Talk: Karissa McKelvey: "The Web of Commons"
August 1, 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Decentralized Web Summit 2018
Hash Lounge
Speakers: Karissa McKelvey, Software Engineer, Digital Democracy
Looking at the internet as a commons — as a shared resource — allows us to understand both its unlimited possibilities and also what threatens it. Let's create protocols that are easy to use, to develop with, and to extend without asking for permission and without paying or having much money at all. Let's create protocols that are driven by the community, built for the public good, and given away for free. If the company or organization dies, the protocols should still be usable. Any blockchains involved should not be tied to a particular for-profit company. We should not be tying our data to any one coin or blockchain for fear of enclosure. The protocols should be optimizing for science (broadly speaking, as in developing knowledge) and mutual collaboration rather than optimizing for profit. Let us not recreate the problem we are trying to solve.
Karissa McKelvey is an open source software developer, writer, project manager, and activist supporting an equitable web. She develops and maintains a wide variety of tools and services for Digital Democracy. She is also a board member of Code for Science and Society and a Director of the Dat Foundation. Formerly a data scientist, her work studying online political communication resulted in multiple peer-reviewed papers and press in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal. In addition to an experienced software and web developer, she leads teams to success with diverse projects in academia, non-profits, and industry. In her spare time she plays the trumpet and volunteers at The Debt Collective as a technology consultant.