Notes from the Homebrew Website Club #5 in Berlin

During the last meeting #4, the discussions were held around privacy issues and decentralized web topics. Some massive privacy regulation changes have happened in the US since our last meetup. Therefore, we continued our discussion about some practical ethical aspects of web development and web design. Here is a list of some introduced resources:

•  Resilient Web Design as an approach of understanding the web from its roots by Jeremy Keith
• (free) Ethical Web book series by Adam Scott
• The Fair WebSercice Manifesto against walled gardens
• Avoiding barriers and harming effects to the user/people via the Ethical Design Manifesto by Aral Balkan
• Social media services try to penetrate us, Calm Technology is a counter movement to this. Watch Amber Case’s talk for more information
• The book The Social Design of Technical Systems: Building technologies for communities is pretty worthy to understand the Indie Web movement better. Especially, the chapter Evolution of Computing, Design Spaces, and Socio-Technical Design describe very well the mechanics between the different disciplines of Social Sciences, Cognitive Science, HCI, Computer Science (Software), Electronic Engineering (Hardware), and so on.
• How to think about technology critical is pretty well expressed in the Critical Engineering Manifesto
• Tracking or also called CapitalismSurveillance is a big topic for Common Terms. Their intention is to make terms & conditions more accessible. In  that context Terms of Services – Didn’t Read provides a good overview of the good and bad parts of the most famous online platforms. A TRUSTe is business services which try to deal with all the cookie and tracking service from a good user experience for corporate and the user/people as well. If they do a good job, I don’t know… at least they provide a range level of trust instead just a one-option “yes” button, which most websites provide… A statistical approach for managing user tracking without destroying their privacy is called Differential privacy. That technique seemed to be pretty complicated and we decided to put it beside. In my opinion the approach of Datensparsamkeit might be a better option.

A smaller side topic of our meeting was the discussion about tooling and easy onboarding for Indie Web newbies. Of course everyone can set up a server or register at a webhoster.

The step after this first initialization can be still to big. The Google Creative Lab provide a nice starter package with the name Coder, which addresses teenagers, parents and newbies in the field of web design and web development. Coder is an image file that can be copied on a SD Card and started with a Raspberry Pi. A ready webserver with all the needed software makes the first coding and web design step so easy. We discussed if it possible to provide a similar experience with the indie web tools. Within the group, we ended up with the opinion that we don’t need something like this, because the webhoster Dreamhost is already working on an one-click installation of an ‘indieweb-wordpress’ image.

We also discussed the VPN Tool Streisand and figured out that is cool, but doesn’t provide an advantage from an Indie Web point of view.

Joel introduced his NodeJS get-DNS tooling and his self-hosted sharing button implementation Meddelare, which is looks like a legit alternative to the ShareThis (spying buttons)

One of the last topics were future events in Berlin or related with the spirit of the Indie Web Community

• Indie Web Camp (13-14. Mai) in Düsseldorf
• Indie Web Camp (20-21. May) in Nuremberg
• Datensummit, 28 & 29 April in Berlin
• Material , August 17th, 2017 — Reykjavík, Iceland,  Very interesting concept of interpreting the web as material
• re:publica, 8-10 May in Berlin, The Internet Community Conference for Europe in May in Berlin.
• NodeJS Meetup, 23 May in Berlin, With one talk about Decentralize Authentication
• OpenTech Summit, 25 May in Potsdam ,  Good Spirit of DIY and Open Culture

Some more notes about our meetup are available at Sven’s blog. We also have a new meetup website, which makes it maybe more easy to find us.