8 Best Blockchain Donation Projects Improving Humanitarian Aid
This article dives into issues that threaten the humanitarian supply chain (i.e., lack of accountability and trust, lack of transparency, high fees, misaligned incentives, and coordination challenges) and looks at eight use cases of Web3 technology within this context.
A New Way to Reference and Retrieve Geographic Data
This post explores how EASIER, an initiative of researchers from the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, uses STAC and web3 technologies such as Filecoin and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to store, retrieve, and analyze geospatial and geographic data.
Accelerating Makers Archive
The Accelerating Makers project (https://acceleratingmakers.publicgoodapphouse.org/) was created to help technology builders and nonprofits co-create purpose-built tools for public good. Focusing on using DWeb tools, the project empowered nonprofits to take ownership of their technology and impact solutions. This series features conversations and resources that explore the benefits, examples, and methods of building decentralized solutions that are purpose-built for change makers. Click to view a full archive of data from the project, including copies of all explainers, research, guides, and webinar recordings. Additional resources can be found on Github: https://github.com/CaravanStudios/PublicGoodAppHouse/tree/main/AcceleratingMakers.
Accelerating the Makers of Civil Society
TechSoup's Accelerating Makers project, supported by FFDW, aims to bridge the gap between civil society organizations and decentralized web (DWeb) technology. By providing education, resources, and community events, the project seeks to introduce civil society decision-makers to DWeb technology and enable DWeb Makers to understand the needs and challenges faced by civil society organizations, ultimately fostering the development of purpose-built, transparency-oriented, equitable solutions for the world's most pressing issues.
An Introduction to the Interplanetary File System (IPFS)
This video explains some of the issues with the current internet and dives into the basic concepts of how the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) aims to solve these issues. It explains the data structures employed by the protocol and a high-level overview of how they work. It provides a brief guide on how to install and use IPFS. Some topics covered in this video include distributed hash tables, MerkleDAGs, BitTorrent, peer-to-peer protocols, and decentralized file systems.
Anatomy of a Content Identifier (CID)
Explore CIDs (Content Identifiers), the unique labels used to point to data stored on distributed information systems, including Interplanetary File System (IPFS), IPLD, libp2p, and Filecoin.
Announcing The Decentralized Future Council
The Decentralized Future Council (DFC) is focused on raising awareness and educating policymakers about the decentralized web and related technologies. Through educational initiatives and engagement with scholars, influencers, and organizations, DFC aims to promote understanding of the potential of Web3 technologies.
Announcing The Starling Lab
This blog post announces a multi-year commitment of FFDW to the Starling Lab, a research center tackling the technical and ethical challenges of establishing trust in the most sensitive digital records of our human history.
Bacalhau Documentation
The Bacalhau documentation explains how to get started with Bacalhau on Filecoin. Bacalhau is a platform for Compute Over Data (COD). With Bacalhau, one can streamline existing workflows to run computation where data is stored.
Big Ideas Driving the Decentralized Web
This blog post delves into the growing interest in a more decentralized internet structure. It examines key concepts such as decentralization, centralization, distributed networks, peer-to-peer networks, open source, protocols, nodes, and decentralized data storage. These concepts are identified as crucial catalysts in the progression of the DWeb and Web3 movements.
Black Experiences in Crypto: An Exploration of Crypto Adoption in Web3 by Black People
Black people in the United States are adopting crypto at high rates relative to other groups and to traditional financial tools. This report seeks to answer why. What are the motivations? What is unique about Black people's motivations and participation in crypto? CRADL hopes the Web3 industry, leaders at traditional banks, and policymakers use this report as inspiration for meaningful and evidence-based solutions that enable more equitable wealth-building opportunities.
Blogging on the Decentralized Web
This curriculum provides coding examples on how to build a blog using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) in order to create content addresses that don't change.
Building Distributed Press, a Publishing Tool for the Decentralized Web
This article announces Distributed Press, a project that offers creators a user-friendly alternative to centralized platforms by providing a no-code publishing platform and content management system (CMS) that has access to decentralized platforms such as IPFS and Holepunch. The focus is on empowering individuals and serving diverse communities such as activists, journalists, offline networks, and artists.
