Schedule Travel&Accom. Volunteer Register Contacts References

banner

The aim of the P2P Basel workshop is to bring together researchers and software builders to share insights and collaborate towards the sound and sustainable development of efficient eventually-consistent (offline-first) peer-to-peer systems. Examples of related projects of interest are Secure-Scuttlebutt, DAT/Hypercore, Cabal, Socket Supply co., Earthstar, Willow, Nostr, Holochain, P2Panda, GNUnet, NextGraph. Other P2P projects that are based on stronger consistency models, such as Mass Market are also of interest.

The workshop is intended for 16 participants, 4 from the Computer Networks Group @ Unibasel and 12 invited external researchers and developers. The workshop is intentionally kept small to encourage deep technical discussions, foster strong collaborations between participants, and make the logistics easier to manage collaboratively.

We are already at full capacity.

Schedule Overview

  Fri. Jan. 31 Sat. Feb. 1 Sun. Feb. 2
8h-9h Breakfast + Lunch Prep. Breakfast + Lunch Prep. Breakfast + Lunch Prep.
9h-10 Official Welcome Talks Talks
10h-12h Tutorials/Lectures Talks Talks
12h-14h Lunch & Going Indie Roundtable + Dinner Preparation Lunch + Dinner Preparation Lunch + Dinner Preparation
14h-18h Tutorials/Lectures TBD TBD
18h-20h Supper Supper Supper
20h-… TBD TBD TBD

*TBD: To Be Decided by participants (unconference style)

-> Official Welcome (Friday January 31st 9h-10h)

The official opening of the workshop will be done on Friday morning with a brief announcement from Erick, a roundtable to get to know each other, and a keynote talk by Prof. Christian Tschudin: “State of Affairs: Decentralized Research at University of Basel”.

-> Tutorials/Lectures (Friday January 31st Morning & Afternoon)

Tutorials/lectures provide a presentation of fundamental concepts and skills that may help participants better understand the following talks and discussions. We have time for 5 introduction tutorials and lectures of 45-50 minutes on core topics of interest. Already planned lectures are:

  1. (Fri. 10h) “Fundamentals of Cryptography for (and by!) Non-Cryptographers” by Ali Ajorian [Ref: Introduction to Modern Cryptography]
  2. (Fri. 11h) “Yao’s Garbled Circuits” by Osman Bicer [Ref: Original Paper]
  3. (Fri. 14h) “Formal Verification Tools for Protocols and CRDTs: Promela and VeriFx” by Christian Tschudin [Refs: SpinRoot VeriFx]]
  4. (Fri. 15h) “(Manually) Proving the Convergence of State-based CRDTs & Application to 2P-BFT-Log” by Erick Lavoie [Ref: 2P-BFT-Log Paper]
  5. (Fri. 16h) “” by ??

These lectures are open to students and researchers of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Basel. Participants are invited to prepare in advance by reading the relevant reference material.

-> Going Indie or Not: Round-table with Students on Non-Traditional Careers in FOSS and/or P2P! (Friday January 31st @ 18h30-19h30)

Are you close to finishing a degree at University of Basel? Do you have an interest in contributing to free and open source software (P2P or not!) but wonder how that could possibly become a (paid) career?

Participants of P2P Basel will share their career experience of the last years. You will learn their academic and non-academic backgrounds, funding models they have experienced both as employees and independent developers, the highs and lows of being indie, and funding opportunities they have leveraged in Europe. Some of them could become your mentors in the future!

Participants:

  • Andreas (P2Panda)
  • … and others!

Funding sources discussed:

  • NLNet
  • NGI (2025 is the last year before the program is discontinued)

We have up to 3 complementary meals we can graciously offer to Bachelor/Master students that register in advance, otherwise students should bring their own meal.

-> Talks (Saturday February 1st and Sunday February 2nd Mornings)

Format: Saturday and Sunday mornings will have prepared talks, each with 15-20 minutes of prepared content but with a generous time allowance of up to 20 minutes for interactive questions and discussions with other participants. There are 4 slots reserved on each day.

Purpose: The invited talks should present new insights that are likely to be useful to other participants in their own projects. These insights might come, for example, from having deeply reflected about fundamental problems, or found unexpected issues in deployments that you wished you had known earlier because they would have led to different design decisions. You are strongly encouraged, but not obliged, to publish those insights in citable academic papers (such as pre-prints on Arxiv) or blog posts on your project’s website prior to your talk. If you do so, we will link to them next to your talk.

The talks are not intended for general marketing of your project: all participants are already fully busy advancing their own project(s) and so they are unlikely to drop theirs to join yours. Marketing towards a general audience will be better served by other venues (blog posts, videos, talks in larger conferences, etc.).

Diffusion: You do not need to attend the workshop to see the talks. We will make them available publicly after the event on Archive.org. See references below for links to talks from previous years.

Planned talks so far:

  1. Ali Ajorian, “Obfuscation as Instruction Decorrelation”, Arxiv Pre-print
  2. Aljoscha Meyer, “Verifying Arbitrary Slices of Content-Addressed Strings” Pre-print
  3. Niko Bonnieure, “Encrypted DAG of Operations” and/or “Causal Reliable Broadcast”
  4. Keks, “Using MLS in Less Centralized Settings”
  5. Osman Bicer, “Improvements to Garbled Circuits”
  6. Christian Tschudin, “Latest tinySSB experiments: transient feed acquaintance, distributed app store and bubbles.”

Travel and Accommodations

You will have to organize travel and accommodations yourself. Basel is easily accessible by train and by plane. The cheapest hosting option is typically AirBnB.

Volunteering and Self-Organization

Half of the program will be done in a participant-driven unconference style. You can already think about sessions you’d like to host, discussions you’d like to initiate, etc.

To keep registration fees low, we will collectively cook and clean for ourselves during the event. All participants are expected to contribute: aprons and kitchenware are provided. Meals will be organized so that they do not require more than 30-60 minutes of preparation/cleaning from volunteers during the meal breaks, and will cook (if needed) in automated cookware during the sessions.

Registration and Attendance Fees

The workshop is by invitation from the organizers only. To have an opportunity to be invited in future editions, publicly contribute to eventually-consistent peer-to-peer systems in one or many of the following ways: publish your insights in pre-print venues, such as Arxiv, write insightful posts on your blog, and contribute to the technical development of eventually-consistent peer-to-peer systems.

We ask for 75 CHF / 80 EUR for attendance, regardless of when you arrive or leave, to cover meal costs including breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Sponsoring

If you have an academic affiliation and will give a talk, the Computer Networks Group can access university funds to help cover travel and accommodation. Contact Christian Tschudin.

Contacts

References

Books

Academic Papers

Others