphical and should appeal to a wider audience. Let us know if you have any feedback before this goes live!

Technical 

Maui (Ben), Luandro, and Mix are helping on the development of Ahau (which means “I, me” in Maori), a new application that uses decentralized technologies to create sovereign repositories of traditional knowledge of indigenous/tribal communities. As part of that work, they are developing new specifications, based on SSB messages, for managing permissions and visibility of messages. Aljoscha could not resist the appeal of a good spec and also helped in exploring the design space and edge cases.

Keks is working on a new private message format as well as a first implementation of private groups.

Soapdog has started building ssb-backup-tool, a tool to backup and restore your SSB identity, independent of any of the existing clients. This should make the task easier for non-technical users.

Arj has continued work on his SSB Browser Demo, which runs the core of SSB (ssb-server) from inside a web browser. This will also be useful to evaluate different strategies for synchronizing updates, including replication of only the most recent messages.

Powersource has explicitly articulated the Design Principles behind the design of Patchwork. This shall make it easier to decide whether new contributions are compatible with the application.

Research

Christian has presented our first peer-reviewed paper on the design of SSB at the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2019), that was held in Macau, China between September 24th and 26th. Christian was also invited by the organizers to moderate a panel on decentralized technologies, with participation from Ktorn as well representatives of other projects, such as IPFS.

Finances

The 163$ you have donated in September and the previously held funds have supported the hosting costs (11$) of Cel’s website and they sponsored a part of the work on Diversity & Inclusivity done by Mix (200$) and Mnin (300$).

We thank you for your continued support, see you again next month!

Erick