Building Decentralized Code Collaboration on Ethereum - Abbey Titcombe

next up we are so excited to be hosting abby from radical she's going to be talking about um building decentralized code and collaboration on ethereum abbey how are you good how are you today shannon awesome we're soaked to have you you ready to go yeah absolutely awesome take it away great um great to meet everybody um everybody's watching love eath denver really missing it um the annual trek uh to colorado this year so um sending good vibes through the internet um but cool i'm here my name is abby um i'm here to talk to everybody about the project that i'm building uh called radical um so before i get into radical um which is a decentralized network for co-collaboration i want to talk quickly about um ethereum so uh the reason we're all here is to talk about ethereum and we all really love ethereum for a lot of reasons um but mainly because it's becoming a really big part of this thing that we call you know web3 you can call web3 a framework a concept a religion i don't know but in my opinion i think web3 really represents um this important transition from an internet controlled by centralized platforms to an internet powered by decentralized protocols it's also an industry and a space that is entirely online values total decentralization and is completely open source which i think is one of the more powerful things um about web3 um you know we're building software that is decentralizing but is also decentralized itself um in its open source nature um and in kind of like the values that are embedded um in you know people that are in the ecosystem um so this is also really cool um however we on the radical team think that there's kind of an elephant in the room um which is really around code collaboration so the way that we build this software um and the there's just this big kind of glaring hole in that the hosting sharing collaboration and distribution of the software that we're building to bring about web 3's you know very existence is very centralized um it's centralized to platforms on the web that have a same hold on the developer ecosystem that facebook twitter google amazon and these other big tech companies have on our day-to-day lives so before we tackle how radical is you know trying to um be an alternative to the centralized code collaboration um maybe you're wondering you know what is the problem with centralized code collaboration um and i feel like i have to say it every single time i talk about radical um but github is really great github is one of the centralized platforms for collaborating on code and we love it and we really mean it when we say um that github has played an extremely important role in the growth of the open source ecosystem and it's played a really big role in a lot of our lives um and this is because it's basically created a global social network of developers of people building code and it's developed this rich platform that has defined new workflows that have completely revolutionized how we build software together and it's also built by nerds who care about open source i realize my slides are maybe a little bit i guess my slides are a little bit wonky so i hope that the lag catches up on my screen i can share these online for other people as well but basically github is really great it's built by people that we respect and and you know share our values but at the end of the day it's also a walled garden that's built on open soil just like everything else right um so github is built on top of git which is a free and open source distributed version control system um and so very similar to the other platforms that we web three pioneers of the ethereum ecosystem uh are trying to dismantle and divest from facebook twitter amazon google um and we've seen this similar trend in the recentralization of the open protocols of the web that we've seen with the open protocols that back code collaboration and the main outstanding factor is uh that it's controlled by one corporation um in that github is owned and controlled by microsoft so that being said there's you know pros and cons to the situation but just like we've seen um in the other social platforms we've started to see the side effects of the centralization we've seen the corporate influence of microsoft and other you know global social platforms creep into everyday news whether it be banning developers from uh us ancient countries buckling under government pressure to shut down disruptive software or censoring code due to external influences um for example the riaa's recent attack on the open source software repository of the youtube downloader and so now we start to see the cracks begin to show just like we've seen um in twitter um with everything that's happened with the most recent election a lot starting to happen and we're starting to see um our centralized code collaboration platforms start to crack under the pressure the societal pressure and the technical pressure that comes with being one of the biggest global hubs for collaborating and building open source software so despite all these examples which kind of makes up like the ideological um you know argument for decentralizing code collaboration um we think that the call to decentralized code collaboration isn't just based off of values because again github works for a lot of people we even use it you know and proposing an alternative based purely on ideology uh alone disregards the reason that these platforms became so important in the first place um but there are real problems with um centralized hosting platforms um and the first of these is the inherent platform risk with that comes with any corporate owned platform um this subjects its users to censorship and usually will be continuously subjected to and overtaken by capitalist means and extraction which are often misaligned with the goals of free and open source communities second there's a real security risk central platforms are single points of failure and provide many real attack vectors um that are again as the repository of code grows on github only becomes more apparent and only becomes more of an attack vector um as centralized platforms struggle to keep up as you know technology advances finally which i think is the biggest one um is vendor lock-in so all non-git native features like issues comments reviews and pr's are entirely hosted on github everyone says well git is decentralized so it's fine that's my backup that's where my code is but what would you do if you lost all of your issues the conversations the discussions the the contributions um that were made or not made to a repository most of the collaboration layer would be stripped away leaving only the change history of the code so basically you'd have the code but you wouldn't have the collaboration and along that lines the social network of github is entirely unique to and hosted by github our developer identify identity is defined by social connections that are made through these centralized platforms it's not sovereign to us um just in the same way that you don't own your twitter profile um and more and more we start seeing that online identities are real identities and it makes people uncomfortable that all of our social relationships stars likes follows that define our reputation define our identity exist solely within these platforms so proposing an alternative um to uh hosted platforms based off of these issues um you know is more relevant because we're starting to see these issues show through the cracks but as software development continues to grow at the rapid pace that it's growing today um and with the nature of the digital ecosystem shifting and turning as it encompasses more and more and more of the world we'll see these small problems these edge cases soon become critical points of failure if not solved or addressed and this is hyper relevant for the web3 space because in a world where nearly all software relies on open source code and our entire ecosystem depends on open source code maintaining the resilience and the health of our free and open source ecosystems is more important than ever you know the issues with hosted platforms can't be ignored our dependence on the essentially hosted platforms in you know specifically our space for the distribution of our infrastructure is you know inherently unsustainable and there must be like an intentional shift in narrative