History
p2panda emerged out of activities around the self-curated zine BLATT 3000 (2014) and subsequent festivals VERANTWORTUNG 3000 (2016) and HOFFNUNG 3000 (2017), the latter of these being the catalyst for building a custom platform designed to help communities organise in a decentralised manner, also called HOFFNUNG 3000.
While exploring building a p2p festival platform we met many people from the communities around Earthstar, Secure Scuttlebutt, DAT / Hypercore, Cabal, Chaos Computer Club, Fediverse, Antiuniversity Now, Pixelache trying to understand how this technology affects the way we organise ourselves.
This led to a group of people interested in realising a protocol for p2p communication, which ultimately should serve as a tool to build applications, like a festival tool and more. We've been meeting regularly on Mondays since 2019 to hack p2panda. We have also been active in some other projects including the Liebe Chaos Verein, organising a p2p gathering and a reading group in Berlin. Obviously we're still going to organise another festival sometime!
In 2021-2022 we've received NGI Pointer funding to bring p2panda to its first official release. Over the last months we focused a lot on a core set of p2panda functionality which is: Data creation, validation and querying with many features on top: Permission, Encryption, Schemas and more. Our main focus was to find a language around the problems we wanted to solve, making many diagrams to understand the structures we were looking for, designing APIs so it is easier for developers to get started with p2panda - and finally implementing them.
