Spritely presented spirited speeches spanning the planet

Over the past 6 months, Spritely has been busy bringing our message to new audiences. I thought it might be nice to compile a list for everyone to watch our talks. Christine Lemmer-Webber, the Executive Director of Spritely, has been busy giving most of these presentations, but the entire team has helped as well. The talks cover our technology, our values, our past, and our vision.

Org mode Witchcraft at Spritely

In January, five Spritely members went to the annual FOSDEM conference to talk about the organization and how we all contribute to it. The first talk was actually by me, talking about how we organize our organization, and how we manage the many whitepapers we have put together using Org Mode. I also gave a sneak-peak of the trans-bean program which can use a Magit-style menu to edit plaintext accounting ledgers.

An update from that video is that trans-bean is now available on Codeberg if you want to try it out!

Today's fediverse: a good start, but there's more to do

Unfortunately, this talk is one of those things you had to experience in person. The camera didn't capture the performance. It is still worth a listen though! Our founder, Christine Lemmer-Webber, and the Chief Technologist at Spritely, Jessica Tallon, talk about their view of the fediverse, from their perspective as two of the primary authors to the AcitivityPub spec.

Object-Capability Security with Spritely Goblins for Secure Collaboration

Juliana gave a beautiful presentation of how our shared values regarding individual rights and consent led naturally to the technical choices Spritely has made. She also gives a great overview of Ocaps which is worth watching even if you are familiar with object capability security already.

Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme

Dave is fighting an uphill battle against dependency hell, and he needs your help. Part of the solution is, of course, Guile Scheme! Spritely's scheme-to-webassembly compiler, Hoot, is now mature enough to utilize in your next web application, and Dave thinks you should try it. What you will get in return is true reproducibility and a good bootstrapping story, along with all the web APIs you're used to. He even goes on to show how reactive programming can work through webassembly and Scheme, and plenty of other goodies.

Goblins: The framework for your next project!

Jessica is the lead technologist at Spritely and brings a lot of experience to the table when it comes to defining networking standards. She is a co-author of the ActivityPub. Now, working on Goblins at Spritely, she believes the Goblins library can be used for much more than just social media.

Shepherd with Spritely Goblins for Secure System Layer Collaboration

Juliana's second talk at FOSDEM this year was about her work on bringing the distributed networking power of Goblins to the Shepherd, which is responsible for coordinating services on a Guix system. With this project well underway, system administration, across the internet, can soon be done in a capability-secure way. This talk covers the current status of the project as well as how the Plan 9 system inspired her to start.

Spritely and a secure, collaborative, distributed future

Christine gave the last talk from Spritely at FOSDEM this year, and walked through the larger concepts of Spritely and how they come together, and why we decided to make mascots for all the different components. The Spritely project plan from 6 years ago is still the current plan, despite all the work that was done in between. As more and more characters have been coming to life, we have been getting closer to fulfilling our promise of peer-to-peer application development made easy and secure.

c-base Fireside chat

Christine had an intimate conversation at Berlin's famous c-base space station with Volker Grassmuck, ranging from topics about her personal life, her experience working on the ActivityPub, and the work she is doing now at Spritely. She ends it with a powerful and hopeful message about the future of decentralized networking.

Fediforum keynote

Christine again gave an amazing talk about the values that led to Spritely, most importantly including fun and enjoyment. She talks about the differences between the fediverse and Bluesky, and how each can learn from each other, as well as our current battle against surveillance capitalism. Throughout all of this, she gives an optimistic view of what can be accomplishe through community activism.

What the future holds

We are all putting our heads down to work on delivering the promises we talked about this year so far. In the current environment, the tools we are building are more important than ever. We hope that these talks inspire you to try out our technology and read our papers, maybe even donate! And each month, you can come listen to more of us talk at our monthly Office Hours.

Have a great rest of the Summer!