The Great Calamity Circumvention Assembly at IPFS Camp 2019

This is the story of the Deep Dive sessions at IPFS Camp 2019 as told from the perspective of a DWeb historical researcher in the far future.

In 2019, the intergalactic dweb uprising began. The pillars of what had become the foundations of human civilisation started to crack under their own weight and the very beginnings of a new empire began emerging from the shadows. An empire forged in the flames of discontent of central servers and “do-no-evil” monopoly. Peer to peer communications - the heart of the dweb - slowly formed efficient and autonomous networks that expanded beyond the reach of the blue planet and far into the galaxy, the likes of which the old world order had never seen before.

The uprising began modestly as a “space camp” in the ALPHA region 5P4-1N. From fear of ambush the exact coordinates were only divulged to the heroes that enlisted. What happened at that camp laid the foundations for the world as we know it today, but between then and now, many battles took place and we will forever honour the unbeknown dragon slayers that emerged from camp to lead the uprising and shape our new world.

This story attempts to recount a small part of camp, what was referred to back then as “Deep Dives” but what we later came to know as The Great Calamity Circumvention Assembly.

At this time the uprising was in its infancy. Incredible progress had already been made expanding peer to peer communications, content addressing and information permanence, but as unbelievable as it sounds, the dweb had still not yet expanded beyond the reach of the blue planet (what we once referred to as “Earth”).

Networks in those days were siloed and inaccessible. Data was equally unavailable and fragile and temporary. The transition from analogue to digital was still in living memory and appropriate steps had not yet been taken to ensure human history was permanently recorded. The worldwide data erosion seen in the Global Electromagnetic Fire Disaster of 2027 (just a handful of years after camp) proved this point and some estimates suggest that over 83% of all human history for that period was wiped out.

As you can imagine, there were a great many problems the dweb uprising was facing at that time. The Calamity Circumvention Assembly (“Deep Dives”) was formed at camp to address as many of those issues as possible.

Around 160 space rangers formed somewhere in the region of 30 splinter groups to focus on specific open problems around IPFS. As you know, IPFS - the InterPlanetary File System is one of the biggest proponents of the dweb and is currently the most widely used file system across the universe, used by over 31,000 known alien races. It was one of just a handful of dweb technologies at the time and later went on to play a monumental part in the dweb uprising.

The plan was to come up with new and inventive solutions to these problems. The enlisted space rangers were vetted to ensure they were experts in the dweb field and were suitably well placed to solve the issues at hand. In just 1 hour and 30 minutes (that’s 1000 hexsecs in our time) the splinter groups intensely discussed their assigned topics and documented a wealth of knowledge, ideas and observations that are still referenced in academia today.

The outcomes from each splinter group’s discussions were “pull requested” to the camp repository (A “pull request” was a term used at that time to submit additions/deletions or changes to a set of files). The following day splinter groups presented their solutions to the assembly for intergalactic approval.

Transcripts and videos from The Great Calamity Circumvention Assembly were salvaged from the Global Electromagnetic Fire Disaster of 2027 and we’ve transcoded them into formats appropriate for today’s dweb browsers. Enjoy!

There are more to come, keep posted!

More content from IPFS Camp is being salvaged and transcoded.

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