This past week, @BenMS and myself were in Paris presenting a paper at the [ADAM symposium] (Programme, ADAM Final Symposium – Adam), which was focussed on decentralised technologies. We will make the paper available via GitHub next week and I will attach the link to this thread for those who are interested. Our talk went as planned and was well received, barring overly some aggressive questioning from a guy from the W3 Consortium (we gave as good as we got). Academic conferences are new to me, but I liked the contrast between this and the other conferences that we have been attending and I think this will be the start of MaidSafe moving to different types of events to maximise our exposure to as many different groups as possible. Being a former academic, Ben was in his element!
We met lots of interesting people, unsurprisingly lots of Computer Scientists and Academics, but most had not heard of MaidSafe so great to expose our technology to new people. The University of Westminster are going to be inviting us down to talk to their students and faculty fairly soon and I would anticipate being invited to other conferences on the back of this. One of the most interesting guys that we met was a Platform Integration Engineer at the Mozilla Foundation, he has been following us for a few months.
Mozilla receive the vast majority of their funding from Google and many see this model as unsustainable. The person we spoke with intends to champion the SAFE Project inside Mozilla with
the engineering team prior to approaching the org’s key decision makers. We spoke at quite a high level and obviously much more technical discussion needs to take place, but his initial thoughts
would be to incorporate the SAFE network with their existing [Firefox extensions] (Extensions – Add-ons for Firefox (en-US)) in the short term, but moving to try and build the SAFE network into a decentralised standard, in conjunction with the W3 and others in the longer term. Obviously this discussion is at an extremely early stage but promising that like minded organisations are keen to work with us.
After the conference finished on Friday our work wasn’t done and by popular demand Ben and I went to a local office of one of the symposium speakers where Ben gave an excellent technical overview of the network to a small group, including computer scientists, academics and the guy from the W3 I mentioned earlier. So, a tiring and very busy few days but lots of exciting stuff to follow up.
