[2020 Theme Proposal] High Social Impact Applications

[parkan]

Note, this is part of the 2020 Theme Proposals Process - feel free to create additional/alternate proposals, or discuss this one in the comments!

Theme description

The two top goals within the IPFS Mission statement are:

• Ensure that all people have the ability to efficiently access and grow humanity's knowledge.
• Mindfully develop new technologies that preserve and promote rights of individuals.

We believe that the adoption and long-term success of IPFS is necessary for us to be able to fulfill these goals. In the more immediate term, a significant and growing body of technologists has been taking these same challenges head on, under various titles such as Humanitarian Software, Community Networks, and Resiliency Engineering.

The applications range from disaster relief coordination and mapping, to connecting off-grid indigenous communities in remote mountainous areas, to collecting oral traditions in near-lost languages, to offering low-cost internet access in inner city neighborhoods, to bringing newly digitized Buddhist texts back to Nepal on a (literal) yak, and dozens more. While the problem domain is varied, the commonality is aiming to provide knowledge and communication services to those underserved by the mainstream technology world, and to protect those whose rights are most at risk.

The unique challenges of operating in these environments are an excellent opportunity to test and showcase the advantages of IPFS, to uphold our mission today, and to guide us to realizing it fully in the future.

Core needs & gaps

Technological solutions to problems of vulnerable populations, especially when devised by outside actors, can be a controversial topic (cf. impact of microfinance/mobile finance apps in India and Africa). However, NGOs, aid workers, academics, anthropologists, activists,and community representatives all tend to agree on a set of requirements:

• offline-first
• local services and collaboration
• efficient use of expensive or unreliable WAN links
• systems maintainable by community members

(source: presentations/conversations at DWeb camp, Our Networks, Radical Networks, etc)

The first three needs map remarkably well onto strengths of IPFS as designed. Being able to stream an educational video from a local peer on the mesh network instead of re-downloading it via a metered satellite connection, a typical scenario described by field workers, is a near-perfect demonstration of content routing.

The biggest gaps I can see are:

• local discovery story
• avoiding excess network traffic
• documentation and examples addressing these use cases
• ensuring work is maintainable by community members

Why focus this year

The reasons are primarily those of opportunity and urgency:

• groundwork is already laid down
• rising number of climate refugees has created immediate and growing need for resiliency tools
• uncertain development future fo Dat, which a lot of the existing p2p field software relies on

The more abstract reason to consider this as a priority is to bring our stated mission into clearer view while doing our medium-term planning.

Milestones & rough roadmap

The work here maps closely to the efforts of the locol WG, and should grow on that basis. The specific milestones depend on validating the rough requirements list (in “core needs” above).

Desired / expected impact

The immediate desired impact would be the development and field deployment of humanitarian software based on IPFS, and direct support of our mission.

Beyond that, downstream benefits are significant:

• validate and demonstrate the value of IPFS in an area where we are uniquely positioned to succeed
• recruit new groups as IPFS users and potential contributors w/strong emotional and value alignment
• generate organic positive publicity about IPFS impact and mission
• identify and address critical points within the IPFS stack: by analogy to how Accessible Design Helps Everyone, making our libraries perform well in relatively extreme environments will mean significant UX improvements in more mundane situations like losing LTE on a subway train

[parkan]

@momack2 I was intending to write this up on Friday but woke up way too sick to do much of anything, trying to salvage that now

hopefully this can still be included in the proposal set, let me know and I am happy to expand with more references and a roadmap sketch

also paging @autonome + @terichadbourne: this is my best effort at a quick summary of (personal) observations on the space and our relationship to it, would love to have your input

[momack2]

Absolutely, @parkan! Very near and dear to my and many of our hearts. Agree with you that it takes continued research and experimentation to identify the highest-value pain points to push on (likely by building proof of concepts as we did for package managers). I think the berty and textile teams have done a good job pushing both on this and the mobile front (which is also very important for many local first applications), and may have learnings to report back.

[terichadbourne]

@parkan The Local Offline Collaboration SIG monthly meeting would definitely be a great place to raise issues and seek support from the broader community. Please feel free to add agenda items for anything you'd like to discuss! (Next call is Dec 18.) https://github.com/ipfs/local-offline-collab/issues/25

[terichadbourne]

We discussed this issue of high social impact applications on today's edition of the Local Offline Collaboration SIG call. Everyone is welcome to check out the meeting notes or video recording (relevant section starts at 33:18).

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