Causal Islands LA

Benedict Lau is an engineer of distributed systems, mesh networks, and collectively-governed infrastructures. He is a co-founding member of Hypha Worker Co-operative and Distributed Press, CTO at EQTY Lab, and Starling Lab for Data Integrity.

Programming in the ℓittle.

Exploring how to elevate visual notations with multi-modal authoring experiences, liveness, and portability across programming environments.

Full-stack developer focused on software that gives people more agency. Currently doing work at Neynar, the easiest way to build on Farcaster.

Gavin Gamboa is a Los Angeles-based composer, pianist, and video-artist interested in the intersections of improvised and premeditated composition, using software to form a multifaceted stylistic praxis.

Hannah Howard has made contributions across the IPFS ecosystem for 5 years. She wrote parts of Bitswap, all of Graphsync, most of the initial Filecoin markets protocols, and most recently Lassie, a universal retrieval client for IPFS in Go. Hannah is now lead engineer of the W3S venture, focusing delivering hot, decentralized, content addressed storage and retrieval at a global scale. Before all this, Hannah just wrote web apps for people, and before that, she spend 10 years working in non-profits.

Ivan Zhao (he/him) is a poet, game & type designer, and web artist interested in nonlinear narratives, forms, and mechanics that reckon with digital, diasporic, and queer identity. His work interrogates individual and viewer agency. Websites as alternative worlds and lives. Typefaces as diasporic families. Game making as self discovery. Attention as love.

In the past, he has directed two editions of Kernel Magazine, a literary magazine and community reimagining techno-optimism for a better collective future.

I am the Community Lead at Gnosis where we're building open infrastructure for the decentralized internet.

Julian Bleecker, BSEE, MSEng, Ph.D. is a leading researcher, designer, and entrepreneur in the fields of technology and innovation. He founded Near Future Laboratory and OMATA, and is the originator of the concept of Design Fiction. Bleecker has published extensively on design, technology, and the future, and his book "The Manual of Design Fiction" is widely recognized as a pioneering work on the subject. His work has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, and he is known for his innovative and forward-thinking approach to shaping the future through design.

mai (they/them) is a Senior Organizer of DWeb projects, co-founder and editor of COMPOST magazine and Distributed Press, and a contributor with Hypha Worker Co-operative. They are an organizer, facilitator, and writer focused on the digital commons and other intersections between network technologies and the solidarity economy.

Zhenya works on the privacy-preserving developer platform DXOS. Previously worked on Apollo's commercial offerings for GraphQL, and on Microsoft's Office, Windows, and web developer ecosystems.