This year at DWeb I'm helping lead the Demo Night Market. If you are thinking about showing something off, please submit an application (the demo question is late on page 2 of the proposals page) or simply connect with me and we can discuss:

https://linkedin.com/in/matthewschutte
matthew.schutte@holo.host

In past years I've helped steward the lightning talks, and bear at least partial responsibility for a nearly disastrous first unconference style day a few years ago.

I'm a former big wave surfer, a current hack musician, and an experienced entrepreneur with strengths in high level architecture, strategy, communications and partnership / business development.

More recently, I've been deepening my tech skills by building software myself now that getting unstuck has gotten a little easier thanks to some of the new AI tools.

I have lived and traveled all over the world both for work and for surf, but now call Puerto Rico home where I live in a small condo in a small town with my wife Tatiana and our two cats, Tiger and Shy.

On the professional front: I'm a co-founder of Holochain, a peer-to-peer application framework that has taken far longer to get to production ready than any of us anticipated, as well as Unyt accounting, a peer-to-peer payments and accounting system built on top of holochain. In addition, I'm an advisor to a couple of foundational AI lab startups and have volunteered and served on the board of directors of Toward Warm Data with Nora Bateson. I am open to aligned board or advisory roles and would love to hear what you are currently feeling most excited about. Let's jam!

This year, I have the honor of co-leading the Demo Night Market, an expo-style event where our goal is to help campers discover and experience as many exciting DWeb projects as possible.

After completing my Master's in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), I now work as a Research & Development Engineer, focusing on privacy-enhancing technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). I also volunteer as a Strategic Advisor to the Board of the TUM Blockchain Club, Europe's largest blockchain student organization.

From 2023 to 2025, I served as the club's President and Head of Education & Research, where I organized the TUM Blockchain Conference which is Europe's largest student-led academic Web3 conference bringing together more than 1,200 attendees and 150 speakers.

Beth McCarthy is a Berlin-based strategist, curator & experience designer. With her consultancy Abstract Machine Studio, Beth serves clients building ecoystem, culture and relational intelligence. Currently, she supports DWeb Camp with strategic partnerships, Web3Privacy Now as Program Director, Funding the Commons with program design and management and other allies as an advisor.

Beth is passionate about digital rights and freedom, tech as a force for resilient communities, and designing for ethical humans and their systems.

Hi. My name is Stefano De Vuono (he/him). I'm sometimes a San Francisco-based and sometimes Earth-based software engineer. I've often straddled the line between art and technology, design and code. I wrote my first university essay on emacs on my new Linux install. I've worked as a web (and sometimes embedded hardware) developer a digital art startup, where I designed and patented a digital image security system.

Whether helping a client revamp their developer tooling, shortening onboarding from two weeks to less than a day, collaborating with artists to develop interactive installations, or mentoring junior engineers, I have a passion for making things better Currently, I'm open to senior or staff-level engineering roles, ideally with a focus on backend or infrastructure work.

I'm also open to collaborating on interesting projects or chatting about math! Please don't hesitate to reach out! You can find me. I believe in you.

Tinker, florester and admirer of originary cultures. I believe and live a better world where communities are enpowered and self-governed, people have the time and spirit to tend their human and non-human peers and tools are hacked or built for the well-being of people and the planet.

Andrew is a technologist based in New York City that has always had a strong curiosity for decentralized technologies. He has worked on peer-to-peer applications focused on data autonomy and offline-first use cases since 2021, primarily in the form of data collection and mapping tools for indigenous communities at Awana Digital.

Evan is the Research Director at SWF. He is the co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and the Activity Streams 2.0 data format. Sometimes called “The Father of the Fediverse,” Evan made the first-ever post on the social web in May 2008. He founded the identi.ca website and GNU Social software, as well as coauthoring the OStatus specification. As chair of the W3C’s Social Web Working Group, he led the development of ActivityPub and AS2 into official standards. He won the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2009 as “Best Social Networking Hacker.” He is the author of “ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web” from O’Reilly Media.

My work and activism is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectivelly managed infrastructure.

In the last seven years I've been working almost exclusively on resilient web sites using Jekyll and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty. In 2024, I also became an organizer and facilitator at Escuela Común and developer and sysadmin at Red Abya Yala.