Can Filecoin Be the Storage Network for Human Rights Data?
HRDAG, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, harnesses the power of statistics to address human rights violations and promote accountability. By embracing decentralized web (DWeb) technologies like Filecoin and IPFS, HRDAG secures and preserves critical human rights data resiliently. This enables advocates and human rights defenders to access verifiable information, empowering them to drive positive social impact and promote justice worldwide.
Collect, Preserve, Democratize: A Q&A With Democracy’s Library
Democracy's Library aims to address the problem of inaccessible government data by creating backups and a repository of verifiable information. Their goal is to make government records, research, and data freely and permanently accessible to all stakeholders, leveraging technologies like Web3 and decentralization to transform the structure of knowledge and facilitate better collective societal management. By preserving critical information in a repository with verifiable information, they strive to empower the future of government and enable informed decision-making.
Content Addressing on the Decentralized Web
This beginner-friendly course teaches how hashing and content addressing enable verifiable data sharing with peers on the decentralized web. Topics covered in this course include data retrieval, data identification, cryptographic hashing, and content identifiers.
DWeb for Creators
The Decentralized Web For Creators Knowledge Base is an interactive index of resources that accompanied the DWeb for Creators online course at Gray Area, San Francisco. Here you will find essential links from the sessions, including outside resources such as readings, videos and other references. Start using the DWeb in your work today!
Decentralised Digital Identity
This article explores how a ‘Decentralised Digital Identity’ concept applies to media users or a professional publishing company. It investigates how these identities can be used to develop trust and extract new value in the publishing and media industries. The work is based on the research undertaken by the Cogency project in 2022, which assessed how Web3 can be used to help build ongoing trust and develop new revenue streams for publishers and content producers.
Decentralization in All the Things
This article emphasizes the need to reshape societal structures for the digital age. The central idea is establishing a standardized infrastructure while encouraging decentralized collaboration to maximize social innovation and benefits. Examples from various sectors highlight the potential social impact, from finance to healthcare and education.
Developments in Web3 for the Creative Industries: A Research Report for the Australia Council for the Arts
This report identifies how artists, musicians, game designers, and other creative practitioners are pushing the established boundaries of the creative economy using Web3 tools and platforms. The report steers clear of aspirational ‘use cases’ and focuses instead on the industrial transformations that have manifested to date, including new ways of manufacturing ownership, rewarding and incentivizing fans to sustain creative projects, and the use of web3 for organizing and managing collaborative creative endeavors. Some concepts covered in this piece include intellectual property, peer-to-peer networks, blockchain, and records management.
Distributed Press Documentation
This site contains technical documentation about Distributed Press: an open-source publishing tool focused on censorship mitigation and content hosting for the World Wide Web and Distributed Web. It automates publishing and hosting content to the web that it seeds to decentralized protocols like IPFS and Hypercore.
EASIER Data Initiative Lightning Talk at Computer Over Data Summit
Watch John Solly, the Lead Geospatial Developer at the EASIER Data Initiative, present at the Compute Over Data Summit. His talk explores how decentralized technologies have created new opportunities for geospatial data and associated research.
Easier Data Initiative Lightning Talk II at the FIL Network Base
Watch John Solly, the Lead Geospatial Developer at the EASIER Data Initiative, present his lightning talk at the FIL Network Base in Austin Texas. His talk explores use cases for Filecoin and IPFS to store publicly funded geospatial data to promote accessibility for research and academic institutions.
Empowering a More Informed, Transparent Society with Decentralized Technology
FFDW collaborates with MuckRock, a non-profit organization, to leverage the Filecoin network, IPFS and the greater decentralized web for preserving public documents and enhancing information transparency. MuckRock's DocumentCloud platform enables journalists and researchers to request, analyze, and share government documents via FOIA requests, while decentralized technologies ensure the long-term data preservation of these critical resources.
