DIP-38: A sufficiently decentralized collaboration stack for Devcon 7

Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs)
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Description:

Devcon is a communal event. It encourages local and global coordination in the Ethereum community through IRL meetups but also digital tools where people find others, share information, and co-produce knowledge and code.

However, these digital tools are a persistent point of centralization in crypto that remains largely unaddressed. Google Docs/Drive, Notion, Luma and Twitter threads are the main tools used by people, teams and organisations alike. These have great UX but come with limited control over your data, no privacy guarantees, and no support for community ownership.

Fileverse is built to make this community coordination & collaboration free from centralized intermediaries and their arbitrary rules that threaten people’s data sovereignty. It is designed to be decentralized (smart contract + p2p networks), private (E2EE), compatible with crypto-native identities (eg. ENS) & communication channels (Farcaster/Lens), and simple to use.

We propose the gradual piloting of the Fileverse stack as a way to meet the needs of Devcon participants without compromising on values or user experience. It would provide easy access to:

  • Note-taking and file sharing
  • Collaborative documents
  • A Devcon community page showing:
    • Community notes, translations, discussions and more for each day/talk/event/etc at the conference
    • People that are publicly contributing and attending
  • Shared ownership. Multisig-owned and managed content and data storage
  • Onchain identities and interactions
  • Crypto native communication (e.g., share content as frame on Farcaster & Lens)
  • Information automation
    • Webpage / information fetching bots
    • Translations bots
    • Onchain content AI agents on Fileverse auditable infra

Example Flow:

Devcon 7 conference attendees/participants will have a community-owned, collaborative stack available to them this year via a website and onchain (e.g., devcon.dnotes.org or devcon.ddocs.org).

From there, attendees/participants will have a full view of notes/content produced for the conference by other attendees/participants, side-event organizers, and core organizers. People will also be able to reshare content on crypto socials such as Farcaster/Lens. Meaning to allow people that are browsing through their social media feeds to quickly flick through and engage with Devcon community notes or an event description without leaving their feed.

Participants will also be able to anonymously authenticate there (eg. with ZuPass) to access a suite of collaborative tools including dDocs (E2EE alternative to google docs), Whiteboard, and dPage (open-source alternative to Notion) to help them through the conference. For example, dDocs lets people:

  • Collaborate live with others to co-produce anything from wikis to debates
  • Write (markdown compatible)
  • Write code
  • Create tables
  • Token-gate
  • Embed images & links
  • Publish it publicly on the Devcon community page and give either view/edit/comment access to others

Tech spec:

  • Fileverse SDK for storage + editors (i.e., dPage, dDocs, whiteboard)
  • Smart contract as register for content hashes and access permission (audited by Nethermind)
  • Files stored on IPFS & gun.js
  • Comments stored on gun.js (decentralized database)
  • Individual content UI hosted using Fleek
  • Static UI accessible from any public IPFS gateways
  • Offchain access with UCANs - User generated authentication and authorization, not dependent on any central server
  • Infra can be self hosted if needed
  • Data can be exported anytime
  • Onchain accessibility of public files using Subgraph
  • Zupass integration for verification with PCDs (created ZuPassCollab at EthBerlin04)
  • Using Safe Multisig with Hats for granular permissions
  • E2ee for private notes
  • Auto Tagging of content

During ETHBerlin04, it became clear that we should present ZuPassCollab as a separate DIP to enable anyone in the community to build on or use in their respective use cases. ZuPass is an essential building block for trustless collaboration. ZuPassCollab applies that primitive to practical application, namely, enabling an onchain community identity and collaboration space that is co-owned and co-managed by proven members of a group. DIP coming next week.

Finally, we will be submitting a separate DIP to introduce an onchain AI agents / bot architecture we designed to facilitate the automated creation, management, and processing of offchain and onchain community content. We hope this can help people make the most out of public knowledge and ensure its accessibility.

Github: Fileverse · GitHub
GIT DIP: DIP-38: A sufficiently decentralized collaboration stack for Devcon 7 by vijaykrishnavanshi · Pull Request #137 · efdevcon/DIPs · GitHub

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Devcon is a big opportunity to show the use and power of owning your own data and collaboration tools with tools like Fileverse.