Mathias is a contemporary artist living in Switzerland and Berlin. He is co-founder and project manager of qaul.net, an off-the-grid p2p mesh messenger App. Mathias is active in community networks such as Freifunk, and helped build up community mesh networks around the world. He is a board member of the Special Interest Group for Community Network Infrastructures of the Internet Society.

I work at the intersection of open technologies, agroecology, environmental monitoring, and the collective construction of knowledge. I develop and support open source tools aimed at strengthening sustainable territorial practices, connecting local communities, universities and international networks.

Lead DevRel / Integrations at Nym, previously Solidity developer / artist.

Dan Visel is building Tapestries and works on the Wayback Machine for the Internet Archive. He's previously worked at the Institute for the Future of the Book, among other places. He lives in Rome.

Guo enjoy making interesting things with code, words, and music. He is currently working on moss, a desktop application that publishes a website from a folder, making indie sites a pleasant breeze for everyone. He previously built Matters Town, a publication and social platform for long-form articles. In his spare time, he writes random blog posts (mostly in Chinese) and creates music for plays and himself.

https://zacchae.us

Pumsuanhang (Michael) Suantak is the Founder of eimiAI and the Founder & Director of Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities (ASORCOM). A two-time recognized DWeb Fellow, Michael dedicates his work to building resilient, decentralized technologies for marginalized, stateless, and deep-rural communities. Through ASORCOM, he facilitates the deployment of community-owned, offline-first mesh networks that thrive despite severe hardware and power constraints. With eimiAI, Michael is pioneering localized, sovereign artificial intelligence designed to break down linguistic barriers and provide accessible tech for populations traditionally ignored by centralized tech giants. He is a passionate advocate for bottom-up infrastructure, ecological awareness, and ensuring the decentralized web truly serves the rural edge.

Rabble (Evan Henshaw-Plath) is a technologist, activist, and one of the original members of the Twitter founding team, where he helped build the platform in its earliest days after previously working on activist communication networks like Indymedia and TXTmob. Today he is the creator of Divine, an open-source decentralized social video platform exploring how social media can be rebuilt around user ownership, authenticity, and community governance rather than centralized corporate control.

Managing Director of the Department of Decentralization, host of the Berlin Chaos Mesh community, and co-organizer of the DWeb Camp Berlin 2026.

Arushi Bandi is a technologist living and working out of San Francisco. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Habitat, https://habitat.network, building a platform to help organizations and communities own their data and build software for their unique needs. She is also the infra 'witch' of Collective Action School (https://collectiveaction.school) helping tech workers remake tech from below and has been a recurring class-taker of the School for Poetic Computation.

Prior to building Habitat, she was an infrastructure software engineer at Figma for several years.

Sammy Gwilym is a programmer and illustrator, and one half of worm-blossom. She's a co-author of Willow, a family of peer-to-peer protocols.

Nico started the development of Briar Desktop to bring Briar to non-Android platforms. Having been an F-Droid developer for a long time, he sincerely wishes free alternatives to Android to succeed and is mainly interested in free software to empower people.

I am just a chaos agent - anything I touch usually breaks, but I often help to fix it:) Logos contributor, spent 10 years at Red Hat building Open Source.

Gavin Owens builds technologies for human agency; imbued with values of free association, mutual aid, self-determination and egalitarianism. After starting his early career as a scalable ML engineer in San Francisco, he went on to create a company in the digital tooling space which was acquired by Airbnb. There he worked on intelligent design systems tooling. In late 2010s he was the owner/operator of a small DIY art collective in Oakland, CA. Now lives in London and is founder of Tonk, a knowledge layer for collective intelligence.

Andre is a writer and software developer involved with the Secure Scuttlebutt community. He’s a hybrid author but favours self-publishing because owning your own platform is important and also because he secretly enjoys tinkering with ePubs. Andre published many non-fiction books focused on computer programming, and has been featured in a couple of Science Fiction and Horror short story anthologies.

Andre is originally from Brazil but now lives in Scotland with his cat.

