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---
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title: 'Recap: Community & Governance (þing 2023)'
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description: 'Description'
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author: Boris Mann and Robin Berjon
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date: 2023-05-23
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permalink: '/2023-ipfs-community-governance/'
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header_image: '/community-governance-recap.jpg'
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tags:
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- 'thing'
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- 'þing'
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- 'event'
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- 'recap'
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- 'track'
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- 'community'
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- 'governance'
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---
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Governance and community are two ideas that vibe like they wouldn't live in the same part of
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town if their lives dependended on it. Community is warm, fun, and fuzzy if probably chaotic
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and occasionally infuriating, whereas governance sounds a lot more like flossing, something
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dry and painful that you pretend your project does to make the Serious People go away. But
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much like the predictable transition from misunderstanding to mutual respect in a buddy
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movie, these two were destined to form just the dynamic duo we need to take on insuperable
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odds. Community is the for and by of governance, and, quite frankly, the exercize of
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governance is messy, chaotic, and a crucible from which new, more resilient communities
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emerge.
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The full-day Community & Governance track that brought us together at IPFS Þhing 2023
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(which you can [watch in its entirety](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuhRWgmPaHtTIFbOVO5YfXkoFg6wIGbBN)) had all of that energy and then some.
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We spent the time bouncing back and forth between how to prevent capture by lumbering
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megacorporations and how to gather friends for a nice community café, what's a data
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protection officer and better ways to herd cats, ways of protecting people from some of the
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worst content on the Internet while supporting censorship-resistance and how to support
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commons and community ownership. It was a ride and a delightful one too.
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Perhaps the core issue that brought us together across the diverse presentations was that
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we want to learn from the mistakes of the past and organize the community so that we can
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bring about a better world. It's not the worst plan.
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## Memory in Uncertainty
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"*Is that an elaborate way of saying everything's fucked?*" That might not be your
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typical audience question but then this wasn't your typical presentation either (or
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your typical audience, for that matter).
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Cade Diehm is one of the brains behind [*The New Design Congress*](https://newdesigncongress.org/) (NDC),
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a research organization that practices "*ethical red teaming*" to identify issues with
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sociotechnical systems. [WebRecorder](https://webrecorder.net/) and [the Filecoin Foundation](https://fil.org/) hired NDC to take an
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in-depth look at web archiving (on IPFS) to help identify problems. Cade came to IPFS
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þing to udpate the community on his findings, which are captured in the
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[Memory in Uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis](https://members.newdesigncongress.org/memory-in-uncertainty-web-preservation-in-the-polycrisis/) report.
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"*The answer,*" Cade told us, "*is: 'kind of.'*" He gave a wide-ranging presentation
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ranging over the dangers of decentralized technology, the complexity of archives,
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the challenges presented by the potential weaponization of data, and much more.
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It provided a powerful call to take the impact of our tech seriously and to keep in mind that
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tech can only be ethical if it is governed by the people it impacts. Cade concluded
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with a set of tools to help avoid bad outcomes, because "*not everything is screwed.*"
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@[youtube](TdiQGXSZmCk)
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## Community Organizing
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For all that remote work and online collaboration have improved, it's hard to have a
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strong and durable sense of community without meeting people in the flesh now and then.
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Thankfully, we have many gatherings to look forward to this year!
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[Vukasin Vukoje](https://twitter.com/wukoje) made a surprise
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announcement of a new event series: Compute Camp. Details will be released more fully
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soon, but the first edition of this series dedicated specifically to distributed
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compute will take place later this year in Belgrade, Serbia. If you care more about
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doing things to data and less about where it's stored, this might just be the place for
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you.
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Yuni Graham and Niki Gokani walked us through the organization of IPFS Camp, which
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will take place in November in Bangalore. We worked together to figure out what the
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best structure and content for the event would be. They're looking for volunteers
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to be part of the content planning work — please consider reaching out if you're
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interted!
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@[youtube](U5u54jwOg6k)
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And if what you're looking for is a more local IPFS-focused event, why not run your
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own? Yuni Graham and Nicole Schafer presented IPFS + Friends Café, a collection of local
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community gatherings to help develop an IPFS community on the ground, around the
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world. If you're iunterested, they might be able to sponsor such an event as well as
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assist with logistics and finding some speakers. It would be wonderful to see more
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local evangelism!
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@[youtube](FII_9VTgDy8)
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## Cat Herding
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A growing community is a blessing, but keeping up with everything that is happening
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can become overwhelming. Several sessions provided us with both updates and tools to
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stay on top of future updates.