to prioritize the adoption and the exploration and the experimentation with decentralized alternatives for co-collaboration that abide by the principles of free and open source software and also of web 3. and so that's kind of the setting for um why we built radical you know radicals meant to be an alternative that can step in and start supporting the web3 ecosystem as it grows by providing resilient code collaboration infrastructure so radical is an open garden hence the name which is a botanical term uh it's powered by a peer-to-peer gossip protocol that's built on top of git and is complemented by an often ethereum integration so this means that there's no central servers no corporations owning the network and no censorship radical isn't owned by anybody it's a completely free and open network in comparison to other decentralized code collaboration alternatives as well there's no hassle setting up like self-hosting like self-hosted instances that are isolated from each other because everything's based in this one network it's also collaborating peer-to-peer also means working securely offline so with radical everything's local first so this means that all of these non-git native artifacts that are currently locked into centralized platforms and unique to them are brought back to the developer's domain they're brought back to their machine so they're always available available offline and and constructed as artifacts on the protocol layer that can be signed gossiped and and controlled by the person who's contributing and creating those artifacts which is a really powerful concept and and secondly um everything's built on public key cryptography so all of these artifacts are critically signed adding this whole new layer to security and that just really can't be accessed by centralized platforms right now so this means in addition um to your identities that are linked to your device your code will be backed by cryptographic signatures that go beyond you know your current keys that you use um and adding this really important layer of security to day-to-day code collaboration interactions and then finally you can really own your own infrastructure radical will become free and completely open source forever it's a technically politically and economically resilient um infrastructure for developing software together and it's available to you no matter where you are and since it's open source it's forkable it's customizable it's hackable which means that down the line you'll be able to build your own experience and that whatever we build for radical is really just setting the stage for what others will build on radical and four radical in the future so our team has contributed to the radical network um by building you know one of the first truly decentralized desktop clients for code collaboration that we call upstream we personally believe that building functional usable and beautiful experiences for developers and and users of decentralized technologies technologies is essential when challenging any status quo so while we envision this application to be the main way that users interact with radical it will not be the only way upstream as with the radical protocols is completely open source and forkable giving anybody in the space the ability to develop their own code collaboration experience um and and have complete freedom in when experiencing and interacting with the radical network so since we are at can't see the slide i guess it's a little bit glitchy um but this says where but where does ethereum come in um we are at east denver and and one of the really exciting parts about radicals despite everything that i also just told you is how we're integrating with um ethereum so let's walk through some of the things that we're going to be building with our ethereum integration um so first there's um the first the whole point of the ethereum integration is to complement the peer-to-peer network um so this integration is an opt-in feature layer you may call it that gives users the ability to interact with um you know different experiences that may enhance you know their current code collaboration um day-to-day um and with uh ethereum this also gives people in the ethereum ecosystem a way of creating uh having a global you know relevance um on the radical network so with ethereum comes a global name space which gives radical the ability to access these global network effects of centralized platforms without taking on the platform risk um and so we're able to do this with um our ens integration so radical users will be able to claim global names and use them to be identified and discovered on the network and this is a huge part of solving discoverability in peer-to-peer networks it's really hard to build in great discoverability or at least discoverability that rivals the the global search bars that we have in our you know platform conglomerates um but this is the first step to doing that um by being able to claim global names and attest ethereum addresses ethereum identities to radical profiles on the peer-to-peer layer you'll be able to use wallets and addresses in your radical experience um and this will be a way for users to recognize you not only on the radical network but within the global ethereum network so these names are kind of like an application agnostic um and self-sovereign alternative to a github profile which is relevant to unlocking you know our developer identity um the one that really exists and uh the interactions in which we share our github profile to determine reputation or what we're working on so that's a pretty powerful concept but this really powers up some of the other you know user features um that really get us excited the first of those being orgs so easily managing a group of repositories with organizations have become a commonplace feature of our day-to-day code collaboration experience unfortunately when restrained by the social model of centralized orgs centralized platforms and the orgs that are built into those platforms running organizations on these platforms comes with some limitations these limitations are basically um forced on you by this admin based model of centralized platforms that are where a single user has privileged access over the organization and its members and this is really limiting to projects and collectives that operate within non-hierarchical structures it also poses challenges around trust especially for communities protocols dowse that are mainly organized over the internet so this is where radical works comes in on radical organizations are powered by smart contracts instead of dependent on admins these contracts allow you to define the rules and permissions for code bases in a completely trustless manner manner so with orgs dows decentralized organizations internet communities squads collectives can access a new superpower where everything membership admin control governance canonical project states source code and the code collaboration that goes into that organization is truly decentralized and so this is taking ownership and this is a really powerful concept taking ownership of the asset which is your code base and returning it to control of a group of individuals and giving them the ability to program that control and program that ownership in a way that's secure and trustless and not reliant on a centralized platform or service so that's where orgs comes in and this is going to be one of the big features that we're launching as soon as we um start rolling out our ethereum features and the second is something called radical funding and so the concept of radical funding comes from the belief that sustainability goes beyond technical resilience so to truly free developers from centralized code collaboration we need to build better solutions for empowering the financial freedom of open source maintainers and developers and so this concept is um enhanced by d5 right you know defy is doing the same we had a little bit of a glitch with abby we hope that she's about to come back to us maybe she can do a quick refresh but she's been talking to us about decentralized building and decentralized funding for open source platforms and how that ties into the ethereum protocol so we're going to just see if abby can rejoin us hopefully she unfreezes soon but since uh she was close to the end of her presentation we're going gonna wrap it up and we're gonna head over to willy