• LX Cast is a researcher, community convener, program designer, strategist, and product leader who has worked on communication and collaboration tech serving millions of people for over a decade. LX is currently co-founder of Spacious, a peer-to-peer group audio app. They are the steward of Folk Tech, a 2026 Voqal Fellow, Curator at DWeb Camp, Chair of the Board at Tech Fleet, a board member at Prosocial Design Network, a steering committee member of the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion, a member of Aspen Institute’s Virtually Human working group, a space steward at DWeb Camp, a mentor with PDX Women in Tech, All Tech is Human, and Mentor Me Collective, and the teacher of The UX of Community. They work with organizations to develop communities of practice. LX is a founder at Changemaker PM, helping nonprofits develop product discovery practices. Past roles include Head of Research at Marco Polo, Sr. Product Manager at Notion, Chief Storyteller at Olark, Program Designer at AI Stewardship Practice Program, Practice Designer at the emergence network, Product Strategist at Lightningrod Labs. Resident Fellow in Community at Integrity Institute, a steward at Collaborative Technology Alliance, and the host of Belonging Builders. Belonging = Freedom = Responsibility is their core organizing principle. How we are with ourselves, our families and friends, our teams, our communities and our culture are interdependent and pattern one another. For this reason, they are committed to their own work in collective practice to be in right relation as a source of possibility for change.

Carmel Schare is a first-year PhD student in CSAIL at MIT researching malleable software design.

computer scientist (UofBasel) with a foot in Secure Scuttlebutt land, radio amateur

Wouter has worked on Defi at MakerDAO since 2017, before shifting focus to decentralized organizations and local-first application building at Powerhouse.

Software Engineer working for user-sovereignty. I care about anti-authoritarian tech, helping the people building it, and tacos.

Wesley is a longtime DWebber who loves the outdoors, writing and learning about the world. He is currently building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on an open social protocol.

Founder and director of Coasys. Inventor of ADAM. Former lead developer of Holochain core team. Senior developer with 20+ years of experience. Academic background in computer-science, psychology and artificial neural networks.

Founder of weco.io. Full stack web developer. Complexity science and philosophy enthusiast. Dedicated to stewarding the emergence of a healthy global super-organism.

Zach is a designer and technologist based in Oakland, California. He was previously the designer of Meedan's Check, and a founding engineer at Ethos Life.

zionillinois@mastodon.social / zionillinois@bluesky

Holmes is the founder of Quiet (tryquiet.org), a "Slackier Signal" that doesn't require servers, for organizations that need the privacy of Signal but the team features of Slack. He previously co-founded and co-ran the US-based tech policy activism group Fight for the Future (fightforthefuture.org), and also worked as a campaigner at the Free Software Foundation. Way back in the day, he co-founded a peer-to-peer video podcasting tool built on BitTorrent called Miro, and a collaborative subtitling platform Amara.

Project Lead & co-founder of Matrix.org, CEO/CTO Element. Stubbornly trying to advance decentralised communication.

TBD

Duke is a distributed systems engineer working on the IdentiKey Network, a socio-technical stack designed to create the conditions for everyone to be able to realize their creative potential and more fully express their innate gifts. As an engineer, Duke has worked on cryptography at PGP, payments and encryption at Amazon, large-scale infrastructure for Playstation Network, etc.

He has led teams working on non-custodial wallet and key management systems for Nasdaq Private Markets, Holochain, and Good Money Bank, and founded Resource Network, launching a mutual credit cryptocurrency exchange network to real-world businesses. He helped draft the initial spec that became the DID identity standard, and is building a set of distributed network protocols to enable P2P digital sovereignty for anyone and everyone, so we can use the internet together without the weird karma and onerous techno-feudal authority structures.

His mission is to bring non-coercive collaborative models of work and co-creation into the world.

My name is Othman, and I'm building Rocus (https://rocus.io) which is a tool focused on helping people make sense of complex information and organize knowledge in a way that supports clearer thinking. I'm passionate about creating software that solves real problems, stays simple to use, and helps people navigate an increasingly noisy world.

Blake Stoner stands at the intersection of legacy and innovation, building infrastructure for the next chapter of civic innovation. Inspired by a lineage of public service, his work focuses on expanding how communities are seen, understood, and represented in the systems shaping society.

Stoner is the Founder and CEO of Vngle, a Civic Insights Company designing trusted systems for real-time, community-verified insight. He also serves as Board Chair of Heart of South Downtown, stewarding the revitalization of ten historic blocks in Downtown Atlanta into America’s most ambitious district for doers, creatives, and innovators.

To advance nonpartisan progress, Stoner launched the Institute for Nonpartisan Innovation in partnership with the City University of New York, building collaborative research and civic technology that elevates community-powered breakthroughs. His leadership has earned national recognition, including honors from MIT Solve, American Public Media Group, and Special Congressional Recognition from the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

A recognized thought leader and fellow of Harvard, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and the Goldin Institute, Stoner is also part of the UCLA x National University of Singapore Global Executive MBA program, where he studies markets and shifting power dynamics across the USA and Asia.