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Henrique Dias (aka [@hacdias](https://twitter.com/hacdias)) walked us through [specs.ipfs.tech](https://specs.ipfs.tech/),
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the hot new place to get IPFS specifications. Not all of the IFPS specs have been moved
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there yet, but they're in the process of being ported over and everything new will be
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on the specs site from the get-go. This site is intended to grow into the one-stop-shop
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reference for IPFS implementations, ideally reaching the point at which one could produce
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an IPFS implementation from scratch using those documents alone (along with the emerging
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test suite, of course).
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@[youtube](vQVnjEIPuCE)
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At last year's þing in Iceland, the IPIP (IPFS Improvement Process) process was announced.
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The indefatigable @lidel walked us through all of the IPIP work that has happened since,
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and it's a lot! Initially announced as a lightning talk, this was more of a twenty minute
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presentation at lightning speed.
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Keep in mind that this process is open to anyone in the community (and if you're reading
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this that means *you*). There is an
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[IPIP Pipeline GitHub project](https://github.com/orgs/ipfs/projects/19) that maintains an
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up-to-date status of all IPIPs, and the IPIPs get discussed on the
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[IPFS Implementers Working Group](https://lu.ma/ipfs-implementers). More generally,
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the [IPFS Community Calendar](https://lu.ma/ipfs) keeps track of the various meetings and
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events in which the evolution of the IPFS stack gets discussed.
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@[youtube](WcHlV6sQuDI)
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But then again, specs are only one corner of IPFS, and IPFS one corner of a bigger family
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of technologies. Staying on top of everything that is happening in *\[gestures vaguely around]*
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this space remains daunting. One novel tool that is already helping people get a clearer
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sense of what's happening (and that you can use as well) is [Starmap](https://starmap.site/).
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The core principle of Starmap is very simple: by structuring your GitHub issues according to
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very simple conventions, you can create a nested tree of issues that spans any arbitrary set
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of repositories and see all of those organized in a single Starmap.
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The idea is that people should be organizing and coordinating code whichever way they see
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fit, but it should be possible to obtain an overview of the status of a progress across all
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of its components nevertheless. One example is the
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[Kubo/Boxo 2023Q2/Q3 items](https://starmap.site/roadmap/github.com/ipfs/kubo/issues/9817#list).
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Bastien Dehaynin from Fission provided us with a clear and exciting overview and demo of the
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system. Several people in the room were already users, and there was definite interest in
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getting a Starmap for specs.
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@[youtube](_HoLDQreF28)
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## Governance
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In order to keep IPFS and its broader ecosystem pushing in a direction that benefits
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all people, to support impactful collective action and ownership, and to avoid it
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being captured by larger players, we need to deploy matching governance capabilities.
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Your friendly here authors, Boris Mann and Robin Berjon, ran a workshop on "What
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Should We Governance?" with the goal of surfacing risks and pain points regarding
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governance of the IPFS ecosystem. This produced a lot of very valuable input, yet
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we feel like we have barely scratched the surface.
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@[youtube](svqlHO3K_RQ)
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Our dynamic duo then split their color-coordinated purple outfits, first with Boris
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discussing the allocation of funding for code and other community work, and
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suggesting that it would be great to use Starmap to find which parts of a project
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are most in need of funding.
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@[youtube](PysiACKo1dI)
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And then Robin talked about the ongoing work in the
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[Decent Data Compliance WG](https://github.com/DDC-WG) where parties from across the
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decentralized world are working together to figure out how to manage
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"[bad bits](https://badbits.dwebops.pub/)", how to protect operators from serving some
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of the worst content on the Internet (or simply things they don't want to host), and how
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to make sure that people's privacy rights are respected. There's a lot of work to be
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done, but it's heartening to see that people are taking these issues seriously.
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@[youtube](bIlji91KEFQ)
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## Where Next?
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The day made it clear that there is strong interest in community and governance
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in the IPFS universe, and you can expect to hear a lot more on this side of things.
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While different aspects of these concerns have places where people can gather to
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discuss them (as seen in the links sprinkled above), overall coordination and
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cooperation around governance in the decent(ralized) world remains limited.
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We joked that we might need a "Working Group Working Group" to provide lightweight
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support for all the community working groups that keep emerging and help them work
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together. But the feedback was that it might not actually be such a joke of an idea.
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Stay tuned!
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