  • Sign in with Safe to Fileverse and delegating non-ownership access like read and write with roles to easy access accounts like phone accounts and browser extension accounts
  • This way users can use their ENS IDs stored securely on Safe while easily accessing Fileverse from their phones and browsers
  • Also using readable links like HackMD does enabled by default, potentially with ENS subdomains so that important links can quickly be shared and opened, e.g. www.talks.devcon.eth.limo which could lead to a Fileverse page. I wonder if it’s also possible to append similar to HackMD where the Devcon talks page could be www.devcon.eth.limo/talks.
  • XMTP and/or Pushchat messaging within Fileverse for people to connect during Devcon and beyond. Imagine looking at the Fileverse page for www.talks.devcon.eth.limo while messaging your group chat to coordinate plans.
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Spencer here from Hats Protocol.

We are extremely excited to help support this initiative for devcon. We share Fileverse’s belief in the importance of a decentralized collaboration stack for communities and organizations. Such a collaboration stack needs granular and robust permissioning, and we’re committed to helping enable that in Fileverse with onchain role-based access controls.

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Thanks for the great ideas / suggestions Adam! We took some of them onboard immediately after reading your comment!

  • Sign in / up with Safe is something we recently perfected with ddocs.new - making it easy also for those who don’t have any wallet (incl smart accounts) on their devices.
  • Prove your identity via ENS is also another feature we tested out with the release of ddocs.new - very useful to separate people by pseudonyms vs onchain identity.
  • :eyes: don’t want to get ahead of myself but the customizeable link is something we’re testing at the moment and its looking gooood : )
  • One thing that is clear here is that finding other people and interacting with them is extremely useful in big conferences, especially for the many people who come alone or only know people via their anon persona! The messaging feature may or may not be necessary for it - we’re currently exploring some options and discussing them with teams doing privacy preserving decentralized messaging (trying to assess the viability of using onion routing here).
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Thanks for the super contribution Spencer! The Hats protocol has unlocked a lot of new ways for us to add granular permissions to this ‘sufficiently decentralized collaboration stack’. Looking forward to showcasing some of the hierarchies and flows that we designed already : D

UX is starting to look amazing and very accessible!

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I’m excited to test all of this with ddocs.new, especially the ENS compatibility with ahurwitz.eth (Safe account) and adamhurwitz.eth (Externally owned account).

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Hi all! I am part of Waku project and after brainstorming with Fileverse we’d love to join the endeavour and help build something permissionless, privacy preserving and unstoppable:)

Waku is a privacy focused peer-to-peer permissionless network, a set of protocols and open source software which serves as a communication infrastructure for web3. We come from original cypherpunk and Ethereum heritage - the predecesor of Waku was Whisper:)

Waku can be used anywhere where users or app components need to communicate in uncensorable and privacy preserving way - frontend to frontend, frontend to backend, decentralized backend nodes etc.

We have some ideas where we’d fit into the collaboration portal, but if anyone can think of good use cases, always open to hear and assess:)

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Really amazing initiative for the DevCon and wider crypto community! We, Firefly, see a lot of synergies here to be considered.

About Firefly: it is a decentralized social app by Mask Network. We’re all about blending Web2 and Web3 to create a seamless social experience. Firefly lets users access on-chain and off-chain content in one place, making it a go-to hub for anyone diving into Web3.

We’d love to explore some collaboration ideas with you:

Real-Time Info Flow: Firefly integrates data from Web2 and Web3 platforms like X, Lens, and Farcaster, plus on-chain NFT transactions. Users can filter and view real-time trends in one place. Check it out. [link]

Comprehensive Profiles: We’ve got a full integration of Web2 and Web3 profiles, giving users access to detailed identities anytime. Here’s an example.

Multi-Platform Publishing: Firefly lets users edit and publish across platforms like X, Farcaster, and Lens, all from one app—perfect for sharing ideas quickly during DevCon.

We think these features could add real value to the DevCon community’s collaboration and knowledge sharing!

Would love to discuss how we might combine our strengths to deliver the best digital DevCon experience ever!

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Thanks for sharing these here as well, team Mask! It’s an key part of the work needed for the Devcon 7 app to have a live feed of content and info shared on various social networks. We will for sure be exploring with you idea 1 (“Real-Time Info Flow”). Idea 3 is very powerful as well, if time allows and after we also discuss with others (attendees testing the app, devcon team), we’ll hopefully be able to implement a first version of this with you. Thanks again for participating in this and being on our side to try to make this experiment more social for the attendees and speakers. Back to work, see you in dm!

1 Like