Empowering an Equitable Digital Future
Connect Humanity, a social impact fund, partnered with FFDW to survey over 7,500 civil society organizations across 136 countries to evaluate the state of digital equity worldwide. The findings revealed significant barriers to internet access, affordability, digital skills, policy implementation, and content availability. Connect Humanity and FFDW aim to mobilize resources, knowledge, and solutions to bridge the digital divide, ensure equitable access to the internet, and promote a more inclusive and equal digital future through education and the development of decentralized technologies.
Exclusive: a Crypto-Based Dossier Could Help Prove Russia Committed War Crimes
This article discusses how blockchain technology and web3 tools are used to preserve and verify evidence of war crimes, as demonstrated by The Starling Lab's submission to the International Criminal Court using a blockchain-verified chain of custody. This marks the first evidence submitted using blockchain technology, ensuring its authenticity, preventing tampering or loss, and continuing its digital preservation. This approach can enhance transparency through provenance and accountability in legal proceedings related to war crimes.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 10: Communities and Coordination
Episode 10 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" walks viewers through the history of community governance and decision-making, shared ownership, stakeholder engagement, and DAOs. This episode explores step-by-step how DAOs work and what a future built on networks of DAOs could look like.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 11: Digital Creator Economy
Episode 11 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" explores the transition from Web2, which lets you publish your work, to Web3, which lets you monetize that work. This episode explores the shift in thinking from scarcity of access to scarcity of ownership in art, the rise of NFTs, and how the dweb allows individuals to curate, own, and monetize digital creativity, as well as build new spaces and leverage existing web2 platforms to create new community spaces.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 12: Emerging Web
Episode 12 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" explores how Web3 enables a new iteration of the internet. It explores how Web3 supports censorship and surveillance mitigation, as well as human rights and information access. Experts talk about how this next generation of the web benefits the creator economy, content providers, consumers, and platforms alike.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 1: Evolution of the Internet
Episode 1 explores the internet's origin story and how it empowered content creators and brought universal access to knowledge. It showcases how society moved from Web 1.0 to today's centralized version of the World Wide Web, and highlights the benefits of web3 for long-term preservation of knowledge. Some key concepts explored in this video are peer-to-peer tools, link preservation, and censorship mitigation.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 2: Return to Decentralization
Episode 2 explores the benefits and use cases for decentralization across industries – from financial payments and record-keeping to art and architecture. It also considers how decentralization returns the power of the internet to the hands of the people, rather than to private entities.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 3: Data and User Control
Episode 3 examines the benefits of user ownership and control of data, as well as data encryption, transparency, and security. It also covers the value of data preservation and how web2 companies can adopt web3 tools today.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 4: Digital Identity
Episode 4 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" examines the relationship between authentication and authorization, pseudonymity, the rise of single sign-on platforms, and the advantages of and use cases for self-sovereign identity. Furthermore, it examines how self-sovereign identity may be achieved societally and technically.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 5: Privacy and Rights
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 5, focuses on privacy and rights, including the tradeoffs around privacy and today's digital transactions. Some key discussion points in this episode include cryptography, data collection, location tracking, and web3 alternatives.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 6: Open Source and Inclusivity
Episode 6 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" examines the distinction between open-source and closed-source software projects, incentive mechanisms for governance of open-source projects, and the benefits of inclusivity in open-source projects. Furthermore, this episode discusses some economic considerations about open source projects and examines concepts like scarcity mentality, competition, and collaboration in the open source world.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 7: Economies of Trust
Episode 7 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web " examines applications and use cases for blockchain technology. It covers the mechanics of trustless transactions, network participants within a blockchain ecosystem, and how data ownership works within these systems. This episode specifically emphasizes the mechanisms surrounding blockchains, including smart contracts, multi-chain interactions, and decentralized applications.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 8: Browsers and dApps
Episode 8 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" guides one through the history of web browsers and the benefits of web3-enabled browsers like Brave and Opera, which bake in peer-to-peer protocols and cryptocurrency wallets. These benefits include privacy, data control, and a trustless environment.
