| Schedule | Travel&Accom. | Volunteer | Register | Contacts | References |
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, Earthstar, Willow, Nostr, Holochain, P2Panda, GNUnet, NextGraph, Qaul, Pijul, Iroh.
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. 23 | Sat. Jan. 24 | Sun. Jan. 25 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8h-9h | Breakfast + Lunch Prep. | Breakfast + Lunch Prep. | Breakfast + Lunch Prep. |
| 9h-12h | Official Welcome + Tutorials/Lectures + Student Projects | Mature Insights + Early Seeds Talks | Mature Insights Talks |
| 12h-14h | Lunch + Dinner Preparation | Lunch + Dinner Preparation | Lunch + Dinner Preparation |
| 14h-18h | Tutorials/Lectures + Student Projects | TBD | TBD |
| 18h-20h | Supper | Supper | Supper |
| 20h-… | TBD (recommended places) | TBD | TBD |
*TBD: To Be Decided by participants (unconference style)
-> Thursday Evening
For those arriving early, you may look at our recommended places for eating and socializing.
-> Official Welcome (Friday January 23rd 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 planning for sharing cooking and cleaning chores.
-> Tutorials/Lectures (Friday January 23rd 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:
- (Fri. ??) ?? by Ali Ajorian
- (Fri. ??) ?? by Osman Bicer
- (Fri. ??) ?? by Christian Tschudin
- (Fri. ??) ?? by Erick Lavoie
- (Fri. ??) ?? 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.
-> Student Project Presentations (Friday January 23rd Morning & Afternoon)
Some of the students having successfully completed a related Bachelor or Master project/thesis in the Computer Networks Group will present their work, in 25 minutes. The following presentations have already been planned:
- (Fri. ??) “Late-Binding between Groups and Permissions based on Trust in Offline-First System” by Paul Tröger
- (Fri. ??) “Gachix: A binary cache for Nix over Git” by Ephraim Siegfried [pdf] [source code]
- (Fri. ??) “P2P e-voting Protocol” by Martin Chikov
These presentations 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 referenced reports.
-> Mature Insights Talks (Saturday January 24th and Sunday January 25th Mornings)
Format: 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.
Purpose: The 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.).
Planned talks so far:
- ??
-> Early Seeds Talks (Saturday January 24th Late Morning)
Format: 5-10 minutes of prepared content with no question.
Purpose: Early seeds talks should aim to provide an interesting perspective or insights that have not been validated already, to stimulate interesting discussions and draw attention to potential topics for the unconference part.
Planned talks so far:
- ??
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
- Registration, Schedule, Invited Talks: Erick Lavoie
- Academic Sponsoring: Christian Tschudin
References
Books
- Scott Chacon, Ben Straub, “Pro Git: 2nd Edition (2014)”, [website]
- Oded Goldreich, “Foundations of Cryptography” [Vol I: Basic Tools, Vol II: Basic Applications]
- Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, Luis Rodrigues, “Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming (2nd Edition)”, [website, ebook]
Academic Papers
- Alternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt: Ethnographic study of Secure-Scuttlebutt, developed through active participation within the community. [media article] [paper]
- Gossiping with Append-Only Logs in Secure-Scuttlebutt: High-level presentation of the core replication protocol and open questions. [9min. presentation] [paper]
- Secure Scuttlebutt: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and Decentralized Applications: High-level presentation of SSB, with a comparison to another information-centric approach (Named Data Networking) [paper]
- Local Crypto-Tokens for Local Economics: Articulation of the problem of designing crypto-tokens based on double-spending detection instead of prevention, making them compatible with eventually-consistent replication such as done by SSB. [paper]
- A Broadcast-Only Communication Model Based on Replicated Append-Only Logs: A note on how using broadcast as a fundamental communication primitive leads to replicated append-only logs. [paper]
- Range-Based Set Reconciliation and Authenticated Set Representations: Replication protocol based on sets instead of the logs currently used by SSB. [paper] [master thesis]
- A Connectionless Grow-Only Set CRDT: Technique to compress packet size between replicators without needing prior connection. [paper]
Others
- Secure Scuttlebutt video talks
- Introduction to Cryptography for Non-cryptographers, by Ali Ajorian (P2P Basel 2025) [Youtube]
- Talk recordings on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/p2p-basel-2024
- Previous editions: 2025, 2024, 2023
- Archived projects: Socket Supply