Indie WebCamp
= the Indie Web Movement, an effort to create a web that’s not so dependent on tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google
URL = http://indiewebcamp.com/
Description
"IndieWebCamp is a gathering of web creators building and sharing open web technologies to advance the state of the indie web. We get together for a weekend to talk about what has been done to empower people own their online identities, and then spend a day hacking and creating." (http://indiewebcamp.com/)
Discussion
BY KLINT FINLEY:
"One of them is Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki, the tech that underpins Wikipedia. And there’s Kevin Marks, the former vice president of web services at British Telecom. Oh, and don’t miss Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of the seminal blogging site LiveJournal and, more recently, a coder who works in the engine room of Google’s online empire.
Packed into a small conference room, this rag-tag band of software developers has an outsized digital pedigree, and they have a mission to match. They hope to jailbreak the internet.
They call it the Indie Web movement, an effort to create a web that’s not so dependent on tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and, yes, Google — a web that belongs not to one individual or one company, but to everyone. “I don’t trust myself,” says Fitzpatrick. “And I don’t trust companies.” The movement grew out of an egalitarian online project launched by Fitzpatrick, before he made the move to Google. And over the past few years, it has roped in about 100 other coders from around the world.
On any given day, you’ll find about 30 or 40 of them on an IRC chat channel, and each summer, they come together in the flesh for this two-day mini-conference, known as IndieWebCamp. They hack. They demonstrate. They discuss. They strive to create a new set of tools that can give you greater control over the stuff you post to the net — the photos, the status updates, the blog posts, the comments. “The Indie Web is a community of folks interested in owning their own content — and identity — online,” says Tantek Çelik, another developer at the heart of the movement.
They ask questions like: What happens if Yahoo freezes your online account, loses your data, or goes out of business? What happens if you decide to move all your Facebook photos to another site? What if you want to reply to someone on Twitter using Google+? And then they build software that answers these questions." (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/indie-web/)
Example
"At this year’s camp, Fitzpatrick and fellow Googler Bret Slatkin showed off Camlistore, an open source alternative to cloud storage services like Google Drive. The aim is to give people software that works like Google Drive — that gives you instant access to your files from any machine — but that doesn’t lock you into the Google way of doing things, and that always plays nicely with other services across the web." (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/indie-web/)