• What: Two days of focused discussion and knowledge sharing
• When: Tues July 23rd - Wed July 24th
• Where: Vancouver. Boris will organize meeting space @ Z-Space (505 Hamilton, Buzz 301)

We'll sepnd two days for focused small group presentations and discussions, people can choose to also come to participate in the IETF Hackathon and other events, do public events to promo their work, or just work together as a mini team retreat.

The LOCALHOST Social on Thursday, July 25th, is an opportunity to present a lightning talk for anyone interest in promoting their work. Let Boris know if you want to present!

The DWeb Hack Day on Sunday, July 28th is another opportunity to present developer focused content and hack with people.

Skip to the bottom to read the note from Boris for more context.

Attendees

Boris Mann is one of the organizers of LOCALHOST Vancouver, a series of events around IETF120 happening July 20th - July 28th. ATTENDING

Bryan Newbold from Bluesky will be in town for IETF, along with some fresh code around their decentralized approach to OAuth / OIDC, plus a great resource for AT Protocol and the PLC Directory. ATTENDING

Chris Boscolo: 3NUM is looking at did:farcaster, PLC directory consortium membership, cross platform encrypted messaging, and more. ATTENDING

Mike Perhats: Nosh is exploring the right proto app approach for restaurant owned co-op food delivery. ATTENDING

Andrés Monroy-Hernández: teaching social computing and director of the HCI Lab at Princeton.

We have several other local Vancouverites with expertise and interest in these areas, and could use this opportunity to have others join us for working sessions, whiteboarding, hacking, and learning around these topics (Ryan Betts @depatchedmode, Andy from Nosh, Brooklyn Zelenka)

Chad Kohalyk will be attending IETF, but as a cross-border person is always interested in global GTM discussions. Also, the protocol vs proto App, vs protocol+app (eg the Bluesky model) deserves exploration. ATTENDING IETF MEETINGS PERMITTING

Suggested Topics

Need your input here. There are no experts, more like starting points for discussion.

Protocol vs Protocol + Product vs Proto App: what's the right balance? what are the goals of each? What are the success metrics for each path and how do they differ?

Identity and Auth: what "Login with X" could we be rallying around? How does this need to function to be useful and easy to users, developers, and other actors?

Federating with more than one open social protocol: does this make sense at all? Is this only for "simpler" apps that mostly do sharing?

Open Frames as an emerging standard that solves an interaction pattern and creator/publisher/developer SDK for many proto apps, that would be more powerful and more interesting if it grew beyond just the Farcaster protocol (this is already happening, and multiple proto apps pushing it would make it happen more quickly).

Global GTM: what does it look like to target different countries?

PLC Consortium: benefits of joining the consortium. Crypto bridging to web2 through PLC directory and vice versa.

Getting adoption - who cares about what: is building another app the answer to platform / social fatigue? How the heck do you get distribution? (This is a large and meaty topic but also perhaps too general)

A Note from Boris

I have strong conviction about Proto Apps being very important in the next couple of years. My definition of Proto Apps is applications that are built on top of open social protocols such as ActivityPub, Farcaster, and ATProtocol.

In the platform era, the best we had was APIs hosted by commercial entities, offering no surety to users and creators, never mind developers and other businesses.

In the proto app era, we can choose to build on top of, or interop with, open protocols. The most important areas of interop are in accounts and their related social and interest graphs, and in data storage.

I also have strong belief that the opportunity for new open social protocols to thrive in this cycle is closing or already closed. That it's time to pick base level protocols to get behind, and to build proto apps that leverage them and grow an interoperable growing data and social graph together.

Email/message me if this sounds interesting (or leave a comment). What are your challenges? What would you benefit from learning or co-operating with others? What are some shared pains that might cost each of us less in time/resources/experimentation to work together on? I'll flesh out the FAQ as people ask things.

FAQ

What is Boris getting out of this?

I know the people that I'm initially sending this to and am interested in supporting them. Having y'all come visit me in Vancouver lets me get face time with everyone. It costs you all time and travel expense to come, so I'm willing to facilitate and host.