He holds an MS in Strategic Communication from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Morehouse College.

Joshua Dávila is the writer and podcaster behind Blockchain Socialist and the author of Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It, published by Repeater Books in 2023. He is a co-founder of Bread Cooperative, where he builds crypto applications from a post-capitalist point of view.

David Dao is Chief Scientist at GainForest.Earth and Econ & Gov Lead at Protocol Labs

A pioneer in data valuation for machine learning, David holds a PhD in AI Systems from ETH Zurich. His work, which sits at the frontier of AI and decentralized systems, has been globally recognized by the World Economic Forum, XPRIZE, and Ethereum.

I've worn many hats: game AI for Netflix, high-school coding workshops, humanoid robots in aged care. Now I'm building a single hat for any occasion, Beet, a tool engine for all domains and skill levels. I'm a father, fiancé and software engineer from Wollongong, Australia.

Eric Harris-Braun is a software architect and entrepreneur who co-founded Holochain, Holo, and the MetaCurrency Project, building technical infrastructure for distributed applications and post-monetary currency designs.

Christine has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization. She has also contributed to many other free and open source projects, including co-founding MediaGoblin. Christine established the open source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications - work that now continues here at the institute under her guidance as Executive Director.

Core-maintainer of p2panda

❖ Fediverse: https://post.lurk.org/@adz
❖ Website: https://adz.garden
❖ GitHub: https://github.com/adzialocha
❖ Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/adz

Anton Tranelis is a software developer and community-builder working on local-first trust infrastructure for real-life communities. He is the initiator and maintainer of Web of Trust, an open-source project for self-sovereign identity, in-person verification, signed attestations, and encrypted collaboration.

Lee DeSota is an organizer focused on open science and decentralized governance. She co-leads SciOS, a non-profit which advocates for infrastructure that supports transparent and collaborative research. Additionally, she helps to project manage and champion open source projects at Metagov and DeSci Labs which foster collective decision-making and more replicable, reliable, and transparent scientific publications.

Jonathan Starr is the Executive Director of the Open Source Endowment, a 501(c)(3) building a community-managed permanent endowment for critical open source infrastructure. He also directs SciOS and the Institute of Open Science Practices, where he coordinates researchers and technologists building sustainable infrastructure for open science. His work spans funding mechanisms, coordination systems, and the shared technical substrate connecting diverse scientific systems.

Is a volunteer with the Freifunk Berlin community network and has been contributing to the peer-to-peer and decentralization space since 2014.

What gives my life meaning is to serve and protect the living earth and her people. My mission is to equip the regenerative movement at scale at the pace of the polycrisis, connecting place-based systems change initiatives with trust-based funding, and empowering a global network of networks with tools for coordination. I truly believe that for our species to thrive we need to maximize the number of us who are fully prepared and resourced to contribute collaboratively to co-create a regenerative unfolding. I don't think of this as political, but rather the rational pursuit of my aspirations on behalf of humanity and the greater blossoming of consciousness in the cosmos.

tbd

Calum Bowden is an artist, designer, and researcher at the intersection of technology and organization. He is currently building Meetmarket, a better queer dating app. Calum is also a PhD candidate at Leuphana University in Sociology of Organization and Technology.

Get in touch:
donjackoghue@meetmarket.io
donjackoghue.bsky.social

Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive
Internet Hall of Fame
National Academy of Engineering
Computer History Museum Fellow

Digital identity becomes valuable when it works across systems and enables real processes. That’s where Dr. Andre Kudra focuses his work. For more than 20 years, he has been working at the intersection of business and technology, bringing verifiable credentials and wallets into existing architectures and using them to build new, trusted digital processes across organizations. Business-driven yet tech-savvy, he combines strategic thinking with a deep understanding of how systems behave in practice.

As CIO of esatus AG, he shapes the technological direction together with his team and works on solutions that extend existing IAM landscapes instead of replacing them. He co-founded real-cis GmbH, which is making the vision of a truly Secure Platform happen with its Sovereignty Anchors, hardware and software comined for truly decentralized, sovereign computing.

His roots go back to the early days of digital culture, from the demoscene to retro computing, which still shapes how he thinks about technology today.