Decentralizing
We start with some most excellent news. Congratulations to our friends at Holo for a brilliantly run and hugely successful ICO. And that’s ICO as in Initial Community Offering rather than Initial Coin Offering (more on that here). As far as encouraging a decentralized web as a core facet of Tech We Trust goes, our Collective really appreciates your work.
On the topic of decentralization, we mentioned in our 20th February newsletter that we’d been invited by the Internet Archive to contribute to the development of its 2nd Decentralized Web Summit this summer. This year’s theme is “Global Visions / Working Code – building decentralized technologies that work at scale, with and for real people around the world.”
Our network mapping team (Christina Bowen, Philip Sheldrake, Philip Pridmore-Brown, Robert Best) is working hard to expand the number of decentralization projects featured on our network map and the quantity and quality of data about each for presentation at the Summit. We would greatly appreciate any input you have on this – any projects we should know about and any people we should be talking to? You can see our draft questions and data structure here, and please feel free of course to make suggestions and leave comments.
Co-operating
Shifting focus to a different conference now, a good number of us are attending Open Coop 2018 in London this July. In fact, we have two speakers amongst us: co-founding members Laura James and Michael Linton. We’ll be sure to share their stacks at the time, and videos if they’re available. And as it happens, Holo’s Art Brock will be speaking too. We’d better schedule a Collective social, to which everyone is welcome of course whether you’re at the conference or not. Watch this space.
Getting regulated
If you’ve noticed a bunch of privacy related emails hit your inbox in April, be prepared for very many more this side of the 25th May General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) deadline. This is something we’re working on too, obviously. If you’d like to co-operate on ensuring our compliance, or just fancy taking an early peek, please jump into this Google doc now, otherwise expect an email from us nearer the deadline laying out just how we’re making it work for us.
A forerunner project to the Collective hosted a GDPR roundtable with some heavyweight corporates two years ago, so we’ve been immersed in it all for some good time now. Back then concern wasn’t high. Now many have shot past due concern to full out alarm! And yet if you want to explain GDPR from a Tech We Trust perspective, just point out to critics that in many ways it’s how things should have been all along if we, well, er, had Tech We Trust. That in no way implies that our mission is complete – very, very far from it – but it does tell us that European democratic representatives understand what we’re fighting for here, even if their scope is limited and toolbag restricted.
If you have any questions about GDPR you think we can answer for any other organization you’re part of, please just shout. It seems one unfortunate individual at least could have done with some more prep.
Coding
The Collective is looking for developers, both novice and experienced, who want to get involved in ChatBot (HuBot) and GraphQL research and development projects. Talk with the Social Ledger team in our member chat (in Practices > Social Ledger Lab). This is a member-only chat space, so if you received this email from someone forwarding it to you, please do join here first … we’re very nice people 
Best regards,
Christina, John, Jim and Philip, on behalf of the Digital Life Collective member relations team.
HELP
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The welcome email included login details, otherwise please email tech@diglife.com.
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