2026-07-09 –, The Seedbed
This kickoff session traces what has grown since the inaugural D:Food track in 2024 — in tools, practitioner networks, and research — and orients participants to the core themes shaping this year's D:Food programming. Join us for a generative discussion taking stock of what the ecosystem has cultivated together at the intersection of food and tech sovereignty, and how to get involved in what's next.
The inaugural D:Food track at DWeb Camp 2024 brought together farmers, technologists, and food system organizers to ask a shared question: what does it look like when the values of the decentralized web meet the realities of food sovereignty work on the ground?
That gathering planted seeds that the D:Food community has been growing since — through practice, through research, through ecosystem weaving across geographies and disciplines that don't often share a room. The tools, funding models, and research being highlighted this year at DWeb Camp represent that growth made visible. Initiatives like the Funding Lab for Open Agroecological Technologies (FLOAT), Lab Lab Camp's technologist-farmer pilot projects in Brazil, and the Rooted Innovation research initiative are all part of what has been cultivated since that first gathering.
This session opens the 2026 D:Food track as a conversational discussion with the originators of D:Food (Samuel Oslund and Wendy Hanamura), lightly moderated by Madelynn Martiniere as the lead of the Rooted Innovation project — highlighting what has grown in those two years, why it matters, and offering participants a map of the terrain they're about to explore for the rest of the week.
Madelynn Martiniere is a facilitator, designer, and strategist specializing in collective innovation—the conditions and infrastructure that enable ecosystems to cultivate community resilience and tackle wicked problems together.
For almost two decades, she has worked across sectors and scales to build innovation ecosystems that center open access, community ownership, and collective power. Her portfolio spans the globe: co-designing an entrepreneurship hub for refugees in Uganda, leading development for a digital platform for sustainable fisheries in Latin America, facilitating data sovereignty initiatives toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and stewarding a global movement of founders and funders building businesses that balance profit and purpose.
A co-founder of Armillaria and former Executive Director of Zebras Unite, she has spent over 15 years bridging local practice with systems-level change—developing the social, organizational, financial, and technical infrastructure that enables communities to produce, govern, and share the technologies shaping our future.
She currently serves on the boards of Communitere International, which builds community resilience infrastructure in crisis and post-crisis contexts, and the Holochain Foundation, advancing peer-to-peer technology for community-owned digital infrastructure.
- Unconference: Setting the Agenda
- LABLAB Experience: Co-Creating Agroecological Tech and Bioregional Networks
- Unconference Closing Gathering
- Social Aspects of Sovereign Technologies: Lightning Talks and Discussion
- Ethical AgTech Panel: Assessing Risk and Cultivating Technological Sovereignty
- Embodied Practice - Collective Intelligence Simulation
- Resistance, Resilience and Regeneration - The Role of Collective Infrastructure in Times of Collapse
Wendy Hanamura is an leader with deep experience in nonprofit management of global organizations with outsized impact. Her passion is using storytelling to achieve positive social change. As a content creator, she's had a rich career as a Time Magazine journalist, Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, television reporter and host, moderator and public speaker. She is currently the Board Chair of the Earth Species Project, and contributes her fundraising skills to many organizations she loves.
To be filled out by Samuel