Exploring the Decentralized Web, Episode 9: Beyond the Ad Model
Episode 9 of "Exploring the Decentralized Web" looks at the evolution of the advertising model and its relationship with media. It explores what ad models can look like when the web is decentralized (e.g., streaming payments to content creators). Some key concepts explored in this episode are media distribution, consumer-producer interaction, and community-owned platforms.
F-Droid
F-Droid is an installable catalog of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device. This app repository intends to solve the issues of centralized and walled gardens surrounding both Apple's and Google's app stores, mitigating censorship using decentralized technologies.
FFDW Supports Spritely Networked Communities Institute to Develop Decentralized Social Media
This blog post is the announcement of FFDW's collaboration with Spritely Institute to support the creation of a decentralized social media platform. Spritely works towards liberating individuals' online identities and relationships, providing user privacy and data protection, and ensuring individuals can freely build their online identities. Furthermore, this blog post describes Spritely's goals towards user-empowered moderation tools, infrastructure, user experience, etc.
FFDW Works With Prelinger Archives to Make Rare Historic Films More Accessible Using the Decentralized Web
This blog post announces FFDW's partnership with Prelinger Archives, a San Francisco-based historical film archive. FFDW and Prelinger Archives are working to digitize historical archival footage and store it on the decentralized web for everyone to view, working towards a more free and accessible internet.
FFDW and Guardian Project Team Up to Bring Decentralized Storage to Content Verification and Distribution on Smartphones
This blog post is an announcement of FFDW's new collaboration with the Guardian Project. Specifically, the project focuses on integrating decentralized storage into their solutions for the distribution, authentication, and preservation of essential multimedia and software in their privacy-focused mobile apps.
FFDW and OpenArchive Collaborate to Deploy Decentralized Archive for Human Rights Data
OpenArchive is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing human rights by empowering people to collect, verify, and securely preserve mobile media using distributed backends. Through this partnership, OpenArchive will integrate decentralized storage solutions, such as IPFS and Filecoin, into their Save app. This crucial tool aids individuals in capturing, archiving, and verifying images and videos of global events directly from their smartphones, empowering at-risk communities and improving censorship mitigation.
Fabiola and David Discuss IPFS, Filecoin, and the Decentralized Web
The Guardian Project discusses the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) on this podcast. This podcast contains a high-level overview of IPFS and how it might impact the Guardian Project's internet freedom and human rights efforts. Some of the more technical topics discussed are distributed hash tables, CIDs, and hashing algorithms.
Filecoin Documentation
The Filecoin Docs are a centralized repository of technical information pertinent to developing on top of the Filecoin Network. They walk through concepts like the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), smart contracts, and peer-to-peer networks (P2P).
Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) and Sacred Stacks: Building Community With Decentralized Tools
Sacred Stacks, a collaborative project by the University of Colorado Boulder's Media Economies Design Lab and Center for Media, Religion and Culture, explores the potential of decentralized technologies in building stronger activist communities and making a social impact. Partnering with seven activist communities, they organized a six-month online learning cohort. They created an 80-page illustrated zine to reflect on the challenges faced by the designers of decentralized tools in serving the communities they aim to support, emphasizing the importance of technology in cultivating spiritually creative "cyborg communities" and fostering social change.
Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web Boosts Harvard Library Innovation Lab’s Work to Democratize Open Knowledge
This blog announces FFDW's collaboration with Harvard University's Library Innovation Lab (LIL) to explore open and decentralized technologies for cultural preservation, fighting linkrot, and democratizing open knowledge among many other avenues.
Five Ways DAOs Will Revolutionize Social Impact
This blog post explores the potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to revolutionize the internet. It highlights the alignment between DAOs and community-based decision-making, community governance, accountability, innovative fundraising, and incentivization models. Furthermore, the article emphasizes the ability of DAOs to empower grassroots communities, enabling them to organize, raise funds, and deliver services in a decentralized manner.
From Davos to DAOvos: Blockchain’s Breakthrough at the World Economic Forum
This blog post by Blockchain Law For Social Good Center (BL4SG) provides takeaways from the 2023 World Economic Forum. This article also includes a description of how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) work.
