With 2023 over, and some time between now and the last update, it’s perhaps a good moment to reflect on what happened in 2023 and where the project is right now.

Achievements

Last year saw the closing of our grant from Internet Society Foundation, who have been excellent partners for the past two years! I don’t think I can overstate how important this grant has been for our work.

In particular, a longer-running grant meant the focus could be more on actual research – trying things out and writing up the results – and less on implementation. Though of course, as always, we strive to do both.

In this case, it turned out that the research was necessary. While of course you start any grant work with a proposal in which you outline what you intend to do and achieve, findings along the way can change your course.

The grant funded much of the work on CAProck and vessel, both of which are rather foundatinal technologies.

With CAProck it turns out that there is a fair bit of community interest. At any rate, it is the project for which we receive the most feedback, all of it highly constructive so far. That has been promising, and it means we’ll continue to base future work on this library.

Vessel got rather more mixed reactions. In the ICN community, the focus tends to be a lot more on immutable resources, with mutability layered on top via mutable manifests of sorts. While that approach is sound from a layering and dogfooding perspective, in our opinion, it does not really reflect the way people interact with computer systems: immutability of data tends to be the special case, so using it as a base for mutability seems to complicate matters more than it helps.

However, this means on reflection that Interpeer’s approach is sufficiently untypical for ICN that it’s perhaps best to clarify in which way it is similar and different. As it turns out, that was also the stated goal of the ISOC foundation grant, to arrive at a novel architecture.

The result is the Interpeer Architecture Draft, which not only examines ICN as an alternative, but also Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) and the World Wide Web, and provides distinct approaches and features from either, while being able to somewhat emulate all their modes, except with better protection of fundamental human rights.

As an engineer, it feels a little unsatisfying that the most remarkable result of a grant spanning multiple years is a mere document, even if this is par for the course for research.

But more than a document, it also maps out the future work to be done in this project.

Outlook

The current focus of our work is on integration, which is a little premature in some ways, given so much of the stack is still missing. However, we need to have some target to work towards – so a “vertical slice” approach that produces a minimal target based on currently completed technology is not a bad approach. This work is the current focus of a grant from NGI, and a first result is the GObject SDK.

The SDK allows something very simple, so simple it doesn’t seem particularly powerful at first glance: it allows setting and getting named and typed properties.

The interesting part is that these properties are stored in the Wyrd conflict-free, replicated data type, and then serialized to a vessel resource. This in turn then becomes the API for overall architecture, which deals in resources. In other words, the SDK provides a taste of what application developers can expect, except in its final form these will be local-first, opportunistically synchronized distributed resources.

The next step is to replicate much the same API on Android, which mainly demonstrates – and later enables – cross-platform synchronization.

To illustrate what kind of work is necessary beyond this, we borrowed a page from our spiritual sibling project librecast, and built a technology tree. This shows a mixture of projects and feature milestones, and their dependencies.

At the stage of writing this, we’re not quite halfway to the goal. But it bears mentioning that the ongoing work that is in parallel to development, here highlighted in our salmon brand color, is fairly time-consuming. In particular, this refers to the specifications. The benefit of always producing specifications (as much as possible), however, is that we’re not just writing code – we’re creating something that can even outlast this project here.

Funding

With the outlook showing a long road ahead still, and the largest grant ending, it’s worth talking about future funding.

Disappointingly, a number of grant applications last year fell through. In some cases, the grant giver was clearly looking for other things, and the application was more than a little hopeful. But in other cases, it seemed to fit, so not getting selected stings a little.

Luckily, the funding landscape has changed since we started, and new funds open up every few months. Often they’re specialised and exclude green field R&D such as our work.

NGI’s funding is relatively reliable here, but has a major drawback: it is aimed at the individual contributor scale. Other funds have other drawbacks: while they offer significantly larger sums, they also require a lot more management overhead.

With the non-profit in place, our plan for 2024 is to approach larger funds and shouldering this extra effort, but the run-up to those is long. This creates a projected funding gap between spring and autumn of 2024. We may be able to fill this with funding from NGI again, but words such as “may” are a little terrifying.

Our individual contributors are highly skilled individuals and will always be able to feed themselves. But for the project, it would be nice to have some guaranteed continuity, if only in the form of keeping this website alive.

Our total monthly costs here are relatively low: they include hosting, as well as some accounting and tax software fees. In total, this falls somewhere between EUR 100.- and EUR 150.- per month.

We can keep this website and related resources up almost indefinitely if those funds are covered, which brings me to an appeal. It’d be grand if a few of you took this up!

Having started this project some four years ago now, I have to say I’m happy to be where we are.

When I take my younger self’s perspective, the perspective of someone who – relatively speaking – made up for lack of design with speedy typing, I feel bad about having relatively little source code to show. But when I head back from a conference, having had conversations with professionals from this or other fields, I always feel thrilled about what we’ve done so far.

Clearing that architecture document hurdle was a major step in shaping future work in particular. So for 2024, let’s continue this, and make more of those tech tree hexes green!