In Short

I can't quite remember how I found out about it, but I ended up attending the 2nd FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) for Peer to Peer workshop, and I am very glad that I made the effort.

Things of particular note:

• Cozy
• remoteStorage

Detailed Account

The variety of people in the room made it a very interesting event, I have found out about projects I had not heard of, and found out more about some projects which I already knew about.

The first item on the agenda was a "participatory dynamic with open questions for debate" aka pose controversial/unspecific questions to the room, and have people just stand around and talk. While this did get people talking, the questions were not specific enough to be useful and any division in the room was mostly due to interpretation of the question.

Interesting Links:

• http://hexayurt.com/
• https://github.com/Decentralized-Sharing-Working-Group
• https://fair.coop/
• http://cozy.io/
• http://webid.info/

2nd Day

The second day started off with some very interested lightning talks. There were also some more in depth talks after lunch, and the day finished off with some several tutorials (run in parallel).

More Interesting Links

• https://github.com/fedwiki
• http://remotestorage.io/
• https://github.com/remotestorage/starter-kit
• https://www.w3.org/community/rww/
• https://github.com/read-write-web/wiki/wiki
• http://fed.wiki.org/
• http://ipfs.io/
• http://www.superglue.it/
• https://www.trustroots.org/

Conclusion

In particular, Cozy caught my eye. I am usually critical of projects that appear to duplicate the functionality of others, and in this case, Cozy is very outwardly similar to ownCloud (which I currently use). However, internally Cozy looks to be built on better technologies (CouchDB and NodeJS rather than PHP and *SQL). There would probably be more key differences, if I understood the architecture of both projects better.

I was also very interested in the remotestorage protocol. This might fit in well with a web application I have been developing for the University of Southampton.