Going Bankless
This 10-lesson curriculum is designed to provide an essential background of web3. Some lessons include wallet and blockchain basics, web3 security, layer 1 and 2 blockchains, DeFi, decentralized exchanges, and more.
Greenpilled: Meet 5 Entrepreneurs Engineering Social Good on the Blockchain
This Forbes news article by Jocelynn Pearl highlights 5 individuals working towards social good using blockchain technologies. The projects covered here are open source and utilize interesting concepts like open incentives and quadratic funding. Some of the projects highlighted in the article include GitCoin, Hypercerts foundation, and Govrn.
Hackathons in Web3
This report explores why people join Web3 hackathons and how hackathon design influences the attendee experience. It features archetypes of hackathon teams and includes a hackathon journey map that organizers can use when planning their events.
How Can Civil Society Participate in the Decentralized Future of the Web?
This YouTube video explores the concept of the decentralized web (DWeb), which aims to distribute internet resources across connected devices instead of centralized entities. It highlights the Guardian Project's ProofMode app, which allows activists and organizations to protect their communications and data from intrusion, interception, and monitoring, particularly in documenting war crimes. The video emphasizes how decentralized solutions can empower civil society, distribute power away from individual control, and better serve communities worldwide.
IPFS & Filecoin: The Building Blocks of an Open, Decentralised Web
This video is a talk by Ally Haire, a developer advocate at the Filecoin Foundation. She explains IPFS & Filecoin, concepts, tech, developer tooling, and social and engineering challenges with the current web. She also speaks on how Filecoin/IPFS work towards solving those problems. The topics covered in this conversation are deduplication, verifiability, content IDs (CIDs), content routing, retrievability, storage deals, and crypto-economics.
IPFS: Interplanetary File Storage
This video by Simply Explained takes a look at how the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) works as well as explores its basic concepts and how it can solve issues like censorship using content-addressed data.
Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web
This series of six webinars explores how using decentralized technologies may enhance privacy, empower control over one's own data, and resist censorship. Hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. It includes demonstrations of how decentralized tech is used in publishing, data management, and in preserving cultural assets.
Improving Website Resilience With LibResilient and IPFS
This blog post is a short guide for capturing, publishing and hosting static web pages using LibResilient and IPFS. LibResilient is a JavaScript library for decentralized content delivery in web browsers and markets itself as easy to deploy to any website.
In Brazil, the World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Has Been Overwhelmed With Unprecedented Fires and Clouds of Propaganda
This news article documents issues surrounding the fires consuming Brazil's Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland. The photo presentation in this story was produced in collaboration with The Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford University and the University of Southern California. The photos are cryptographically authenticated and verify when and where they were taken. Captured data also includes confirmation that the images have not been edited, improving data integrity.
International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Technical Speaker Series: Archiving Twitter
This blog is a set of slides presenting what the author learned while building thread-keeper, the experimental open-source software behind social.perma.cc, allowing for high-fidelity captures of twitter.com urls as “sealed” PDFs.
Interplanetary File System (IPFS) Documentation
The IPFS docs serve as a source of truth for developing on top of IPFS. Information such as popular web3 projects built on IPFS, basic concepts surrounding IPFS, subsystems and components that make up IPFS, and more will be found here. These basic ideas include peer-to-peer protocols (p2p), addressing, routing, transferring, content-addressed data, decentralized file systems, hashing, immutability, persistence, subsystems, and IPFS implementations.
Introducing SecureDrop Protocol
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. The SecureDrop project has been aThe SecureDrop system has been around for over 12 years, and recently the Freedom of the Press Foundation started designing a new protocol to replace the current server based implementation. This blog, and the accompanying code at https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop-protocol/, goes into detail about how the new protocol works to preserve the privacy and anonymity of the submitters using cryptography. While the protocol is still in development and not ready for production use yet, it's a great example of the kinds of tradeoffs and considerations that are needed to protect user anonymity in decentralized systems.
