2024-08-20: Back, Back, Baaack
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
Unzipping, Decompressing
I’m always a bit torn after a hiatus in a “daily” exercise (coughs discreetly in the direction of this newsletter): do I …
- over-indulge my Californian and English halves by overanalyzing and overapologizing?
- Make some weak-ass attempt to summarize the multiple missed weeks, probably delaying the restart even more? (Warning: may already have happened), Or
- just not mention the hiatus at all, and hope it’s you who feels guilty for not reading all those non-existent posts I imply are out there, languishing in your spam folder or something?
Well, I guess for now it’s the first. Sorry man.
Meanwhile, in Filecoinvania
(Looking for something less cumbersome than “Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe”, and It sounds better to me than Filecoinistan).
Some of my absence can be explained by much Summer travels . I went to Belgium for a bunch of FIL events in July — and promptly got Covid, which means I in fact missed everything and everyone except the PL Founders Retreat 2024 🄽, and an impromptu “Coughference” me and the similarly-contagious Christine Lemmer-Webber 🄽 had in our Brussels quarantine hotel.
What I picked up (apart from Covid) is that the Filecoinvanian aura is that, post-nucleation (the thing where all of the PL teams exploded into independence, like the sandtrout at the end of God Emperor of Dune), we now have amassed a lot of problems, but we’re all extremely motivated to fix them. I have a many more public conversations about this now, than, say, a year ago, when it was mostly mutterings in multiple group chats. I haven’t gone through the videos of the Fil Brussels events, but I heard that this was also the case there — at least in the Filecoin-facing meetups.
What I’ve discovered this week is that there are at minimum four, and surely more, groups who have come together to fix everything, but are not actually reporting out to any of the other groups (or indeed, know of their existence). I think one of the plans for the next week or so is at the very least document all of them.
Offsite and offline
Then after quarantining (and a brief foray to London to see Zach Zucker perform) it was more-or-less straight into the FF Team Offsite 2024.
This was significant for us, as we worked out a bit more about how the Foundation might pivot from being primarily (but not exclusively) a policy-events-governance-promotion-and-comms shop in the next few months to being more involved in the most boring-yet-needed bits of the problem-fixing arena. A bunch of stuff needs to go to the board first, etc, etc, but this is a direction some of us have been advocating for, for a while. Kind of terrifying now that it’s happening though.
And then last week was Dweb Camp 2024, which I’ll be talking more about in future mailings. This week will be me unpacking all that metaphorically and literally. As well as catching up on many, many dropped plates. You’re not so special, temporarily-abandoned reader.
Thinking about:
- Right this very moment? This newsletter. Historically, I defaulted to “self-indulgent overanalysis of my day” (easier to write; easier to research). My growing, gnawing need for a decent regular Filecoiniverse overview site is, however, messing with what I could do in this email. Like, rather than say what I had for breakfast, there’s an opportunity here for more detailed reviews and updates of what’s going on.
I dunno, what do you think?
❓ Here’s a form that ISN’T A GOOGLE FORM.
It’ll take 30 seconds! Do it! Do it! Do. it. Doit. Dooo ittt. Do it?