2025-03-15 –, Main Stage
How can we build resilient decentralized institutions that don’t break when people and programs do?
If you’ve built any voluntary organization, be it a DAO, company, or non-profit, you’ll know the biggest failure mode is when a person becomes the single point of failure. If you’ve built anything depending on code, whether it’s a smart contract, an app, or a DAO, you’ll know that same fear. But we’re supposed to be building a resilient, decentralized future. How do we do that without creating fragile load-bearing code, and/or people? How do we build a better future without breaking our friends and our fortunes?
Danny O’Brien has spent his life working in long-lasting Internet-built orgs, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to the anarchist hackerspace Noisebridge, to the Filecoin/IPFS ecosystem. Here he lays out rules of resilience that work for code and for colleagues.
Danny O'Brien is Senior Fellow and DWeb Strategy at the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. He has been a tech journalist, developer, and activist for online free speech, privacy, and an open internet for over 20 years, including over a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
His work within the technology sector has included being a founding employee at the Virgin brand's ISP, Virgin Net. As a journalist, he served as Silicon Valley correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the Irish Times, and defended reporters globally from online harassment and cyber-attacks at the Committee to Protect Journalists.