It’s All About the Provenance
Santiago Lyon, former VP for Photography at The Associated Press, emphasizes the importance of establishing provenance in the digital media landscape to combat misinformation and promote trust. He discusses the role of technologies like blockchain and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) in tracking the origins and changes of digital files, providing users with reliable information. The article highlights the CAI's efforts in developing open standards and collaborating with industries to ensure widespread adoption of provenance technology.
Merkle DAGs
This curriculum covers how content identifiers (CIDs) are used to create content-addressable data structures for the distributed web. Learn the theory behind data structures such as graphs, and MerkleDAGs, and how they can ensure verifiability, disreputability, and deduplication.
My Web3 Learning Plan
A comprehensive onboarding guide to understanding web3. This curriculum will walk you through web3 basics, such as understanding wallets, stablecoins, exchanges, Ethereum, Layer 2s, DeFi, DAOs, NFTs and their use cases, and more.
New Horizons for Lawyers in the Blockchain Era
This blog explores the new potential for lawyers under the context of blockchain technology. It offers several different use cases and explains how they may be pertinent to the evolution of law. It investigates ideas like policy, intellectual property, and provenance. The article mainly focuses on use cases surrounding smart contracts and DAOs.
ProofMode
The open-source project ProofMode operates as an almost invisible utility on a phone, automatically adding extra digital proof data to all the photos and videos captured on a mobile camera. This data can be conveniently shared with anyone through a "Share Proof" action. The app aims to enhance media's credibility and authenticity by providing cryptographically verifiable digital proof.
ProofMode on the InterPlanetary File System
Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project talks through his thoughts on the upcoming work on ProofMode, journey into the DWeb, how and where to build in the privacy and security needed for activists and journalists, and finishes with a grand unification theory across multiple apps and projects. Some key topics discussed in this talk are decentralized storage, privacy, security, and cryptography.
Refi Wiki
ReFi encompasses a variety of theories, models, and concepts. This repository aims to serve as a wiki for research, acronyms, and additional reading materials to understand ReFi better. Some topics that will be found in this wiki are DeFi, NFTs, CCPs, carbon markets, ecosystem marketplaces, and the open climate registry.
Regulating Decentralized Speech: Content Policy on the Decentralized Web
This research report discusses the role of user-generated content in developing a decentralized internet via Web3 applications. The brief includes a systematic analysis of the challenges and benefits of content policies and enforcement strategies surrounding regulation in over 30 blockchain-based apps, providing a snapshot of the current field.
Sacred Stacks: The Art Of Cyborg Community
During the second half of 2022, MEDLab led seven communities to explore together the needs, ethics, and challenges of emerging decentralized technologies. What began as an errant search for practical tools became an exploration of ritual, relationship, and poetics. This fully illustrated, 80-page zine compiles reflections and learnings from the Sacred Stacks cohort.
Sustainable Blockchain Summit - Boston
Sustainable Blockchain Summit (SBS) in April 2023 included 1 jam-packed day of expert talks, workshops, and deep dives. The event featured over 35 top thought leaders in sustainability and web3, speaking on energy systems, carbon markets, sustainable finance, renewable energy, and impact beyond carbon.
The DAO Debrief: Lessons Learned on DAO Liabilities and Regulations
This blog post from the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center explores the potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for positive social impact. It discusses legal uncertainties, jurisdictional challenges, and the need for regulatory frameworks to protect DAO members from liabilities (DAO LLCs) while emphasizing the importance of building democratic principles within DAOs.
The DJ and the War Crimes
This Emmy-nominated investigative piece published by Rolling Stone, in collaboration with Starling Labs, explores unsolved war crimes in Bosnia. The images have authentication certificates, including cryptographic verification and hosting on multiple decentralized storage networks. This is one of the first deployments of photojournalism on the Dweb, ensuring that we have an irrefutable record of these events.
The Future of Decentralized Apps: Q&A with Guardian Project
This Q&A with Guardian Project, an FFDW project partner, explores the intersection of decentralized apps (dApps) and social good. It highlights the benefits of dApps in terms of data control, security, privacy, and preservation. The article discusses common use cases of dApps, including their application in the human rights and humanitarian space, and showcases projects like F-Droid and ProofMode that leverage decentralized technologies and storage for secure app distribution, chain of custody, and verifiable media documentation.
