DWeb Camp 2026

David Thomas

David Thomas spent the first decade of his career as an academic literary critic studying climate change and speculative fiction, then decided he wanted to work on the problem more directly. Drawn to the food sovereignty and agroecology movements and to the open source values of Open Food Network, he joined OFN Canada in 2020. Since then he has been working on a problem familiar to most DWeb Camp participants: how do you build digital infrastructure that generates value for the communities it serves rather than extracting it from them, and how do you keep it that way as it scales? That work has taken him into decentralized web standards, federated community governance, and the painstaking organizational work of convening coalitions whose members owe each other nothing beyond commitment to a shared vision. His organizing conviction is that cooperative federation is the only proven means to achieve economies of scale while ensuring that prosperity and decision-making remain anchored in grassroots producer communities. He co-founded the Community of Organizations to test that conviction in practice. It has been two years in the making, and DWeb Berlin is its first real public reckoning.


Session

07-09
17:00
60min
Building Federated Food Systems Technology | AKA ‘A non-profit, a university, a social enterprise, and a cooperative walk into a bar…’
David Thomas, Hannah Wittman, Colin Rinta Stewart, Kevin Cussen

The digital enclosure of agriculture is accelerating, and a voluntary coalition of open-source agrifood system platforms is building the federated infrastructure to fight back. Join Open Food Network, LiteFarm, Our Sci, and C-Group Cooperative for a progress report, a frank airing of unresolved strategic and technical questions, and an open invitation to help shape what comes next.

D:Food/Web
The Seedbed