The Value Prop
The Value Prop is a resource database showcasing the diverse and unique blockchain-based applications spanning sustainability, humanitarian work, education, and others. The Value Prop is chain agnostic and includes use cases and applications built on any blockchain network, reaching any part of the world in numerous social impact areas.
Tuesday Project Spotlight: Tuna Tracking Tools
This blog post spotlights an exciting use case of Web3 tech in the environmental field by explaining how blockchain tech from ConsenSys and TraSeable can track the tuna supply chain from the fishers out at sea to the supermarket.
Universities Use Blockchain-Based Storage to Protect and Democratize Data
This article explores use cases surrounding data storage on the decentralized web. It explains how universities and organizations leverage decentralized storage to preserve useful information, such as research data and open courseware. It also addresses some of the challenges associated with the use of blockchain-based storage.
Web Archiving: Opportunities and Challenges of Client-Side Playback
This blog post captures some technical challenges and opportunities related to web archiving and client-side playback. The author reflects on their experience deploying replayweb.page on perma.cc and provides general security, performance, and practical recommendations on embedding web archives on a website using client-side playback.
Web3 Is Our Chance to Make a Better Internet
The article discusses the potential of Web3, a decentralized, blockchain-based internet ecosystem, to create a fairer and more equitable internet. It examines the principles of justice, particularly those of philosopher John Rawls, and how they can guide the design of Web3. The article highlights the need for Web3 to address wealth inequality, access, and governance issues to fulfill its promise of democratizing opportunity and creating a just internet. It suggests promoting self-determination and agency, rewarding participation over capital, and incorporating initiatives that benefit disadvantaged individuals as key steps in achieving justice in Web3.
Web3 Projects are Rebuilding Carbon Offsets’ Architecture of Trust
This article highlights the benefits of decentralization in the context of environmentalism and regenerative finance (ReFi). The article explores how blockchain technology can ensure that the individuals protecting the environment are recognized. Some concepts covered are carbon offsets, carbon credits, and the open forest protocol.
Web3 and the Trap of 'For Good'
This article explores some issues surrounding social impact initiatives, specifically in relation to web3. The authors explain that web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies are too often built under the context of "for good" but used as tools of exploitation. Also discussed within this article are potential solutions to these issues surrounding accountability, governance, community trust, and equitable power structures. The authors point out some initiatives that are making an impact and explain how to support and contribute to building a better, more transparent internet.
What Is Blockchain for Social Good?
Innovative companies and individuals use blockchain to transform the world’s biggest challenges into humanity’s biggest triumphs. This webpage lists examples of how blockchain is used for social good (e.g., verifying environmental impact, supply chain verification, and micro-financing).
Witnessing the Web is Hard: Why and How We Built the Scoop Web Archiving Capture Engine
This article discusses the development of Scoop, a high-fidelity, open-source, browser-based, single-page web archiving capture engine built to address the needs of the web archiving community, with a particular focus on specificity, accuracy, and security. Scoop employs the "no-alteration principle" to ensure captured HTTP exchanges remain unprocessed and authentic. The tool allows users to customize their capture policies and how the browser interacts with web pages. To ensure decentralization of trust, authenticity, and provenance in a decentralized web archiving process, Scoop incorporates support for the Web Archive Collection Zipped (WACZ) file format and the WACZ signing and verification specification, allowing for a cryptographic seal on the web archive file.
World Economic Forum (WEF) Crypto Report Charts A Path to Improve Web3 Sustainability Data Standards
The article highlights the potential of blockchain technology to contribute to a sustainable power system and reduce emissions in the crypto industry. It mentions that blockchain can support renewable energy projects by purchasing renewable energy, creating additional revenue streams, and offsetting carbon emissions related to cryptocurrency portfolios. The report emphasizes the need for comprehensive blockchain emissions guidelines, transparency, and verifiability in emissions reporting within the Web3 ecosystem.
